Last Sunday Tannya F shared this advent reading -
There’s one whacko in every family. Or maybe it’s just that we all take turns being the whacko. Sometimes the whacko part is the idea rather than the person. You know, Aunt Mazzie is perfectly normal most of the time but if you get her talking about the squirrel that gets into her bird feeder, and then she morphs into a gun toting, psychotic killer.
In our house, there is certain grassy knoll that we do not discuss…
About two thousand years ago there was another person that had her family members shaking their heads. Mary came back from the day’s errands and told her mom that she had BEEN with the spirit today; that she was still a virgin, and she would be giving birth to the Messiah.
I’m guessing Mom immediately reached out and checked for a fever. Upon feeling a cool head, the lecture must have begun.
Some ideas are just so subversive, so intense that they cannot be ignored.
-Galileo said, hey look folks, I think the world is round and we move around the sun. Nonsense said Pope, so a trial and heresy ensued.
-Thomas Jefferson and a bunch of his drinking buddies said, I don’t think we should be anybody’s colony anymore. And here we are.
-Martin Luther King Jr. said he had a dream. And a shot rang out.
Some ideas are too big to be held onto. They grow and change everything they touch.
Today we light a candle of ideas. Not the everyday ideas like Hmm, I wonder if John would notice if I put chili peppers in this….Big ideas. Ideas like a pregnant young girl having the chutzpah to bare a savior as a baby.
For that season at least, she was the family whacko. But she nurtured an idea, a child, that changed everything.