Jugglers and Door-Holders, Far As the Curse Is Found
or the work of the kingdom come, here and now
Greetings from the Back of the Flock, where we are slowed down by impossible toddler winter boots, innumerable school spirit days, and looking for the scotch tape again.
Maybe you’re buying the last of your gifts, or wincingly, the first of your gifts. Maybe you’re packing to travel to family or furiously scrubbing toilets before your nearest and dearest descend on your house. But either way, I bet you’re busy. So whether you sneak into a locked bathroom to read this today or tuck it away until the relief of the morning of the 26th, know what you’re doing is the work of the Kingdom.
As head of the Ministry of Magic Making in my house, there are a few holiday traditions that I have tried to weave into our family’s DNA. Most years, we get to them, at least to some degree, although this year’s thankful tree had about 5 leaves on it, rivaling last year’s Unthankful Tree. But new months are for fresh starts, and we have been absolutely nailing one of my favorite traditions.
Each day in December, my kids have unwrapped a Christmas picture book for us to read together. I don’t know how many years I have left of their willingness to be read to like this (rest assured, I’ll be bribing their participation with sugar, and perhaps cash, up to the day they leave my house), but each year we read twenty-five books spanning from the downright silly to the outright poignant.
We try to read a mix of new and familiar each year, and there are a few perennial favorites that make me cry every time. One is The Clown of God by Tomie dePaola. In the story, young Giovanni is poor and parentless. He sleeps in the markets and earns his supper by juggling fruits and vegetables for shoppers. One day, a traveling circus comes to town and decides to take Giovanni along. In time, he becomes a famous juggler, ending each performance with a whirling rainbow of balls, plus one shining golden ball — “the sun in the sky.”
He travels all over Italy, and at one point, he runs into two Francisan monks who tell him that his juggling brings glory to God…an idea he dismisses in the presence of these two committed servants of God.
Towards the end of his life, Giovanni’s fame has faded, and he is once again destitute. In exhaustion and defeat, he slumps into the cathedral of his hometown and promptly falls asleep within the warmth of its walls. When he wakes, he is startled to see the castle glowing with candlelight as streams of people make their way to the statue of the Virgin and her Child. When he asks what is happening, he is told that it is Christmas and that everyone is bringing gifts to the Christ child statue.
Once the crowd leaves, Giovanni approaches the child and is surprised to see his face carved into a stern sadness. Having nothing else to give, he begins to juggle for the child, much to the horror of a priest who stumbles onto the scene of supposed sacrilege. But before the priest can stop him, Giovanni performs his routine and finishes by tossing the golden ball - the sun in the sky - into the air.
Then drops dead on the spot.
As the priests rush to his side, no one notices that the golden ball is sitting in the Christ child’s hand, just below his now-smiling face.
The first time I read this book, I cried so hard that my kids were literally alarmed. I just kept saying, “you guys…you guys!” as they stared at me with slightly anxious looks. Giovanni’s story named something for me that I knew to be true but so often went unsaid.
Despite having grown up on a steady diet of I Corinthians 10:31, “Whether you eat or you drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God,” somewhere along the way, I’d begun to believe that the missionaries and pastors and priests were doing the real work of God…that to be an A+ Christian, I needed to be involved in some kind of active ministry position. And for a season of my life, I did just that. I lived in the bush of South Sudan teaching English; I worked with refugees and immigrants here in Minneapolis through various ministries. But when I read The Clown of God, that was all in my past.
At that moment, I was just a mom, drowning in diapers and dishes, and my primary purpose in God’s kingdom seemed to be to get up between 4-7 times a night.
In the years since, I have learned better. I have learned firsthand that our most ordinary days are infused with the sacred, that the Divine is hiding in stacks of board books and next to the grocery store clerk, sitting beside me in the zoom call and smiling down from the bus driver’s seat. I have found that in God, we truly do live and move and have our being, and that whether we teach seminary students about the sermon on the mount or teach fifth graders about rotational symmetry, whether we brave the wilds of foreign lands for the sake of the gospel or brave the aisles of Aldi with two toddlers for the sake of dinner, whether we clean feet or we wipe butts, we can do all of these things to the glory of God.
We can be exactly who we are — with our quirky interests and room-filling laughs, our habits and strengths (the good ones and the ones that get us into trouble), our introversion and extroversion — and show everyone around us a little of what God is like, not in spite of ourselves, but because of who we are.
I think that’s why I have watched this video approximately 27 times since I first saw it.
In it, a boy - I want to say around seven-years-old - proudly tells his mom that he’s been given a classic role in his school’s nativity pageant. She guesses the obvious ones — Joseph, a wise man - before he excitedly tells her that he is Door Holder #3. She laughs in excitement with him, pressing for more details about his role, and he responds, “I’m a door holder! Get in there! Let’s go!” complete with a fist pump of enthusiastic determination.
This boy’s contagious excitement about his arguably minimal role is literally the Sermon of the Year, offered free of charge from the backseat of his car. Much like I used to think that the gold stars were reserved for those whose actual job was to spread the gospel, I used to think of the kingdom of God as a far-off, future reality, something that would only appear after Jesus returned. And while I can’t predict the order of future events, what I believe now is that the kingdom has already come. A sermon I recently heard put it this way: “We are in the overlap of the age of night and the age of day, but the age of light is already here,” first appearing in a star over Bethlehem.1
The age of light is here. And now.
One of the best books I read this year was Sara Billups’ excellent book Orphaned Believers. In one portion, she compares the individualistic, future-minded, “luring sense of escapism” common to some evangelical end-times beliefs to ideas more common in Black eschatology, which are framed around community and the work of tending to God’s dream right where we are, right now.
She quotes divinity professor and African American scholar Derek Hicks in saying that beliefs about the future and end times “must be grounded in the historical present, and must challenge present circumstances that stand in contrast to God’s desire for justice and equality for all people.”
Not far off, but here. Not in the future, but now.
In this season of advent, we are not just preparing for a distant reality, we are working in a kingdom that has already come. We are to, as the timeless song sings, “No more let sins and sorrows grow, Nor thorns infest the ground…far as the curse is found.”
And the crux of it is that we can garden this kingdom into being in a myriad of ways. Accountants can till the ground; so can poets, carpenters, receptionists, and those who would rather be home with a good book. Teachers can pull the weeds alongside graphic designers and mayors and Uber drivers and mothers who aren’t getting enough sleep wearing milk-stained shirts. All of us, politicians and protesters, waitresses and veterinarians and nurses and engineers, even third-string doorholders and destitute jugglers, have the opportunity to join in planting a happy chorus of zinnias, dahlias, and sunflowers where once there was only weeds. And we do this not by becoming other - but by growing into exactly who we were made to be, far as the curse is found.
Happy Advent and Merry Christmas! Christ has come, and so has the Kingdom. Let us work together in it!
Rick Stawarz, Restoration Anglican, Sermon on 11/19/23
A few notes!
*Look for a separate email in early January with links to What I’m Loving Lately, some quality memes, and more!
*But in the meantime, I wrote this advent poem, and if you find this Christmas season laced with uncertainty or not quite knowing how to celebrate in light of all…this (gestures broadly), then you might enjoy reading it.
My wife and I both cried when we read this. So much truth and hope. Thank you thank you. Keep writing and speaking truth in love.
Thank you making this meaningful addition to Advent, Elizabeth. Merry Christmas. You’re doing holy work. 🕯️🤍