This first Sunday after Christmas was a particularly moving service at my church. We had the baptism of two sets of twins, and although the scripture reading was about the Slaughter of Innocents and the Flight to Egypt, the minister’s sermon was built around slections from
Lullabies from the Axis of Evil – a response to President Bush’s naming of the Axis of Evil in his 2002 State of the Union address which is a collection of lullabies from around the world in the belief:
Lullabies lead us to the deepest and most fundamental way of communication between human beings. It is where all sharing of ideas and feelings starts. Between mother and child, between father and child. It is a universal culture. And it is amazing to see how many aesthetic similarities, musically and lyrically there are in lullabies from country to country all over the world. The text-issues are often the same, so are the musical structures. Differences in scales, language, metaphors and religion cannot cover the fact that in the lullabies, the cultures of the earth meet each other. Or rather: from this common starting-point they grow into diversity
.............................. http://www.hrmusic.com/artists/axis.html
The sermon was a reminder to all of us to see Jesus’ face in the face of children – particularly those we would label as enemies, or less than worthy. It was a call to oneness of our most fundamental form of communication – that between mother and child, and some of the tracts was played from that CD with interspaced comments by the minister. At the above link, you can read about the project CD, listen to some of the lullabies and even buy the CD if you wish. Try it I think you will find it moving as well.
Now one might ask all of this relates, but it does especially when the child, as some of them do at baptism, cries, and the minister pointed that Jesus probably cried as baby and Mary probably sang lullabies to him. In short, this sermon did one of the characteristic reversals of Christianity and Trickster – the very helpless, hungry, needy babe is really the marker of our most human and divine existence – both -- I repeat Both because all of the various oxymorons of the season (that I have talked about here whether they be history, legendary, or even frivolous) are the birthright of our species. The unity of the primal experience with the diversity of cultural and linguistic instantiation is the trickster reminder that all of us are born to the joy and tragedy of our humanhood.
So let us remember that even when Pan is born, the cry is a nativity cry:
