The Right Stuff

I learned about pomegranates because a Russian ballerina became beloved by enthusiastic Australians.  “Hold on there, Monica, that’s quite a jump between Aussies and pomegranates, how do you figure that?”

It does sound like chaos theory, the whole “butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and a storm ravages half of Europe” thing, except both a ballerina and a pomegranate are bigger than a butterfly.  Although the ballerina was supposed to be as light on her feet as a butterfly.  Anna Pavlova was the first Russian prima ballerina to travel around the world a hundred years ago, bringing her dance to people in many countries who had never seen ballet before,
including Australia and New Zealand.  Despite her problems with high arches and gangly legs, she inspired chefs to whip up a meringue dessert that is the proud feature of many Christmas dinners down under.  One benefit is that they don’t have to cook it at a high temperature in the middle of the summer, another is that it is great with fruit, especially pomegranates.  Pavlova is to Australia and New Zealand what pancakes with maple syrup is to Canadians, served up with bacon on the side.  Alberta’s equivalent would be a barbecue with Grade A beef, beans and baked potatoes. Slavic countries would have their piroshky and halopchi, scots would have their haggis and champit tatties, and Newfoundlanders would have their Jiggs dinners.

Great food takes time and tradition to get right.  It’s hard to cook up a great pavlova in Canada, our sugar and flour is a little different than the Aussie stuff. Canadian recipes for dressing or Christmas fruitcake are handed down from generation to generation, with edits and fine tuning according to taste.  Learning how to make a Jiggs Dinner with its all-important garnish of pease pudding has been a real learning curve for us Albertans more familiar with Bannock or perogies.

We like cooking up meals for those we love and care for, but no one recipe will work with every family.  Our tastes and traditions are almost chaotic in the variety we show.  Not unlike love, in a way.  Joseph showed love by planning not to make a public example of Mary, shaming her in front of her friends and family for not showing fidelity to him throughout their engagement.  Sparing her this embarrassment was his way of loving her.  And it was solely his decision.  He was the only authority to decide her fate.  If he had been an angry, vengeful man, he could have had her executed for her infidelity.  There’s no Cousin Elizabeth in the Matthew passage for her to run to.  In fact, about the only thing Matthew and Luke agree on about the Christmas story is that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.  Matthew has no shepherds or angel choirs or censuses or inns, Luke has no wise visitors or trips to Egypt.  They both share long genealogies, Luke focusing on Mary’s lineage, and Matthew has Joseph’s family tree.

That family tree is fascinating, because with the scandal of Mary’s pregnancy, Matthew mentions several other scandalous women.  Bathsheba, whose pregnancy almost destroyed David’s rule over Israel and caused chaos in his family.  Tamar, whose pregnancy was also seen also as a betrayal of her marriage oaths and punishable by death until she revealed who the father was.  Women who were at the mercy of a man’s decision and who had no choice in what would happen to her in that rigid patriarchal system that valued women solely by the offspring they could produce for their tribe.  Joseph was fully shaped by that patriarchy, that cultural expectation of what it meant to be a man and a father in ancient Israel. 

And yet, and yet.  Just as God messed with Abraham and Sarah’s comfortable life, just as God called Moses and Miriam to challenge slavery, God threw chaos into the patriarchal system.  God sent Joseph a dream.

Joseph’s dream wasn’t just about breaking his personal expectations, it was a culture-shaking moment, a major paradigm shift in how women were to be honored and respected.  It was a dream of radical inclusion, a challenge of the status quo, and an inspiration for the future.  Love was not going to be boxed up in a one-size fits all rule for all time.  His dream was a chaotic disruption of a long-standing tradition.  Which is what Advent is all about.  Recognizing when God’s chaos shakes us out of the traditions we may be taking for granted, the traditions that may not be loving or life-giving for everyone in our culture.  The traditions of making shortbread when we’re called to invent pavlova.

One expert put it this way

"Christianity is, at root, an Advent religion. That is, our [faith puts us in a place] where promise and fulfillment don’t quite meet. Our experiences [put] us there, too, as people keenly aware that our [dreams are not our reality] …. We never stop expecting new life to break onto the scene. We have work to do, but we recognize it as God’s work done on God’s terms." - Matt Skinner

Like a Russian dancer God sometimes tiptoes into our lives and ends up helping us shape new cultures, new ideas, new passions, new loyalties.  Sometimes God whirls into our lives with pirouette after pirouette, inspiring dreams and new possibilities.  Our world needs some new recipes for love and compassion. New creations and inventions that help us dance into a paradigm shift of acceptance of diversity, like the Respect for Marriage Act in the states. New taste experiments as we try new things like pomegranates that we never experienced as children. We wait and work in hope that love will dance into even the most cynical hearts, that hope will inspire life-changing dreams, that peace will break into the world, and joy will be in every home.  God, we pray, bring love to us all.  Amen.

And here's my attempt at my first pavlova, with pomegranate and kiwi fruit.  For some strange reason, it evaporated very fast even though it wasn't the most beautiful of things compared to how some folks mix it so beautifully!