Intimates with God
Homily delivered First Sunday of Christmas (Year C RCL TEC)
27th December 2009: 8:00am Said and 10:15am Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of St. John the Baptist, Seattle Washington
Readings: 1 Samuel 2:18-26, 26; Psalm 148; Colossians 3:12-17; Luke 2:41-52
God, let us not accept the judgment that this is all we are. . . . Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
Today’s gospel is a story of terror for any parent—losing your child in a crowded, huge place with little hope of finding him again. Mary and Joseph discover to their horror that their twelve year old son Jesus has disappeared. They search for days only to find him in one of the Temple Courts taking an impromptu course in religious law. The Blessed Virgin greets him pointedly: “Child, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been looking for you for three days.” He answers sharply, “Why did you look all over town for me? Surely you must have known, Mother, that I would be in my Father’s House.” His barbed use of the word “Father” to mean God here corrects his mother’s loose use of the word to refer to her husband, Joseph. The reply has an edge that parents who have raised adolescent children will recognize. Mary, like many such parents, doesn’t get her teen-ager’s joke. Rather, she takes it in with puzzlement, and ponders it all. The story concludes with the family’s return home and, “He was obedient to them.”
The story presents the glories and the incongruities of the incarnation, the taking on of human flesh by God in Jesus. God in human form speaks, but as a twelve-year-old boy explaining his behavior to a distraught mother. It sums up the incarnation’s scope: in the words of the Book of Hebrews, Christ shared all our limitations and trials, but was sinless nonetheless.
The incarnation marks a radical continuity between our human lives and God’s, and that implies a sacredness in all it means to be human, including adolescence. We often miss the point, wrongly thinking that somehow God came among us without truly being one of us. This “God incognito” paid for our sins and somehow made it possible for us to be more like God, and less like human beings.
That is a total warping of the meaning of the incarnation. God became truly human in all ways (except in resisting God), and that means it’s O.K. to be fully human. In fact, it means God calls us to be fully human, and to do that he calls us to follow his example when he was among us, and not resist God so much. It is only thus that we can find our true and full humanity.
We often hear this time of year calls to “put Christ back in Christmas.” People complain about commercialization, too much partying, and not enough praying. This phrasing of the question gets the issues all wrong. It separates the partying and celebration from spirituality. Granted, some people see the holiday solely as a consumer or marketing event. The holiday is thus diminished, often becoming a source of stress and depression. The problem, however, is not too much celebration, but too little. “I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my whole being shall exult in my God” says Isaiah. It is not just “the spiritual side” of us that should rejoice. To want to turn Christmas into a sectarian prayer meeting rather than the public, boisterous, and commonly shared party that it currently is—regardless of beliefs—stems from bad theology. It stems from an unhealthy sense of Guilt and Shame, of feeling dirty and unworthy. It carries with it a self-loathing, an alienation from self.
A healthy shame or guilt is focused—regret and embarrassment at our deliberate misdoings. It leads to a desire to make restitution, to make amendment of life. But generalized, fuzzy Guilt and Shame, an overall and unremitting sense of “I’m not worthy, I’m not worthy,” is unhealthy. It leads not to repentance, but to alienation, indifference, and despair.
It is easy to see why we feel at times so alienated. God creates the world, and the resulting creation by definition is not creator, is not God, unlimited, all sufficient, all powerful. We creatures are painfully limited, wholly needy, and pitiably weak. We seem to have a built-in tendency to want our own way, to resist others, and this includes a tendency to resist God. And so the good, the true, and the beautiful world God intends to create, including the us God intends, seems at times to be merely a Shining, Distant, yet Impassible City in the distance, ever-receding.
Limitation, however, is not rebellion. The Church Fathers often distinguish between two different kinds of evil. One is found the systemic gaps in the ambient Goodness of God in creation—the evil that is simply the “absence” of God due to the differentiation of creature from creator. The other is willful resistance to God’s intention. One is natural evil, normally associated with the limitations, pain, and occasional seeming senselessness of nature imposed by the very fact of being created and contingent. The other is moral evil, the result of rebellion and willful resistance. Some Fathers call the tendency toward alienation and rebellion common to all human beings “original sin,” because it seems to be inborn, from our origins, not because it is all that creative, or ‘original.’
God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth shared all our limitations, weakness, and silly quirks. He was subject to natural evil like the rest of us. The most obvious example is his unjust death by torture at the hands of the Roman Empire. But despite this, he never resisted God. Though a typical adolescent in some ways in today’s story, he is unusual in his openness to God.
Theologians describe the incarnation from the outside by saying that God in taking on flesh accepted its limits, or in technical jargon, the willed the “occultation of his divinity.” An early hymn in Philippians (2: 6-8) describes it as Christ “emptying himself.”
But we need another image to describe it from the inside. One is the Celtic spirituality’s idea of “thin places,” geographic spots where the veil between the ordinary world and the spirit world seem particularly thin, like the island of Iona. These are places where the Distant, Shining City does not seem so far away, where it seems easier to commune with God. There are also some people in whom the image of God does not seem so distorted, whose life shows the presence of God shining through. The man Jesus is the ultimate example of a person as a “thin place,” in fact, the thinnest of places.
This implies a great deal about our lives, both as individual Christians and as a community within the larger world. William Stringfellow wrote,
“Jesus Christ means that God cares extremely, decisively, inclusively, immediately, for the ordinary, transient, proud, wonderful, besetting, frivolous, hectic, lusty things of human life. The reconciliation of God and the world in Jesus Christ means that in Christ there is a radical and integral relationship of all human beings and of all things. In Christ all things are held together (Col. 1:17b).
“The church as the Body of Christ in the world has, shares, manifests, and represents the same radical integrity. All who are in Christ—all members of Christ’s Body in the world—know and live in the same integrity in their personal relationships with every other creature in their own, specific personal histories. . . . [T]he reconciliation of the world with God in Jesus Christ establishes a person in unity with both God and the whole world. The singular life of the Christian is a sacrament—a recall, a representation, an enactment, a communication—of that given, actual unity, whether in the gathering of the congregation now and then or whether in the scattering of the members within the daily affairs of the world. . . . [I]t is careless and misleading to speak of the action of God in the world in Christ in terms of “making the gospel relevant” to the secular. The Body of Christ lives in the world in the unity of God and the world wrought in Christ, and, in a sense, the Body of Christ lives in the world as the unity of God and the world in Christ.” (William Stringfellow, A Public and Private Faith, 1962, 40-44).
In Jesus, we see that limitation or weakness do not equal rebellion or resistance. In Jesus, we see that God made us, intends us to be very good, but that God is not yet finished creating us. Jesus calls, “Let God finish.”
Just as Jesus accepted who he was and the tasks God had for him, we must accept who we are—gifts, and strengths, disabilities and ugly deficiencies and all. We must accept who others are as well. We must be gentle both on them and ourselves. Seeking to let God finish his creative work in us, trying to amend our lives, both personally and communally, requires an open-ended listening, a total trust that in God’s good intentions for us, in Lady Julian of Norwich’s words, “all is well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Such openness is the difference between true humility and its cheap counterfeit, the pride that demands that we either be the best of all or the worst of all.
A pretty good sign that we are not following Jesus in this is alienation: alienation from our selves; alienation from our bodies; alienation from our conscience. Alienation between people is a sign of this on a social level. All these are signs of not accepting who it is God made us to be. They appear when we try to tough it out, and bulldoze ourselves into the better us that we have in mind, rather than following Jesus by emptying ourselves, to let go and let God.
A pretty good sign that we are getting closer to God in this is that regardless of the limitations and hardships we face, we still have a sense of one-ness. Teillard de Chardin wrote, “The surest sign of God’s presence is joy.” This is why one of the key questions asked in any spiritual direction and discernment process is “What puts a smile on your face?” It is a pretty good indication of where your treasure is, and with it, your heart.
Ambrose of Milan, who taught and converted Augustine of Hippo in the mid fourth century, wrote dozens of hymns that made available to common people the basic teachings of Christianity. Both Ambrose and Augustine were very flawed people, but ones who persevered in open-ended listening to God. That’s why we call them saints—not because they lacked flaws, but because they persevered despite them. One of Ambrose’s hymns praises the enfleshment of Christ in these words:
O equal to Thy Father, Thou!
Gird on thy fleshly mantle now;
the weakness of our mortal state
with deathless might invigorate.
As God became truly human in Jesus, let us accept our own humanity, with all its limitations and failings. And and as Jesus accepted the Father's will in all things, let us open ourselves to listen to God and follow where Jesus leads us.
In the Name of God, Amen.
