On Us A Light has Shone (Christmas C)

 

On us A Light has Shone
Homily delivered for Christmas Day (Year C)
24th December 2021

6:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. Sung Eucharists
Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

The Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Isaiah 9:2-7 ; Titus 2:11-14 ; Luke 2:1-20 ; Psalm 96

 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

“The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;

those who lived in a land overshadowed by death --
on them light has shone…

For a child has been born for us,
a son given us;

Ruling rests upon his shoulders;
and he bears the names

Marvelous Mentor, Dauntless Deity,
Father Forever, Peaceful Prince.

His rule shall grow and grow,
and peace without end will prevail.

David’s throne and reign
Will he establish and sustain,

Setting things right and overturning injustice
from this time onward forever.

Yahweh the Heavenly Commander, by heartfelt ardor, will accomplish this.” (The Ashland Bible)

 

Earlier this week, in the Daily Prayer Office, we sang the O Antiphons upon which the hymn, “O Come, O Come, Immanuel” is based.  On the Solstice, the shortest day and longest night, we sang “O Rising in the East” which says, “O brightness of light eternal and sun of justice: Come and enlighten us who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.” 

 

I have never noticed the theme of “the shadow of death” in these Christmas texts before, but given our repeated bereavement in the Parish these last weeks, this year I recognized it again and again, as incongruous as it seems in the season’s expressions of joy. 

 

As John says, “the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.”  We appreciate light precisely because we dwell at times in deep darkness.  And letting that light brighten our minds and lift our hearts is wonderful indeed. 

 

The doctrine of the incarnation, of God taking on flesh and becoming a human being, is by its very nature as incongruous and wonderful as light in the darkness, hope in the face of death. 

 

The basic problem is simple—“God” is what we are not. We are contingent; God is sufficient. We are changeable; God is unchanging. We are masses of conflicting urges and desire, most of them selfish and all of them formed by a self that is in no way complete or whole. God is pure being, intention, and love itself. We are incomplete and sick; God is wholeness and health itself. We have failings galore; God is holy perfection itself. We can be pretty benighted, ugly, and false; God is beauty, light and truth. How can these two polar extremes be reconciled, let alone combined?

 

The early, united Church discussed the issue at length.  It gradually recognized that the Love and Power that brought the universe into existence and still sustains it, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth embraced and took on in every way but sin the weakness, limitation, handicaps, and contingency of being human. The early Councils declared that Jesus Christ was fully God and fully Man, 100% Divinity and 100% Human Being. He was not a 50-50 mix, half God and half human being.

To those who say that Jesus was merely a man whom God had raised up, the Creed they wrote replies, “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father,” that is, there never was a time when he was not thus begotten.  “…Of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.”   “O Come All ye faithful” quotes the Creed when it sings, “God from God, Light from Light Eternal, Lo! He abhors not the Virgin’s womb:  Very God, begotten, not created, O Come let us Adore Him.”

At the other extreme are those who believe that Christ was fully God and only seemed to be human. The letters of John in the New Testament condemn people who “do not acknowledge that it is in the flesh that Jesus Christ came” (2 John 1:7) and later Gnostics even split the human Jesus from the divine Christ, and pictured the unsuffering, unmoving Christ looking down upon Jesus on the Cross, laughing that people would mistakenly think that he, the Christ, had suffered.

 

To all of these, the Creed states, “He became incarnate (that is, took on flesh) from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.” 

“Truly God and truly Human”: we often miss the point, wrongly thinking that somehow God came among us without truly being one of us, only play-acting to be human.   The one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church confessed in the Creeds teaches that this belief is deficient, despite its broad popularity among believers. 

 

God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth shared all our limitations, weaknesses, ignorance, fears, 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.   When we talk of him as light, it is often hard to remember that he was light “in the darkness.” 

Theologians try to describe the incarnation from God’s viewpoint by saying that God took on flesh and accepted its limits, willing his divinity to be hidden.  An early hymn in Philippians (2: 6-8) describes this as Christ “emptying himself.”

But we need another image to describe it from a human viewpoint.  One is 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, or our Trinity Labyrinth.  These are places where the Distant, Shining City does not seem so far away. 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.

 

The incarnation marks a profound continuity and solidarity between God and us and our lives in all their messy, chaotic glory.  In Jesus, all we are has been brought intimately close to God.  In Jesus, all we are can be made holy as he is. 

 

William Stringfellow writes,  “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)”.

 

In the light of Jesus, we see that our human limitation and weakness do not have to equal rebellion or resistance against God.  In Jesus, we see that God made us, wanting to look upon his creation and call it “very good,” but is not yet finished creating us.  Jesus calls, “Let God finish.” In Jesus, we see that though we all will die, this does not mean oblivion and endless separation.  It means even greater life, even deeper relationship.  

Just as Jesus accepted our mortality and all that this means, we too must accept who we are— hopes and fears, 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 God’s  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, in Lady Julian of Norwich’s words, “all is well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

 

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, even alienation from our own mortality. Alienation between people is a sign of this on a social level.  Alienation appears when we do not accept who we and others are and surrender this to God. 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 do what God does.

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.”

 

Christmastide is a time of joy.  “O Come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant.”  That’s because God is here.

 

Ambrose of Milan, who taught and converted Augustine of Hippo in the mid fourth century, wrote the great hymn praising 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 truly accept our own humanity, with all its limitations and failings, all its fears and pains, including the dark, including death.   And as Jesus accepted the Father's will in all things, let us open ourselves to listen to God and follow where Jesus leads. 

 

Follow that bright light.    

In the Name of God, Amen.