Come Let Us Adore Him (Christmas Day Year C)

 

 

Come Let us Adore Him
Homily delivered for Christmas Day (Year C)
24th December 2024

5:00 p.m. Sung Eucharist
St. Luke Episcopal Church

Grants Pass, Oregon

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.

 

O Come, All ye faithful, joyful and triumphant,

O Come ye, come ye, to Bethlehem.

Come, and behold him, born the King of angels,

O Come, let us adore him. 

 

Have you ever thought about what we are saying when we sing this?  Worship a baby, barely born and in diapers? (That’s what “swathing bands” are.) Worship a little creature with a brain that is just beginning to organize sensory input and is still years away from rational thought?  How can this be?

 

The doctrine of the incarnation, of God taking on flesh and becoming a human being, was a scandalous idea from the start. The basic problem is simply stated: “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. We have failings galore; God is holy perfection. 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 deliberate revolt against God all  the weakness, limitation, handicaps, failures, 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 being begotten.  “…Of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.”   The carol 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 a human being. 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 heretical, 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.

Theologians try to describe the incarnation from God’s viewpoint by saying that God took on flesh and accepted its limits, willing his deity to be overshadowed by bis humanity.  The technical theological term for it is “the occultation of the divinity.”  An early hymn in Philippians (2: 6-8) describes it as Christ “emptying himself” or kenosis.   But this image, though completely true, sounds at times a bit mechanistic and abstract to us.    

Perhaps we need another image to describe it from our human viewpoint.  One is Celtic spirituality’s idea of “thin places,” geographic spots where the veil between the ordinary world and the unseen world behind and beneath it seem particularly thin, like the island of Iona, the grotto at Lourdes, or even the view from a mountaintop.    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, folks we call “saints.” The man Jesus is the ultimate example of a person as a “thin place,” maybe the thinnest of places, or even a place where there is no veil at all.

 

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.  And that is not just us individually, but in community too. 

 

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).

“The church as the Body of Christ in the world has, shares, manifests, and represents the same radical integrity. All who are in Christ … live in the same integrity in their personal relationships with every other creature … [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 [Church] lives in the world in the unity of God and the world wrought in … Christ.” (William Stringfellow, A Public and Private Faith, 1962, 40-44). 

 

In Jesus, we see that our human limitation and weakness do not have to equal 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.”

Just as Jesus accepted who he was and the tasks God gave 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, 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, including our appetites and sexuality; or alienation from our conscience. 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, finding that the harder we push, the greater the load of rubble we are trying to bulldoze away gets.  Instead, we should not push, but lean back, follow Jesus by emptying ourselves, by letting go of our worries and letting God do the rest. 

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.

 

This helpless baby was God made one of us. God taking on human nature is the signal event that invites us humans to take on God’s nature.   If we worship that helpless baby, we must treat the helpless with generosity.  If we make room for him and his refugee family in the inn, we must treat all refugees and aliens with compassion, respect, and decency.

 

This helpless baby was only beginning to enjoy all the good human life has to offer.  Yet he was also just starting to suffer all the bad life can throw at us. Yet despite it all, he remained ever trusting in his Father, and faithful. We must trust and be faithful too. 

 

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:

Come, thou Redeemer of the earth,
and manifest thy virgin-birth;
let every age adoring fall,
such birth befits the God of all.

Begotten of no human will,
but of the Spirit, thou art still
the Word of God, in flesh arrayed,
the promised fruit to man displayed.

The virgin womb that burden gained
with virgin honour all unstained;
the banners there of virtue glow,
God in his temple dwells below.

Forth from that chamber goeth he,
that royal home of purity,
a giant in twofold substance one,
rejoicing now his course to run.

From God the Father he proceeds,
to God the Father back he speeds,
runs out his course to death and hell,
returns on God’s high throne to dwell.

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 and our fellow beings’ humanity, with all its limitations and failings. And as Jesus accepted the Father's will in all things, let us open ourselves to listen to God and follow where Jesus leads.  

 

Joyful and triumphant despite our sufferings, let us follow the one who through human suffering became joy and triumph itself.  O Come, let us adore him. 

In the Name of God, Amen.