Incarnate Light (Christmas1 ABC).

 

Incarnate Light

Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7; John 1:1-18; Psalm 147
First Sunday After Christmas Day (Year ABC)
Homily delivered at Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Sutherlin Oregon
28 December 2025, 11:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist

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

 

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … That light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it... And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld the brightness of the Father’s light.”  (John 1:1, 5, 14)

 

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 Christmas texts much before, except maybe for the story of the massacre of the Innocents by Herod.  But the image of Christ as the enfleshment of the Light of God clearly suggests that this Light will conquer darkness, will conquer death. 

 

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, as 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 Romans. But despite this, he never resisted God.   He was indeed the light that shines “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 island of Skye.  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.  His birth marks a radical continuity between our lives and God’s.  This implies a sacredness in all it means to be human.   Human love, friendship, the simple pleasures of our world, and even our sorrows and pain—all these are taken up into God the moment God takes on our flesh.  Do we honor the sacred in each other, and in the world about us?  What does the Incarnation say about our own treatment of children, families, the poor, refugees and immigrants, and people in general?  What does it mean about our national policies in welcoming or rejecting the foreigner and alien? 

 

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 fathers all teach the effects of the Incarnation: 

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.

 

“The whole world is a kind of bodily and visible Gospel of that Word by which it was created” (Herbert of Bosham, Migne Patrologia Latina V 190 para. 1353.)

 

“Every creature is a manifestation of God” (John Scotus Eriugina, Migne Patrologia Latina V 122 para. 302). 

 

“Every creature is a Divine word, for it tells of God” (Bonaventure, Commentary on Ecclesiastes, ci. t. ix). 

 

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 feel thanks, not fear.  And that includes the fear that we are not pleasing God, that we somehow deserve God’s punishment.  Instead of this, we feel thanks, gratitude, and joy. Despite our brokenness, we feel a sense of one-ness or whole-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.” 

 
As God became truly human in Jesus, let us truly accept our own 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. 

 

Follow that bright light.   

 

  

Beyond Right, Beyond Religion (Advent 4A)

 

Beyond Right, Beyond Religion

Isaiah 7:10-16; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18

Fourth Sunday of Advent (Year A)

Homily delivered at Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Sutherlin Oregon

21 December 2025, 11:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist

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

 

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

Today, the final Sunday of Advent, is Mary Sunday.  But we hear actually very little about her in today’s Gospel.  That is because the cycle of Gospel readings for this year is from St. Matthew, and in general, Saint Matthew does not focus on women as closely as does Saint Luke.  The principal figure in Matthew’s infancy story is not Mary, but Joseph.  

 

There is an important detail in this story: “because he was a just (or upright) man, Joseph did not want to publicly denounce Mary, so he decided to divorce her quietly.”  Joseph could exercise the rights accorded to males in that society and, to protect his dignity, punish the woman who has so shamed him.  He could publicly accuse her of adultery and divorce her, and perhaps even see her stoned to death to satisfy his honor.  Some even said it his DUTY to humiliate or even kill her, to uphold the right and God’s dignity.  

 

But Joseph just can’t conceive of such a harsh way of treating Mary, although it is fully within his rights.  He decides a quiet divorce is the kindest way out of the difficult position into which Mary has put him.   Out of compassion for Mary, he decides to not insist on his rights.  He chooses a less brutal path: quietly break the engagement and send her on her way. Both paths are legal, and “right” in accordance with the law of that society. Of course, by sending Mary away, Joseph is abandoning her and her child, and condemning them horror.  But at least the law is upheld, and right is sustained.  

 

But Joseph has a dream, and an angel tells him that Mary has not betrayed him, and rather, that the child to be born is holy.  Joseph must not abandon Mary or the baby.  He is to support and sustain Mary, foster the child, and even give it the heroic, patriotic name Josh. (“Jesus” is a nick name for Joshua.).

 

On occasion, God intervenes and talks to us, whether in dreams, or scripture, or contemplative moments, or in the advice of friends.  And sometimes God tells us to go beyond right, beyond legal, beyond good, beyond nice, and truly sacrifice ourselves to make God’s love become flesh in our lives and the lives of others.    

 

Joseph chooses this path.  He listens to the dream and goes ahead and marries Mary, effectively adopting her child.  Then he spends the rest of his life supporting and nurturing the woman and child whose abandonment had been his legal right, if not duty.

 

Going beyond the right, going beyond what the rule books say, is the way of love.  It is like when Jesus says ‘you have read in the Law ‘don’t commit murder or adultery,’ but I say don’t even let yourselves be overcome by rage or lust.”

This principle has special application at this time of year, which recently has seen not just by rampant commercialism, but also increasing sectarianism.    

Some say we need to put “Christ” back into Christmas.  But they have it backwards.  I think they want to take “Christmas” that big joyous public party for all,regardless of faith, out of “Christ.”  Like the Grinch in Whoville, they want strip out the heart of Christmas--inclusive generosity and compassion.  And they steal it from our idea of who Christ is and what Christ calls us to. What they say they want is more explicit Christian branding on a holiday that has become one big shared public party, but by insisting on this, they miss the incarnation of God as a compassionate inclusive man that is the heart of the Christian feast. 

Just look at how this argument plays out.  For several years running now, some people, usually evangelicals waging what they call a “culture war,” whine about people they say are trying to “take Christ out of Christmas.”  They see “Happy Holidays” not as an effort to be inclusive and try to spread holiday cheer to all, but rather a deliberate insult to Christians and Christ.  Once they even argued that Starbuck’s Coffee’s use of red holiday cups marked with the company logo rather than white snowflakes were part of an anti-Christian plot. Such a partisan and sectarian approach contrasts sharply with a “common prayer” and “universal” approach to the faith, which sees us in community with those of differing beliefs or no belief, sees our duty as to minister to all, and sees shared holiday fun, with or without the Christian trappings, as a sign of God’s love. 

There once was a time when self-styled “Bible believing” Christians of an earlier day outlawed Christmas altogether because it wasn’t “Christian” enough.  

                    

After the English Reformation, some Christians believed that the Church had not been reformed thoroughly enough, that it was not sufficiently “biblical,” and that it still was corrupted by what the early reformers called “the enormities of Rome.”  They wanted to get rid of vestments, bishops, organs, and even the regular celebration of the Eucharist itself.   These Puritans focused their political activism in Parliament on eliminating corruption and privileges of the Royal Court and the nobility, including the bishops, whom they tended to call “certain popish persons.”  When the Army raised by Parliament won the Civil War and killed the King, the Puritan regime that came into power was narrow, fundamentalist, and harsh, somewhat like an English Taliban.  They banned Prayer Book worship and bishops, and set into Law a whole range of austere measures aimed at purifying the country.

One of these measures banned the celebration of Christmas.  Its very name—Christ’s Mass—was far too Roman for the Puritans’ tastes.  The fact that is was marked by twelve days of mid-winter partying, singing, drinking, and, for the more religious, Eucharists, were equally distasteful.  Special church services, mince pies, hanging holly, big parties were banned from 1644 to 1660.

Now in fairness to the Puritans, it must be said that they were rightly concerned at the excesses of some of the partying:  then, as now, serious public drunkenness and debauchery were among the abuses attendant to the celebration of the season by some.

The Puritans, throwing away the baby Jesus with the bathwater of overdoing it in Christmas partying, banned the holiday outright.  “Christmas is a pagan celebration,” they said, “and must be done away with by true Christians.” They were putting “Christ back into Christmas” big time!

Note the theology at work here—it is exclusionary, not inclusive: “true” Christians need to show their “trueness” (and, in so doing, point out who are “false” Christians and pagans).  It is contemptuous of many of the simple pleasures shared by people regardless of belief or tradition, and seeks to parcel out good things only to those who are orthodox.   The puritans said, basically, “If you don’t know God in just the right way, you are not worthy of joy.  No parties for you!” 

 

One of my favorite choral anthems at Christmas is John Rutter’s setting of “What Sweeter Music.”  The text was written by an Anglican priest who had lost his job under the puritans.  He wrote it for a Christmas party thrown by newly-restored King Charles II.  I love the poem, with its inclusive, incarnational theology that really does put a loving, inclusive Christ into Christmas.   and have sung it with several different choirs over the years:

What Sweeter Music

What sweeter music can we bring

Than a carol, for to sing

The birth of this our heavenly King?

Awake the voice! Awake the string!

Dark and dull night, fly hence away,

And give the honor to this day,

That sees December turned to May.

Why does the chilling winter’s morn

Smile, like a field beset with corn?

Or smell like a meadow newly-shorn,

Thus, on the sudden? Come and see

The cause, why things thus fragrant be:

‘Tis He is born, whose quickening birth

Gives life and luster, public mirth,

To heaven, and the under-earth.

We see him come, and know him ours,

Who, with his sunshine and his showers,

Turns all the patient ground to flowers.

The darling of the world is come,

And fit it is, we find a room

To welcome him. The nobler part

Of all the house here, is the heart.

Which we will give him; and bequeath

This holly, and this ivy wreath,

To do him honour, who’s our King,

And Lord of all this revelling.

What sweeter music can we bring,

Than a carol for to sing

The birth of this our heavenly King?

--Robert Herrick (1591-1674).  

 

Even in his infancy, even in the womb, Jesus calls us to go beyond self, beyond tribe, beyond rights, and even beyond religion and sect, and to love and serve those who have no claim on us, to make God’s love present to all.  

 

May we listen to Joseph’s dream and not stand on our rights and dignities, especially when these are called “right” and “moral,” or good “Christian.” May we follow Joseph’s example, and follow the call of self-sacrifice when it comes to us.  

 

In this coming Christmastide, may we all season sing, eat, drink, and love each other well.  Let us reconcile with each other and mend family and friend relationships that have gone bad.  Let’s not begrudge our neighbors who celebrate and love without recognizing the source of their joy and love, the source that our experience tells us is God made flesh in Jesus Christ. 

 

In the name of God, Amen. 

Hope for the Cranky (Advent 1A)

 

Hope for the Cranky

 

7 December 2025

Advent 1 A

 Notes taken from a homily preached from the aisle

Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12; Psalm 72:1-7; 18-19

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

9 a.m. Sung Mass

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Grants Pass, Oregon

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

 

When I first became an Episcopalian, I was taken aback when Advent came.  For me, it had always been the time for preparing for Christmas.  But then, right there in the lectionary, it was all about the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord!  John the Baptist preaching doom!  Yikes!  But a kind priest resolved my conflict.  Advent is the season where we focus on, like E.B White’s Arthur, the once and future king.  We focus on the then and yet future coming of our Lord.  It happened back then, but it will happen still in the future.  As the Gospel of John puts it, “the hour is coming, and now is.” 

 

This matters a lot to me, especially this year.  

 

Remember that line from C.S. Lewis?  He talks about the times when our faith just doesn’t give us the lift it once did.  He calls them “dry times,” when the water of life seems to have stopped flowing.  Well, for about a year, I have been in one of those.  It may have something to do with the direction our country has taken, enough to make anybody lose hope.  I have felt alienated from my family, from fellow church members, from God. Everything in my life seemed to worry me as much as paying bills or taxes. Even my back and neck started hurting again. 

 

I have heard some people characterize such a spiritual funk as a crisis of faith, as doubt, or the sin of despair.  Others call it depression.  But I realized about the end of summer that what I was experiencing was none of these.  It was more akin to grouchiness, crankiness, being a curmudgeon, what my father used to call being “techy,” a vague annoyance at the world.  Then when fall came in full force, in all four choral groups I sing with, we began to prepare Christmas music, with all its joy, happiness, and sense of things having been set right in the world.  My first reaction was to think, “here we go again!”  It’s been 2,000 years and the world is just as screwed up as it was then.  What difference does it all make? 

 

But then something happened.  That music and joy started working on me.  It opened my heart.  I started having feelings again.  Good feelings.  And I realized that to no longer be a grouch all I had to do was decide to not be one.  To stop blaming my malaise on others or outside things, no matter how broken and twisted they were.  And my hope returned.  I am so thankful.   

    

When I was young, I sometimes heard in Church sermons on what they called the “signs of the times,” or the signs of the end-time.  Most of these were disastrous indications that the world was going to hell and destruction.   Some people misunderstand scripture and think that the prophets provide a television guide like prevue of coming events, and those are not good things.   I only later learned that this was a gross misunderstanding of the New Testament idea of “signs of the times.” 

 

But the prophets always talk to their own day.  The prophets talk about the horrors of their own age and say these will continue to occur, and maybe even get worse.  But they also see that becaue of God’s love, it will end well.  They see a future where the crooked will be made straight and illness will be healed, where weapons of war will be melted down and beaten into farming tools. 

 

So when Jesus says to the biblical literalists of his own day, “You know how to read the weather, but not read the signs of the times,^” he is not saying you don’t recognize the bad things on the prophetic list of coming distractions,  the rotten things that supposedly will precede the coming day of the Lord.  No--he is saying you don’t recognize the good things in my ministry--the healings, the granting of sight and speech or the ability to walk on one’s own--that are signals that in Jesus the good things of the hoped-for day of the day of the Lord are already here.    

 

It is part and parcel with the heart of our faith.  We look about the world and see it is broken.  We hope for God to come and set it right.  That’s what “day of judgment” means, after all.  In the Old Testament, the Book of Judges is not about legal court and people in white powdered wigs wielding gavels and being called “Your Honor.”  It is about people like Samson, Deborah, Judith, Barak:  military heroes who set things right and liberate the oppressed.  That’s the basic idea of the “Day of Judgment.”  Oppressed and abused people see the day when things are set right as an occasion for joy and hope.  But what if we are the abusers, the oppressors?  The it’s a day of doom and fear.  And we all are both oppressors and oppressed.  If we ask who are the wicked who might get the worse of it when things are set right, if we are honest, we see that, in the words of Pogo, “we have met the enemy and he is us.” 

 

And that is why the prophets give us the great call, “shuvu, shuvu, Yisrael,” “turn back, turn back, O Israel,”  It’s why John the Baptist says again and again, “Change your ways, for the Day of the Lord approaches,”

 

Repentance is not about beating ourselves into submission and forcing ourselves to follow impossible rules.  Such a bulldozer approach to our lives is a recipe for unhappiness and tension—the very kind of tension that leads us to feel compelled to engage in the very things we should turn away from. Paul several times suggests that instead we should “clothe ourselves in Christ” or “look upon the face of Jesus: to bring more and more light into our lives, and that this will change us.  The Colossians passage that usually is translated, “put to death your earthly parts,” is   a bad translation.  The Greek is much clearer: “let the earthly parts of you die.”  As we are changed by focusing on Jesus, the light he gives us actually empowers us to show love, and the bad behaviors will of themselves drop off and cease. 

 

Paul talks about putting the example of Christ before our eyes, putting gratitude for what he has done for us in our hearts.  A heart full of gratitude has little room for the selfishness that generates unjust, hurtful, abusive, and wanton acts. 

 

I read in Tertullian this last week a great line I had never noticed before: “When a person who cares only for themselves dies, the whole world breathes a sigh of relief.”  Repentance gives that relief without us having to die. 

 

Hope is what Advent is all about.  We see the world and see that, even 2,000 years after the coming of our Lord in the flesh, it is still a profoundly broken place.  And, in the words of the poet, what happens to hope deferred?  Does it dry like a raisin in the sun? Or does it explode?   For me this last year, it made me cranky. 

 

The message of Advent, which talks about how God has come already and will still come again, is this:  don’t give up on hope. 

 

Sleepers, awake!  Cast aside the works of darkness and don the armor of light.  Put on Christ.  And all will take care of itself. 

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.