Come Let us Adore Him
Homily delivered for Christmas Day (Year C)
24th December 2012
Homily delivered for Christmas Day (Year C)
24th December 2012
6:00
p.m. and 11:00 p.m. Sung Eucharists
Trinity Episcopal Church
Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland,
Oregon
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 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.” 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 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.” 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 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 heretical, despite it 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.
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, 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.
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, 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.
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 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.”
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.”
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; 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, 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.”
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. We must treat all the helpless with
the respect and compassion.
This helpless baby was only beginning
to enjoy all the good and 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:
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. And as Jesus accepted the Father's will in all things, let us open ourselves to listen to God and follow where Jesus leads.
O Come, let us adore him.
In the Name of God, Amen.
In the Name of God, Amen.
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