Come let us adore Him

 

Come Let us Adore Him
Homily delivered for Christmas Day (Year C)
24th December 2012

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

Ashland, 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 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 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.

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.”

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.”

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.

The Holy Name (Christmas 2B; Holy Name of Jesus)

Verdun Altar Piece, Circumciso Christi

The Holy Name

1 January 2012

Christmas 2B; Holy Name of Jesus

Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

10 AM Festival Holy Eucharist

Numbers 6:22-27; Psalm 8; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 2:15-21

 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us." So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb. (Luke 2:15-21)

God, breathe into us a desire to change—
take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

It is wonderful finally to be here at Trinity Ashland.  Elena and I have been looking forward to this since October, and we want to thank the members of the search team, the transition team, the vestry, and the Trinity staff who have helped us move here from Beijing. 

Today is the Feast of the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ.  Once called the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ, it commemorates the events recounted in today’s Gospel, the circumcision and naming of the baby Jesus.  In recent years the Church has focused this feast on the naming rather than the ritual performed by a moyel, which was perhaps a bit too graphic for modern tastes of primarily gentile congregations. 

The principal idea of the Feast of the Holy Name is that just as Jesus was marked as part of God’s chosen people by the imposition of Abraham’s sign of the covenant, and just as he was marked as God’s agent for saving us by being given the name the angel had prescribed for him earlier, so Christ marks us as his own and gives us his name when we are baptized.  That’s why the other readings talk about God placing his name on his people, and of us having to follow Christ’s example of acceptance and humility. 

The importance of naming, and recognizing the right names for people and things is a key idea behind the Feast so re-conceived.  Myths of power established through naming are found in many cultures.  The Egyptian goddess Isis gains control over Ra only by discovering his true name.   In the Sumerian creation myth, the god Ea begins to create the heavens and the earth “before they had been given names.” In Genesis 1, God creates all the objects and frameworks of the universe through pronouncing their names.  In Genesis 2, Man establishes his dominion over the animals by naming them.

The fact is, we still place a great deal of stock in the process of naming.  Note the care that new parents usually take to ensure that they have chosen just the right name for the newborn.  Think of the difference between the two expressions “to name names,” and “to call names.”  We say “you are calling that person names” implies that what you are saying is not truly who or what that person is.  But if you are truly going to tell the truth and not varnish it one bit, you “name” names. 

The playwright and women's issues activist Eve Ensler, as part of the “This I Believe” Project, said the following: 

I believe in the power and mystery of naming things. Language has the capacity to transform …, rearrange our learned patterns of behavior and redirect our thinking. I believe in naming what's right in front of us because that is often what is most invisible.   . . . When I was finally able as an adult to sit with my mother and name the specific sexual and physical violence my father had perpetrated on me as a child, it was an impossible moment. It was the naming, the saying of what had actually happened in her presence that lifted my 20-year depression. By remaining silent, I had muted my experience, denied it, pushed it down. This had flattened my entire life. I believe it was this moment of naming that allowed both my mother and I to eventually face our deepest demons and deceptions and become free. …

Naming things, breaking through taboos and denial is the most dangerous, terrifying and crucial work. This has to happen in spite of political climates or coercions, in spite of careers being won or lost, in spite of the fear of being criticized, outcast or disliked. I believe freedom begins with naming things. Humanity is preserved by it.

What Ensler is talking is actually a central doctrine of the Chinese philosopher Confucius, the Rectification of Names. “Calling things by their right names is the beginning of wisdom” runs a Chinese proverb based on the idea (cf. Analects 12.11). The words we choose to call things are an important indication of what a society values, or what a society thinks it should value.   Anthropologists have said many times that the process of choosing names for things is one of the principal ways we impose order on perception.

I just finished 25 years of working as a spin doctor for the U.S. federal government.  I know all too well the power of the words you choose to call things, both to establish truth or to hide it.  Our military talks about “going kinetic.”  That means starting to move troops and weapons to actually kill people.  Our political leaders often talk about “preserving our way of life,” but what they usually mean by this is holding on to our possessions, our privilege, and our control of others.  The previous U.S. administration decided to use the words “enhanced interrogation techniques” to describe what previously had always been called “torture” and thereby justified a horrible departure from our best national values.   

  

Bulgarian novelist Elias Canetti, reflecting on the importance of honest use of language, wrote, “You have but to know an object by its proper name for it to lose its dangerous magic.” 

Given the centrality of Jesus to Christian faith and the importance of names, it is  natural that Christians have always reflected on the names our Lord Jesus should have. 

Note the magic and power of names in the following passage from Revelation 19:11-16,  where the seer John sees our Lord coming to set the world right:  

Then I saw heaven opened, and there was a white horse! Its rider is named Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems; and he has a name inscribed that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is called The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, wearing fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, "King of kings and Lord of lords.”

It is hard for most of us today to appreciate that Jesus of Nazareth did not stand out from his contemporaries simply because of his name “Jesus.”   The name is just too unusual for English speakers to think of anyone but our Lord when hearing it.  

The Greek word Iesous transliterates the Aramaic name Yeshua‘ (“Josh”) and the Hebrew name Yehoshua‘ (Joshua).  Out of reverence, Christians in general (except for Spanish speakers) have tended to not use the name “Jesus” to name their children.  Jews have preferred the Hebrew name “Joshua” to the shortened Greek-form “Jesus” since the latter had become associated with the object of Christian devotions.  But this was not the case at the time that Jesus lived. The Jewish historian Josephus mentions at least ten different people at the time who played historical roles that had the name. It was actually extremely common.

Both Matthew and Luke say that the name “Jesus” was given to the baby before his birth.  In Luke, the angel Gabriel during the annunciation tells the Blessed Virgin that she should name the baby Jesus (Luke 1:31), without giving any reason for the name.   Matthew, however, also gives a folk etymology for the name:  Gabriel says to Joseph, “[Mary] will give birth to a son, and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”  This play on words is a little bit like claiming that a man was named Bill because his mother knew he would be working in Accounts Receivable.   The folk etymology for Iesous was apparently popular, since the Hellenistic philosopher Philo of Alexandria also explains the Greek name Iesous as “salvation.” 

This explanation thinks that the name Jesus, Yeshua‘, is related to the verb “to save,” yasha‘.  But this folk etymology, however theologically satisfying it might be, is not correct.  Just as Bill is a shortened form of William, and has nothing to do with billing, Yeshua‘ is a shortened form of the Hebrew name Yeho-shua, or Joshua, and has nothing to do really with the verb “to save.” Yeho-shua combines the divine name of God, Yahweh, with the verb shawa‘, which means “help,” not “save.”   The original name Yeho-shua was the cry of a mother in labor—“Yahweh, HELP!” 

The fact is, Jesus was an extremely common name in Palestine during this time period. But we learn several things about the historical Jesus through his name. 

Though he came from a heavily gentile territory, Galilee, Jesus came from a somewhat pious and nationalistic Jewish family.  Yeshua‘ was a nationalist name: it brought to mind Joshua, the hero who followed Moses and brought the children of Israel into the Promised Land.   The people in Jesus’ family have similar nationalist names. Mary, his Mother, brings to mind Miriam the sister of Moses.  Joseph, his legal father, brings to mind the patriarch Joseph who saved the Israelites by providing refuge in Egypt. Matthew 13:55 mentions four brothers of Jesus:  James, Joses, Simeon, and Jude.  All are names of great patriarchs from Israel’s past: James has the Aramaic or Hebrew name Jacob, the original name of the Patriarch later known as Israel.  Joses is the Greek form of the name Joseph.  Simon and Jude are Greek names for brothers of Joseph, Shimeon and Judah. 

The name of Jesus is thus a call for help, understood as an assurance of salvation.  Jesus’ family gave it to him, under angelic instructions or not, in part because it evoked hope. 

We thus again return, as in most of our Christmastide readings, to the doctrine of incarnation:  God taking on human weakness and limitation, becoming (except for sin) fully human.   And this incarnation is not just individual and isolated, but, fully human as it is, is also social, communal, with hopes for social liberation and justice as well as for individuals being made right with God. 

“Yahweh, HELP!” we cry.  And we recount to each other the stories of God saving His people in the past, of mighty acts of love beyond measure, mercy passing thought. 

“Yahweh, HELP!” we cry.  And we find hope for being saved. 

“Yahweh, HELP!” we cry.  And to us a baby of promise is born, a child ensuring peace is given. 

I am truly thankful finally to be with you here in Ashland.  I pray that in the coming weeks and years we may find deeper and deeper community with each other and find it in that baby whose name is hope itself. 

In our prayer life and quiet time this week, let us reflect and meditate on the Holy Name of Jesus.  And let us be honest and open in our naming of names, and calling out the demons in our lives who parade under false names or no name at all. 

In the name of Christ, Amen 

Via Media Holidays

Via Media Holidays

re-posted from The Trinitarian December 2011

(Parish Newsletter of Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland Oregon)

 

A few years ago one of my friends, a bartender who was very much a professional and proud of his profession, gave me an interesting but troubling factoid. 

“What day of the year, do you suppose, is the biggest sales day for bars, pubs, and taverns in the United States?” 

“I don’t know,” I replied, “I’d guess maybe New Year’s Eve or St. Patrick’s Day?” 

“Wrong,” he said, “New Year’s Eve, most people are going to parties that night and not to bars, though it is a very heavy night at bars because of loners who don’t have parties to go to or people who want to top up before they go to parties.  Only a portion of the population celebrates St. Patrick’s.  The heaviest night of the year, surprisingly, is the Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving Day.” 

“How could that be?”

“Just think about it a minute.  Thanksgiving is the holiday for all Americans, not just Christians, not just Irish Americans and Irish American wanna-be’s.   College kids, young professionals, and even some middle-agers, both with and without young families, are all headed back to the family manse to be with their parents or in-laws, and with siblings.  Often it’s to celebrate the holiday with people they’d rather not spend time with.   Older parents are about to have their calm, happy, empty nests invaded by the offspring they finally succeeded to launch on separate living arrangements.  All those nervous, slightly discontented people head to the bars with spouses, partners, or friends for one last chance to get loaded before they descend into a day or two of the Hell of Bringing Up Father or the Brady Bunch!  They drink at bars because they can’t drink at home, either because they’re traveling or they’re already uncomfortably on stage at where they are spending the holiday.”

This sad factoid gave me a perspective on the holidays I had never had.

There are many reasons to love the season, but there are also tensions.  The holidays bring with them a whole lot of expectations, what we need to do, who we need to be with, what we ought to do, to properly celebrate and to not give offense.  The holidays can bring us face-to-face to our own failings, those places where we do not measure up, either to the expectations of others or to our own.   

Ten years ago, Jo Robinson and Jean Staeheli published their little book, Unplug the Christmas Machine: A Complete Guide to Putting Love and Joy Back into the Season.  They discussed how our expectations could distract us and ruin the season, and how a simpler celebration could help fix matters.  It is still a good read with a lot of good suggestions for having a joyous, and even holy, festival.  

We must not beat ourselves up over the fact that we have not simplified enough.  That too is an expectation that produces unhappiness.   The point is that we need to pace ourselves, and truly celebrate in ways that bring joy to us and to those about us.  

The Feast of the Nativity, or Christmas (Christ’s Mass), is the Feast of the Incarnation, of God becoming truly human.   By becoming truly human, God tells us that it is O.K. to be not O.K., and shows us that acceptance of who we are and who those about us are is the starting point of spiritual progress.    Jesus liked a good party, but did not want party planning to control life.  Note that in the story of the wedding at Cana, he provides hundreds of gallons of the finest wine to the joy of the guests, but also questions his Mother’s desire to control every little detail. 

Anglicans and Episcopalians have always held to the Via Media, the middle way, whether between Catholicism and Protestantism, the traditional and the innovative, or smoky and clangy High Church ceremony or snake-belly low, hands-in-the-air come-to-Jesus Evangelicalism.    Treading the path between two extremes in order to be as inclusive and as comprehensive as possible is the hallmark of English Prayer-book Christianity. 

We need to walk a middle path in our approach to celebrating the holidays too. 

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—for both believer and unbeliever—stems from bad theology.  Incarnational theology demands that our prayer be common prayer, or prayer in community, and our holidays be publicly shared. 

The fact that in the Western catholic tradition we observe a light penitential season, Advent, just before Christmas helps us moderate having too much fun in the run up to Christmas.  The fact that we celebrate the nativity of Christ for twelve full days, Christmastide, from December 25 to January 6, forces us to pace and moderate the celebration.

Elena and I will be arriving in Ashland on December 30, and look forward to starting our lives together with you before Christmastide is over. 

Let’s all get through the holidays in one piece, happy, but rested as well.   

Peace and Merry Christmas. 

Father Tony+

What Sweeter Music (Chrismas Daily Office Year 1)

 

What Sweeter Music?

25 December 2010 

Daily Office Christmas Year 1

Zech 2:10-13; 1 John 4:7-16; John 3:31-36

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. (1 John 4:7-16)

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

“Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God; … those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” 

We often miss the point of these phrases in the first letter of John.  We tend to turn them on their head and read them as if they say “whoever knows God and is born of God learns how to love, and those who abide in God and in whom God abides practice love.”  We might be lead to do so by the fact that the passage says “God abides in those who confess that Jesus Christ is the Son of God” 

But this text argues in the opposite direction—the author says the practice of love brings about and embodies personal closeness to God, not the other way around.   The distinction is an important one, since we generally tend to think that the experience of love in some form or another is more generally common and shared among human beings than is having knowledge of God or being born of God, particularly when we associate such “God-talk” with submission to a particular religious tradition. 

The “love” referred to here, of course, is not just our love for other human beings: “God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son.”  

This is not an argument that we simply “confess Jesus as Lord” with our lips and “God will take care of everything.”   For 1 John, love comes first, and God’s action in our lives takes care of the rest, including the personal attachment to Jesus that he says from his experience is at the heart of having abiding love.  This is not a sectarian call to sign up for a doctrinal program or a partisan religious affiliation.   It is a call to love and trust, with all that those words imply.  And he bases this call on the fact that God sent Jesus, i.e., that God took on flesh and became truly human.

At root here is a key element in classic Christian theology of the incarnation.   Christians have long reflected on what it means when we say, together with the Gospel of John that “the Word of God took on flesh and became truly human.”

That God somehow took on flesh and became truly human marks a radical continuity between our human lives and God’s, and that implies a sacredness in all it means to be human.   Human love, friendship, the enjoyment of 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.  As one of the great theological doctors of the Eastern Church, Saint Athanasius, wrote: “[God], indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God.” (De Incarnation 54). 

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.

In the history of the Church in England, this issue once came to a real crisis point and literally caused the government of England to “cancel Christmas” for two decades.  After the English Reformation, some Christians there 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 fancy vestments, bishops, organs, and even the daily or weekly 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, 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. 

 Sir John Hutchinson

(I feel the need here to be fair to the Puritans.  One of my ancestors, Col. John Hutchinson of Nottingham Castle, was one of the “Parliament men” who signed the death warrant of King Charles I after Charles was tried and found guilty of war crimes and mass murder.  Col. Hutchinson, concerned with the excesses of the Court of Charles I, had initially supported the Roundhead Army in opposing the “King’s men” or Cavaliers.  But he was spared a traitor’s execution after the restoration of the monarchy because he equally opposed  the excesses of the Puritan regime headed by Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell and had prevented retaliatory war atrocities being perpetrated on Cavalier prisoners of war.  The fact that his wife Lucy’s father was a royalist nobleman who helped in restoring the monarchy after the Commonwealth did not hurt either.  Despite the fact that the Puritans “won the war but lost the peace” only to have the monarchy restored, the whole affair changed the nature of the British crown, and prevented in England the kind of traumatic revolution that happened in France in 1789.   Many of the political ideas and slogans of the Roundhead puritans were taken up part and parcel by the American revolutionaries in 1776.)   

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.”

Note the theology at work here—it was exclusionary, not inclusive:  “true Christians” needed to show their “trueness” (and, in so doing, point out who were “false” Christians and pagans).  It shows a contempt for many of the simple pleasures shared by people regardless of their belief or tradition.   It gets the "first love, then know Jesus" process described in 1 John backward. 

 

At Midnight Mass last evening at the American Cathedral in Paris, I was moved very deeply when the choir sang John Rutter’s setting of a modern adaptation of a poem by Cavalier poet Robert Herrick written just after the monarchy and Christmas celebrations were restored.  Herrick, an Anglican priest who had lost his living during the Parliamentary interregnum, wrote the poem for a Christmas party of the newly-restored King.  In it he argues for the celebration of Christmas against the position taken by the Puritans, and he does so wholly on religious and theological grounds.  He uses good incarnational theology:  the sacredness of all of human life , love, and enjoyment in the wake of God becoming flesh.    I love the poem, and have sung it with other 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)

May we all during this 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 us celebrate with our whole being, since in Christ our whole being is being made one with God.   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.  Merry Christmas, one and all.

In the name of God,  Amen.  

Imagine (Advent 2A, 3A, 4A Isaiah passages)

The Jesee Tree

Imagine

--The Rev. Anthony A. Hutchinson, Ph.D.

5 December 2010 Advent 2A Isaiah 11:1-10 

12 December 2010 Advent 3A Isaiah 35:1-10

19 December 2010 Advent 4A  Isaiah 7:10-16

A Comment on Advent Isaiah Readings

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

There is a traditional West African story that in various forms has often been retold in literature and films.  A scorpion asks a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scorpion reassures him that if it stung, the frog would sink and the scorpion would drown as well. The frog then agrees.  But in mid-river, the scorpion stings him, dooming them both.  When asked why, the scorpion explains, "I'm a scorpion; it's my nature."  They both then drown.

Now if the moral you draw from this story is “watch out—people do not always base their actions on rationally considered self-interest,” good.  But if you draw the moral, “there is no hope for anyone ever changing for the good,” I think you have made a serious mistake. 

The call throughout the Hebrew scriptures is, “Turn back,  turn back, O Israel—Shuvu, shuvu, Yisrael.”  And though we may have lost our freedom—whether through some primordial missing of the mark in the origin of our race (“Original Sin”), or through bad actions of our own that have become habits, that in turn have become addiction of one sort or another—the gist of much of the Christian Testament is that for God, nothing is impossible.    That doesn’t mean necessarily that God will take us where we want to go, but that God will take us where God wants us to be, no matter how hard it may appear.  Our job is to try get out of the way, to try to attune ourselves in such a way that we are working with God and not against him.  

Isaiah the Prophet, in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling 

The Isaiah readings we often hear this time of year about “Immanuel,” and a shoot sprouting up from the stump of Jessee are both from the first part of the Book of Isaiah, and come from the lifetime of the prophet, living in the eighth century before the Common Era.  They address the question of whether what we see before our eyes at the present time is “all there is,” is “as good as it gets,” or is “as good as it can get.”   Their answer is an emphatic “No, there is much more and there will be much more.”

Isaiah lived in a world of great and horrifying change.  The first great two international Empires in world history—Assyria and Egypt—had arisen in the suite of turmoil caused by climate change that had disrupted the political arrangements of a thousand years.  Between the two lay the tiny kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the split remnants of the glory days of the early Hebrews, the united kingdom of Jesse’s son David and David’s son Solomon.  Most of the politics of both Israel, Judah, and their neighbor kingdom Aram, centered on the question of how to best survive with such threatening super states all around:  factions supported either allying with Egypt and standing up to the Assyrians or simply paying the exorbitant taxes the Assyrians demanded. 

Isaiah was called to be a prophet the year that king Uzziah died (Isa. 6:1).  This is significant because the short term of Uzziah’s successor was immediately followed by Ahaz, whom the Biblical authors considered to be one of the worst kings in the history of Judah.  Where Biblical authors say that Uzziah "did that which was right in the sight of the Lord" (2 Kings 15:3; 2 Chronicles 26:4-5), Ahaz was another thing altogether.   He was allured the various religious around him, cults that personified wealth, power, sexual pleasure, and fertility in the figures of such deities as Baal and Astarte his consort.  Ahaz even put their sculpted images and altars in the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem, probably arguing that Yahweh and Baal were different names for the same reality. Worst of all, when his international policies failed and he lost wars, he took this as evidence that he had done not enough to honor the gods of the “winners,” and thus revived the practice of human sacrifice, even sacrificing one of his own children. 

Isaiah saw all of this as an unmitigated disaster, one that basically had ended the line of Judah’s kings—going back to Jesse’s son David—and all that mattered in Judah’s national life. 

A new form of political leader had arisen in Assyria—Tiglath-Pileser III, who took power in a military coup and then proceeded to form the first Imperial Power in world history truly based on a centralized military and bureaucracy.  In 735 BCE, King Pekah of Israel (also called “Ephraim”) joined with Rezin, king of Aram with his capital at Damascus, in a tax revolt against Assyria.  The two threatened the king of Judah, Ahaz, to force him to join the revolt. 

In Isaiah 7, the prophet goes out to meet Ahaz as he is inspecting the city’s water works to insure he can withstand a siege from Aram and Israel.  He is contemplating throwing in his lot with the biggest “winner” of all, Assyria.   In a passage we often hear this time of year (Isa 7:1-17), he tells Ahaz,

Be careful, keep calm and don’t be afraid. Do not lose heart because of  . . . Aram and of [Israel], Yet this is what the Lord Yahweh says:
  ‘It will not take place,
   it will not happen, …
   Within sixty-five years
   [both countries will cease to exist]
If you do not stand firm in your faith,
   you will not stand at all. …’

Then Isaiah offers proof of the validity of his words by predicting that Ahaz will soon have a son, and that before that child old enough to know right and wrong (and reject Ahaz’s bad ways), the two nations that Ahaz is fearing will be destroyed and a great national disaster will make reduce the population to the degree that the boy will be raised eating the food of a changed economy:

… the Lord himself will give you^[ a sign: a young woman [that is what the Hebrew says, the Greek translation of it makes this sign all the more marvelous by suggesting, “a young woman who is as of now still a virgin”] will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him “God with us.” He will be eating curds and honey before he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right,  for before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste.  Yahweh will bring on you and on your people and on the house of your father a time unlike any since Ephraim broke away from Judah—he will bring the king of Assyria.

But Ahaz did not heed Isaiah’s call, and instead actually called upon Tiglath-Pileser (the Bible calls him “Pul” in 2 Kings 15:19) to come to his aid and put down the revolt.  This the Assyrian did with a vengeance.  By 732, the he had destroyed Damascus, installed an Assyrian governor, and made Aram a province of the Assyrian Empire.  By 722, Tiglath-Pileser’s successor had destroyed Israel as well.   He annexed all of Israel, killed its king, installed an Assyrian governor, and deported tens of thousands of the leading elites of the tiny rebellious state.  Israel, simply, had ceased to exist as a nation.  

 

Hezekiah's Water Tunnel

But the sign offered by Isaiah, the birth of a son to Ahaz, took place.  His name was Hezekiah, one of the kings of Judah most praised by the Biblical writers.   Hezekiah took the idols out of the Temple and reformed worship.  Much of the Bible’s treasure of Wisdom literature was written during Hezekiah’s reign, including Ecclessiastes, Proverbs, and the Song of Songs.  Hezekiah built the Broad Wall, which doubled the space protected from attack in the city, including for the first time the city’s western suburbs.  To keep the city supplied with water during an extended siege (a reasonable precaution, given the Assyrians’ methods) he had a 500 meter tunnel known as Hezekiah’s Tunnel (still there today) dug to bring in spring water underground.  

So Isaiah had some reason to hope against hope that finally things would be put to right.  He saw the death of Ahaz and Hezekiah’s accession to the throne as a break with the past, a new hope.    He described the line of the Davidic kings as a tree springing from David’s father Jesse.  As far as Isaiah was concerned, Ahaz had all but destroyed that tree.  It was now but the dead stump of a tree that had been cut down.  But the prospects for Hezekiah’s reign were good.  So he describes it as a sprout springing up from the dead stump: 

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,

and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him,

the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the spirit of counsel and might,

the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.

This is a loaded image rich with Isaiah’s acerbic irony.  He calls the Davidic dynasty a dead stump.  It is cut down and useless, seemingly at an end.  But this bit of satire contains a hope rooted in Isaiah’s trust in God to be faithful to his promises.

  

Portrayal of good king Hezekiah in crown of Holy Roman Emperors

He makes Hezekiah a tender sprout or shoot coming up from the apparently dead stump.  He describes the qualities of an ideal ruler that he thinks will make such a revival possible: 

His delight shall be in awe before Yahweh.

He shall not judge by what his eyes see,

or decide by what his ears hear;

but with justice he shall vindicate the poor,

and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;

he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,

and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

Justice shall be the belt around his waist,

and faithfulness the belt around his loins.

But then in a leap of fantastic imagination, he says that this ideal king of the future will make all things right:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,

the leopard shall lie down with the kid,

the calf and the lion and the fatling together,

and a little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear shall graze,

their young shall lie down together;

and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,

and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den.

No one will hurt or destroy

On all my holy mountain;

For the earth will be full of the knowledge of Yahweh

As the waters cover the sea.

On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.

Modern readers can look at this and think, “Clearly, Isaiah was getting carried away by his own enthusiasm for the new king.”  We do this because we have become somewhat jaded about what political leaders can do.  We all remember what high expectations everyone had (sympathetically or otherwise) when Barrack Obama became President of the U.S.  Many at the time said that there was no way that this man who was elected on a platform of hope for change could reasonably fulfill his supporters expectations.   They did so based on prior experience with new Presidents:  the job is just too hard and complicated for anyone to do it perfectly.  The Onion satirically headlined at the time. “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.”

Hezekiah did turn things around in many ways for Judah, but did not end up being the ideal king of the future in Isaiah’s rich poetry.   He faced the same international relations problems as Ahaz, and eventually revolted against Assyria too, unsuccessfully trying to get Egypt to come to his aid.  Archaeology suggests that his reforms in putting down irregular worship domestically were not as thorough as the Biblical authors describe.  At one point later in his life, Isaiah even had to chastise Hezekiah for getting too cozy with another Assyrian rival, Babylon (2 Kings 20:12-19). 

But there is something larger at work here than simple naïve enthusiasm for a new king.  The transcendent hope expressed in the image of transformed nature is found elsewhere in the first part of Isaiah in passages not directly addressing the ideal future king, but rather addressing in general Yahweh’s goodness and ultimate triumph over what is wrong in the world. In Isaiah 35 (perhaps written after Hezekiah had turned out not to be the true ideal king of the future), we read:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,

the desert shall rejoice and blossom;

…

They shall see the glory of the LORD,

the majesty of our God.

…

Here is your God.

He will come with vengeance,

with terrible recompense.

He will come and save you."

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,

and the ears of the deaf unstopped;

then the lame shall leap like a deer,

and the tongue of the mute sing for joy.

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,

and streams in the desert;

the burning sand shall become a pool,

and the thirsty ground springs of water.

Such hope and poetic power ensured that the words of Isaiah would live, and his imaginative portrayal of an ideal future king who would set all things right lived on with them.  When the early Gospel writers were trying to find the words to describe Jesus, they turned to Isaiah’s ideal future king regularly.    “Son of David,” “Prince of Peace,” “Immanuel,” “son of a virgin”—all of these images and more come from Isaiah or Greek versions of Isaiah.But are the Gospel writers’ use of Isaiah in this way just a case of a tall tale growing in the retelling?   I think that Christian faith requires us to say “No.”

Note that Isaiah’s image of the ideal king of the future contains elements that are patently self-contradictory and impossible from a literal reading:  he says that as a result of the future king’s rule, carnivores and herbivores will all eat grass, and no natural predation will occur.    Isaiah was not an ignorant man.  He knew very well that cows and sheep had different digestive systems from lions and panthers, and that predation was in the very nature of some animals.  Yet he says that in the ideal future reign, all animals would live without the battle of “nature red in tooth and claw.”   

He is basically saying that as the result of the future ideal king, even nature itself will be transcended, and the seeming impossible will be made possible.  I doubt that he meant such words literally applying to Hezekiah.  He intended them metaphorically.  He was imagining a world where predation ceased, whether it was Assyrians on petty states, the rich on the poor, or lions and bears on sheep and cows. 

And here we come to the central point I want to take from these passages today—imagination.  In a world that is perhaps too concerned about the literal meaning of things, about the practical, and about the realistically feasible or likely, our imagination is a great gift. 

“He’s imagining things.”  “Isaiah has let his imagination get the better of him.”  “The Gospel writers simply imagined that Isaiah foretold the birth of Jesus.”  All of these phrases betray a contempt, or at least a healthy suspicion, of the human imagination. 

We tend to see the imagination as a creative activity of the mind.  But the great Church fathers, most specifically St. Thomas Aquinas, saw the imagination as an instrument of perception, as a way of seeing things that were not otherwise readily apparent to the senses.  The basis of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises is trained use of the imagination in reflection on scriptural passages.

The metaphorical use of the “heart” (“of one heart and mind” “follow your heart”) has suffered a similar fate in the West as the idea of the imagination.  We tend to think the heart is merely the center of emotion or feeling, and as a result it is sometimes seen as a mere epiphenomenon.   But, as Cynthia Bourgeault points out, traditionally in Western and Eastern spiritualities, the heart too is an organ of perception, something with which we see that which is not otherwise readily apparent.   Paying attention to how we emotionally react to things can tell us many things about ourselves, and with this, about our world. 

Isaiah here is imagining what he certainly knew was impossible under normal circumstances.  He imagines the transformation of nature itself—not only of lions, bears, panthers, asps, and vipers, but of human beings and their rulers.  His imagination is based on trust in God’s promise, and on God’s goodness and justice. 

When we Christians apply these prophecies about the ideal future Davidic king, this anointed one (or “Messiah”) , to Jesus of Nazareth, it is based on our experience of the Risen One’s power to transform us and those around us.  It is an act of imagination, to be sure, but one that we believe  describes the underlying realities of the world around us.  

We all need hope desperately.  This is a world that is lost if it does not have hope.  Without hope, we are likely to think that change is impossible, that how things are now are as good as it possibly can get, and that isn’t too good.  Without hope, without our imaginations seeing the ground for hope beyond the current crisis or horror, we are likely to see the world wholly as described in the story of the scorpion and the frog.

In our prayers during the rest of Advent, let us use our hearts to perceive, let us use our imaginations to see.  Let us be taken up into these stories.  As we near Christmas, let us, in the words of the Nine Lessons and Carols Service, ourselves go with the shepherds and see this babe lying in a manger.   May we see the vision of a transformed world that Isaiah saw, and see it in the person of Christ.

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

Let us pray.

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.