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.

Fully God and Fully Human (midweek reflection)

Fully God and Fully Human

Mid-week Reflection for Trinity Church Ashland 

As we work through the season of Epiphany, when the Church focuses on who Jesus is, based on how he has been manifested, the issue of how to describe the divinity and humanity of Christ in modern terms often arises. The Creeds use ancient philosophical categories that are unfamiliar to most of us as habits of thinking, so the need to rephrase the faith in ways that are familiar to us is great.

D. M. Baillie, a distinguished Scottish theologian, argues that the Council of Chalcedon's doctrine that Jesus Christ was “fully God and fully human” is perhaps best explained by what he calls the "paradox of grace." We Christians since antiquity have been aware that we possess what appears to be a genuinely free will of our own, that we are "not marionettes but responsible persons." At the same time, we are equally sure that whatever good there is in our lives comes from God acting in us. And we feel that we are never more truly free, nor more truly human, than in those moments when we are most dependent on and most open to God.

"This is the deepest paradox of our Christian experience, and it runs right through it, woven into its very texture," says Dr. Baillie. "I suggest that it . . . points the way to an understanding of the perfect union of God and man in the Incarnation." In the New Testament, Jesus is seen "surpassing all other [people] in refusing to claim anything for himself independently, and ascribing all goodness to God." Yet his disciples felt that when they were with him, they were in the presence of God. And Jesus told them they were right in believing that. "If the paradox of Divine grace is a reality in our poor imperfect lives at all," asked Dr. Baillie, "does not the same or a similar paradox, taken at the perfect and absolute pitch, appear as the mystery of the Incarnation?" (Cf. Louis Cassels, Christian Primer: Adult Answers to Basic Questions about the Christian Faith [Doubleday: NYC, 1964; rpt. FMP 1981] 24-26.)

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, provides another modern model in his discussion of "miracles." He writes, God is an "almighty power ..., a steady swell of loving presence, always there at work in the centre of everything that is, opening the door to a future even when we can see no hope. ... God is always at work, but that work is not always visible. God is always at work, but sometimes the world’s processes go with the grain of his final purpose and sometimes they resist. But if certain things came together in the world at this or that moment, the ‘flow’ would be easier and more direct. Perhaps a really intense prayer or a really holy life can open the world up that bit more to God’s purpose so that unexpected things happen. ... We’re never going to have a complete picture on how that works, because we don’t have God’s perspective on it all. But we can say that there are some things we can think, say or do that seem to give God that extra ‘freedom of manoeuvre’ in our universe. And whether we fully understand what’s going on or not, we know that it’s incumbent on us to do what we can to let this happen. We pray, we act in ways that have some chance of shaping a situation so that God can come more directly in" (Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief [Louisville / London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007] 44-45.)

Jesus, as the One who perfectly submitted to God, who wholly aligned his will and his actions with God's ultimate purposes and love, was thus the supreme miracle-worker and the ultimate Miracle. In the words of Celtic spirituality, he was the thinnest of "thin places" between our world and the Ultimate. In "emptying himself" to God (Phil 2:1-13), and submitting fully to God, the Man Jesus is an exemplar for us.

Seeing such "emptying" of self as the heart of growth toward God, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of The Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) wrote the following prayer as part of his Spiritual Exercises:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. All I have and call my own, you have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace, that is enough for me. Amen.

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.  

Intimates with God (First Christmas C RCL)

Intimates with God
Homily delivered First Sunday of Christmas (Year C RCL TEC)
27th December 2009: 8:00am Said and 10:15am Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of St. John the Baptist, Seattle Washington
Readings: 1 Samuel 2:18-26, 26; Psalm 148; Colossians 3:12-17; Luke 2:41-52

God, let us not accept the judgment that this is all we are. . . . Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Today’s gospel is a story of terror for any parent—losing your child in a crowded, huge place with little hope of finding him again. Mary and Joseph discover to their horror that their twelve year old son Jesus has disappeared. They search for days only to find him in one of the Temple Courts taking an impromptu course in religious law. The Blessed Virgin greets him pointedly: “Child, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been looking for you for three days.” He answers sharply, “Why did you look all over town for me? Surely you must have known, Mother, that I would be in my Father’s House.” His barbed use of the word “Father” to mean God here corrects his mother’s loose use of the word to refer to her husband, Joseph. The reply has an edge that parents who have raised adolescent children will recognize. Mary, like many such parents, doesn’t get her teen-ager’s joke. Rather, she takes it in with puzzlement, and ponders it all. The story concludes with the family’s return home and, “He was obedient to them.”

The story presents the glories and the incongruities of the incarnation, the taking on of human flesh by God in Jesus. God in human form speaks, but as a twelve-year-old boy explaining his behavior to a distraught mother. It sums up the incarnation’s scope: in the words of the Book of Hebrews, Christ shared all our limitations and trials, but was sinless nonetheless.

The incarnation marks a radical continuity between our human lives and God’s, and that implies a sacredness in all it means to be human, including adolescence. 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. It stems from an unhealthy sense of Guilt and Shame, of feeling dirty and unworthy. It carries with it a self-loathing, an alienation from self.

A healthy shame or guilt is focused—regret and embarrassment at our deliberate misdoings. It leads to a desire to make restitution, to make amendment of life. But generalized, fuzzy Guilt and Shame, an overall and unremitting sense of “I’m not worthy, I’m not worthy,” is unhealthy. It leads not to repentance, but to alienation, indifference, and despair.

It is easy to see why we feel at times so alienated. God creates the world, and the resulting creation by definition is not creator, is not God, unlimited, all sufficient, all powerful. We creatures are painfully limited, wholly needy, and pitiably weak. We seem to have a built-in tendency to want our own way, to resist others, and this includes a tendency to resist God. And so the good, the true, and the beautiful world God intends to create, including the us God intends, seems at times to be merely a Shining, Distant, yet Impassible City in the distance, ever-receding.

Limitation, however, is not rebellion. The Church Fathers often distinguish between two different kinds of evil. One is found the systemic gaps in the ambient Goodness of God in creation—the evil that is simply the “absence” of God due to the differentiation of creature from creator. The other is willful resistance to God’s intention. One is natural evil, normally associated with the limitations, pain, and occasional seeming senselessness of nature imposed by the very fact of being created and contingent. The other is moral evil, the result of rebellion and willful resistance. Some Fathers call the tendency toward alienation and rebellion common to all human beings “original sin,” because it seems to be inborn, from our origins, not because it is all that creative, or ‘original.’



God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth shared all our limitations, weakness, 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. Though a typical adolescent in some ways in today’s story, he is unusual in his openness to God.

Theologians describe the incarnation from the outside by saying that God in taking on flesh accepted its limits, or in technical jargon, the willed the “occultation of his divinity.” An early hymn in Philippians (2: 6-8) describes it as Christ “emptying himself.”

But we need another image to describe it from the inside. One is the 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. 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.

This implies a great deal about our lives, both as individual Christians and as a community within the larger world. William Stringfellow wrote,

“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—all members of Christ’s Body in the world—know and live in the same integrity in their personal relationships with every other creature in their own, specific personal histories. . . . [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 Body of Christ lives in the world in the unity of God and the world wrought in Christ, and, in a sense, the Body of Christ lives in the world as the unity of God and the world in Christ.” (William Stringfellow, A Public and Private Faith, 1962, 40-44).

In Jesus, we see that limitation or weakness do not equal rebellion or resistance. In Jesus, we see that God made us, intends us to be very good, but that God is not yet finished creating us. Jesus calls, “Let God finish.”

Just as Jesus accepted who he was and the tasks God had for 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 for us, in Lady Julian of Norwich’s words, “all is well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Such openness is the difference between true humility and its cheap counterfeit, the pride that demands that we either be the best of all or the worst of all.

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. All these are signs of not accepting who it is God made us to be. They appear when 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.” This is why one of the key questions asked in any spiritual direction and discernment process is “What puts a smile on your face?” It is a pretty good indication of where your treasure is, and with it, your heart.

Ambrose of Milan, who taught and converted Augustine of Hippo in the mid fourth century, wrote dozens of hymns that made available to common people the basic teachings of Christianity. Both Ambrose and Augustine were very flawed people, but ones who persevered in open-ended listening to God. That’s why we call them saints—not because they lacked flaws, but because they persevered despite them. One of Ambrose’s hymns praises 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 accept our own humanity, with all its limitations and failings. And and as Jesus accepted the Father's will in all things, let us open ourselves to listen to God and follow where Jesus leads us.

In the Name of God, Amen.

God’s Meaning, Intention, and Self— Fully Human
John 1:1-18
Homily delivered First Sunday of Christmas (Year B RCL TEC)
28th December 2008: 8:00am Said and 10:15am Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of St. John the Baptist, Seattle Washington
Readings: (Isa 61:10-62:3; Ps 147, Gal 3:23-25; 4:4-7; John 1:1-18)

God, let us not accept the judgment that this is all we are. . . . Inflame our hearts with the desire to change—with hope and faith that we all can change. Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen. (adapted from Dorothy Day)

I am very grateful for Fr. Peter’s invitation to preach here this morning. Though I count West Seattle as my home in the U.S., I currently live in Hong Kong where I am a deacon in the Anglican/Episcopal Church there, the Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui, preparing to be priested this September. I currently serve as a chaplain at the Cathedral of Saint John the Evangelist and a lecturer in Biblical languages and literature at the Anglican Seminary there, Minghwa Theological College.

My wife and I are visiting Seattle for the holidays to be with our children and grandchildren during the holidays. All the time we have been spending with three year old Emma and six month old twins Delia and Elsie has made both of us very thoughtful this Christmas about that universal human experience, babyhood. And our need to use borrowed vehicles and snow shovels has reminded us of how much relying on others makes you closer to them. Together, the experience has made me reflect on just what it means when we Christians worship the Baby Jesus.

Frankly, it is something of a scandal. “O Come, Let us adore Him,” we sing, without a thought about what we are saying. Worship a baby? Barely born and in diapers? (That’s basically what the “swathing bands” were for.) 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?

But other lines of carols seem to have given the matter some more thought: “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail the incarnate Deity,” “Of the Father’s Love begotten, ere the worlds began to be,” and “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.”

Gerard (Gerrit) van Honthorst (1590–1656), Adoration of the Children (1620),
Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Italy.

The Gospel reading today is the prologue of the Gospel of John. It cites an early Christian hymn, whose rhythm and balance is clear once you remove the interposed verses that talk about John the Baptist. The text is the source of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, and contains a sentence that sums the doctrine up: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.”

The doctrine of the incarnation, of God becoming a human being, was a scandalous idea from the start. The basic problem is simple—we tend to define the word God by 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 but none of them formed by a self that is in any way complete or whole. God is being itself, pure intention, pure love. We are incomplete and sick, God is wholeness and health itself. We are sinners; God is perfection itself. We can be pretty benighted and false; God is light and truth. How can these two polar extremes be reconciled, let alone combined?

The Church during the first six centuries of its existence dealt with these issues in a series of ugly arguments that are called the “Christological controversies.” In this discussion, the Church looked again and again to our text in John and to the description of Christ in Hebrews 4:15: He is wholly able to sympathize with our weaknesses because he was tested in every way, suffered every trial just as we—yet was without sin.

Icon of the Emperor Constantine and the Holy Fathers at Nicea.

The doctrine of the united Church—the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church that we confess in the Creed—was worked out during those controversies and by those Councils. The Creed itself, together with the list of what books we accept as the Holy Bible, stand as the primary legacies of those Councils.

I can’t go into the detailed history and doctrinal differences here. What the Church gradually recognized is that in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Love and Power that brought the universe into existence and still sustains it embraced and took on in every way the weakness, limitation, handicaps, and contingency of being human. The Councils declared that Jesus Christ was fully God and fully Man, 100% God and 100% Human being. He was not a 50-50 mix, half God and half human being.

To those who stressed the oneness of God at the expense of the divinity of Jesus, the Creed states, “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), God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.” It is the Creed that the carol quotes when it says, “God from God, Light from Light Eternal,” and “Very God, begotten, not created.”

At the other extreme the Creed also sought to correct those who stressed the divinity of Christ at the expense of his humanity. Some believed that Christ was fully God and thus only seemed to be human. The letters of John in the New Testament condemn these people because they “do not acknowledge that it is in the flesh that Jesus Christ came” (2 John 1:7). 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, “We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, . . . 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.”

Mural of the Emperor Constantine and the Holy Fathers at Nicea.

Popular Christian legends from those early years show some of the confusion that prevailed—many of the infancy Gospels rejected by the Councils for inclusion in the New Testament portray not a helpless, speechless baby Jesus, but one that can give his Mother sermons the day he was born and that as a child has an unfortunate tendency to miraculously kill off his playmates when they are mean to him and then equally miraculously to resurrect them when his Mother would tell him it was not nice to kill one’s playmates.

Against all these views, the Church teaches that as difficult as it may be to understand, Jesus Christ was both truly God and truly Man.

Reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable natures—divine and human—is only part of the problem, however. The changing ways people had of understanding the historical Jesus himself was the root of the problem.

It was only over time that the people around Jesus came to understand his unique character. Today’s Gospel was a key part of that process.

From fragments here and there preserved in the Gospels, we know that the people who actually knew Jesus while he was alive had no problem seeing his human nature--

In Mark 3 we read a story about Jesus’ family trying to get Jesus to come home and start acting normally after he began his public ministry. They do this because they believe he has gone insane. Later in the chapter we read about Jesus publicly disassociating himself with his mother and brothers and saying “Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother.”

His family wasn’t alone in thinking that he was behaving in unexpected, if not inappropriate, ways. In Matthew 13 people from his home town wonder how on earth Jesus could be so wise and work such wonders, since he was just a local boy whose father, Mother, brothers, and sisters they all knew.

Even those who followed Jesus had a great difficulty coming to an understanding of who he was. When Simon confesses Jesus as the Messiah at Caesarea Philippi, this is seen as unusual. Jesus praises Simon’s acceptance of the witness of Heaven about Jesus’ identity by giving him a new name—Peter—that plays on the idea that such acceptance is the solid foundation of faith, (“You are a little stone—Petros, and upon this Bedrock—petra—I will build my Church…”)

It is about those who rejected Jesus’ mission because they could see only his human side that today’s Gospel says, “he came unto his own, and his own people rejected him.”

Clearly, Jesus’ bodily reappearance after what they all knew was his death made his disciples reconsider things and start reinterpreting what they had experienced with Jesus. After all, he was for many a close family member and friend who had said that somehow God was actively present in his person, who called God, “Father,” and said that their being right with God somehow depended on how they reacted to him.

In the Book of Acts, we read that shortly after Jesus’ death, reappearance, and final departure, his Mother and brothers had finally joined together with his disciples (Act 1:14).

Because of Easter, Jesus’ followers recognized that their Master was at the very least what the prophets of Israel had promised-- the ideal King of Israel anointed by God’s spirit to save his people and establish a kingdom of justice and peace. But this anointed one, or Messiah, had turned out to be not exactly what they had expected. He had not overthrown the foreign invaders, not brought history to an end, not set up the everlasting peaceable kingdom they had hoped for.

So their ideas of what the Messiah would have to change. They began to use one of the less common honorific terms for a king of Israel to describe him—Son of God. In the Psalms God says to the King of Israel, “You are my son, this day I have begotten you.” They now remembered that Jesus had repeatedly referred to God as “Father.”

They thus only came to recognize his true nature gradually, and as time moves on, they understand more and more, and the earlier they think it is that Jesus’ divine sonship was clearly established.

Saint Paul, whose writings are the earliest ones we have preserved in the New Testament, in about 50 C.E. says that Jesus Christ was “constituted as Son of God” as of his resurrection from the dead (Rom. 1).

About two decades later, the earliest Gospel, Saint Mark, says that the “beginning of the Gospel of Christ, the Son of God,” was at his baptism by John the Baptist, when God’s voice declared “You are my beloved Son,” the Spirit descended upon him.

Another decade or two later, in the late 70s and 80s, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke each tack on to the beginning of Mark’s story a couple of chapters of very divergent legendary material about the birth of Jesus.


But despite the unharmonizable differences differences in the legendary details, both Matthew and Luke agree in proclaiming the Jesus was Son of God from the moment of his conception in Mary’s womb.

You see the direction of the development? The more time goes one, the earlier it is that Christians believe that Jesus was constituted as Son of God: Paul says as of his resurrection; Mark, as of his baptism; Matthew and Luke, as of his conception and birth.

The latest Gospel in the New Testament, Saint John, was written around 100 C.E. Today’s Gospel reading says that it was not at Jesus’ resurrection, nor his baptism, nor his conception, that he was constituted as God’s Son. John says that it was always that way. Jesus was always in God and of God.

The hymn to Jesus Christ as the Logos, the eternal word of God, in John chapter 1 begins: “In the beginning was the word.”

This translation misses the richness of the Greek en arche en ho logos. Another way of translating might be, “At the start, at the root of all, the logos existed.” The writer is referring to a word with a long background and heavy baggage, both classical and Semitic.

The Greek word logos is where we get out word logo, our word logic, and our words analogue and dialogue. It means much more than just “word.” At its root, it means whatever it is that makes or conveys meaning or sense, whether in our minds or on our lips. The word logos in some ways includes the meanings of both the Latin words oratio “speech or utterance” and ratio “intelligence, rationality, sense.” Thus, a good way to translate the first verse is, “At the root of all things, there existed Meaning.”

But the Logos is not just meaning and utterance of meaning. In order to build a fence around the Law and avoid uttering “in vain” the name of God, Jews had begun to find ways of referring to God without using God’s name. The first action of God in creation is Genesis chapter one is speech. “God said, Let there be light, and light came into existence.” And so the creative active speech of God became one circumlocution for God proper, just as hashem, the name, did. But Dabar ha-Elohim “the word of God” became a powerful image of the power of God manifested in history and in personal lives as well. Later, the Aramaic term Memra “the word” became one the ways of referring to God as present, active, and discernable in the world.

I am sure that John has both images of logos, the Greek and the Semitic, in mind when he quotes this hymn about the logos who in the beginning is with God and is God.

The hymn says that the Word/Meaning/or Active Principle of God took on flesh and “dwelt” among us. The choice of the word “flesh” is almost certainly deliberate. In Semitic culture, basar “flesh” was the physical, earthy part of a person that you could see, touch, and smell. It was a key part of you, and not that separable from your mind or spirit. The symbol for a man to be part of the covenant that God made with Abraham was that he be circumcised in his flesh. For Greeks, sarx “flesh” was the changeable, impermanent part of a human being. For some Greek philosophers, it was the part that resisted reason and had a mind of its own, the part that I think we would identify by talking about addictive, obsessive, or compulsive behaviors. It was in this sense that Saint Paul had occasionally used the word—sarx for him sometimes is shorthand for that part of a human being that resists God’s intentions for us.

When the prologue of John says the logos became sarx, it means that Reason itself, Meaning itself, God’s Active Intention itself took on all it means to be a human being: all the limitations, all the doubts and fears, and the ignorances, all the handicaps.

The hymn softens this by adding “he dwelt among us.” The word used for “dwelt” is eskenasen: he “pitched his tent” among us. The image is of a temporary habitation, like the Tent of the Meeting or the Tabernacle of the ancient Israelites, where God Himself was made manifest to Moses. I usually translate it as “he dwelt for a time in our midst.”

The hymn adds, “and we saw his glory, as of the Only Son of the Father, full of Grace and Truth.” Perhaps a better way to express this would be “we saw his glory, as of someone from the Father who was absolutely One-of-a-kind, someone full of Grace and Truth”

It is here that for me, at least, the conflict between divine and human is resolved--Grace and Truth. For despite all our limitations, we human beings can on occasion transcend ourselves and open ourselves to Grace and Truth. On even fewer occasions, we can even become the instruments by which Grace and Truth can be given to others.

“We saw the glory of God made flesh, we saw the Glory of Meaning Itself placed within this apparently meaningless world—and we recognized that glory as Grace and Truth.”

Here is the squaring of the circle and the reconciling of the polar opposites—God revealing Himself as Grace--undeserved, unconditional, one-way love, and Truth—the acceptance of things as they are with a willingness to conform to things as they ought to be. It was in this that John says Jesus was recognized as the Logos from all eternity. But he adds-- Jesus was monogenes—one-of-a-kind. We occasionally can transcend ourselves. Despite all the limitations his humanity imposed, He is Transcendence Itself.

John affirms in his prologue that Jesus was in God, with God, indeed, was God from the beginning. This is part of larger effort in the Gospel to play down the earthly origins of Jesus and the patent humanity he enjoyed in order to make what really mattered stand out.

In John chapter 7, some of Jesus’s opponents complain that he could not be the Messiah because they knew he was from Nazareth, and they believed a tradition that the Messiah’s origin’s. Later in the chapter, other opponents say he cannot be the Messiah because they know he is from Galilee and they believe that the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem, the city of David. To the former, Jesus replies that the people around him do not truly know where he is from—he is from the Father above, and those about him don’t see this. To the latter, he does not say, “Oh yeah, well I was secretly born in Bethlehem, not Nazareth.” What he does say is this: “You have no idea where I am from.” Again, the point is clear: he is from above, from the bosom of the Father.

The hymn to the Logos ends by saying, “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.”


In his Christmas Day sermon of 1611, the great Anglican divine Bishop Lancelot Andrewes commented on this chapter. Andrewes was a scholar, and was a major translator and editor of the King James Version of the Holy Bible, published earlier that year. This is what he said about the incarnation of Christ, the word being made flesh:

“I add yet farther; what flesh? The flesh of an infant. What, Verbum infans, the Word of an infant? The Word, and not be able to speak a word? How evil agreeth this!”

He uses the original Latin meaning of the word “infant,” namely, a person who is not yet able to speak, and thus portrays the Word made flesh as “the Word that cannot even speak a word.” There is something wrong in this to Andrewes: had he been speaking modern English, “how evil agreeth this!” would have been “This just isn’t right.”

The word that is unable to speak—Andrewes meant by this two things: the utter helplessness and powerlessness of God made man in a little baby, and the inexpressible depth of the revelation of God thus made.

Andrewes continues (I have updated his language a bit),

“And how was He born, how welcomed? In a stately palace, cradle of ivory, robes of estate? No, (here he borrows from the Gospel of Luke), but a stable for His palace, a manger for His cradle, poor clouts (rags) for His array. This was His fleshly beginning. But follow Him later on in life, it gets no better. Shivering when weather is cold; sweaty and faint when it is hot. Suffering hunger, thirst, and exhaustion. And is His end any better? It sums up his whole life—what is His flesh then? Scourged and beaten, black and blue, bloody and swollen, rent and torn, thorns and nails sticking in His flesh. When John says “became flesh and was made a human being” this is what the word “flesh” means. If the ever-lasting Word of God had been made head of all the angels, that would have been an abasement; to be a lesser angel, even worse. But listen to Old Testament passages applied to our Lord in the flesh that he was born to, “he was despised, rejected among the people,” and “I am a worm, and not even a human being.” “Born thus, clothed thus, housed thus, treated thus—this is as bad as it can get. He truly was among the lowest of the low. By thus being “made man” He was unmade. To take on this flesh, he had to lay aside much, and not merely play at lowness, but to suffer lowness by being low. I want you to think on this—why ever would He have done such a thing? Why such great indignity? What was it that made the Word thus to be made flesh? Certainly not some human motivation or principle. That already is flesh, and thus cannot provide a motive to become flesh. It was God alone, and in God nothing but love. Love alone did it. Love, as Saint Paul says, is not jealous, does not keep score, is not worried about status. And this emptying out of self is the core characteristic of love. This Love did not count costs, and thus did not worry about what flesh it would be made, but rather, how it would remake flesh.”


This helpless baby was God made one of us. We must treat all the helpless with the respect and compassion. The Ultimate Meaning of the universe found a place in human flesh, in the person of this speechless and helpless baby, who was only beginning to enjoy the good things life offers. But he was also just beginning to suffer everything that life can throw at any of us. Yet despite it all, he remained ever steadfast. This only Son of God offers us Grace and Truth, and gives us the chance to be adopted as Children of God. As helpless, pathetic fellow human beings, let us accept what he offers, and in Love offer the same Grace and Truth to those around us.

In the name of God, Amen.