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.

Be of the Same Mind that was "in Christ"

Paul Gaugin, Le Christ Jaune. 1889

Be of the Same Mind that was “in Christ”
Philippians 2:1-13
20th Sunday after Trinity (Proper 22), 9 Oct. 2008
Homily delivered at St. John's Cathedral, Hong Kong

God, let us not accept that judgment that this is what 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)

My second son David was a very precocious child, and occasionally would ask questions that in their simplicity and naivety actually revealed profound problems. When he was about nine or so, he once asked me, “Why did God have to kill his Son Jesus to pay for our sins? Doesn’t that make him a very bad Father? Why couldn’t he have just been bigger-hearted and forgiven us when we’re sorry? Isn’t that what he expects from us? Besides that—didn’t he forbid human sacrifice?”

I tried answering him by citing the normal “Law versus Mercy” and “the need for an eternal atoning sacrifice” arguments we usually hear from people quoting snippets of scripture, here and there. But David would have nothing of it,” “Look,” he said, “if God is really in charge of everything, he can make things the way he wants. So why did he make them so that he had to kill off his own Son?”

It took me several years before I fully realized that the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and the incarnation mean that in a real sense God the Father did not have to “kill off” his Son to satisfy some law he had set up. Rather, the death of Jesus on the cross “for our sins” was in fact God giving himself freely to heal us and rescue us from our failings and shortcomings and all their effects. My nine year old son’s image of the child-abusing, murderous Father-God set on obeying the constraints of justice at all cost is common. But it is wrong. It is a twisted and wrong image, seen through the narrow and distorted lens of human limitation. The birth, life, death, and bodily reappearance of Jesus after his death is actually the Great Mystery of Love Himself descending below all things to save, redeem, and heal his pitiful creatures from the nasty fix we find ourselves in.

This Great Mystery was the subject of an early Christian hymn that Saint Paul quoted when writing to the saints in Philippi. Since it comes from before Paul, the hymn in today’s reading is one of the oldest parts of the New Testament, from the first couple of decades after the death of Jesus. Paul quotes the hymn, probably one that his audience in Philippi would have sung in Greek in their small Church services, in order to argue that Christians should be humble, not stuck up, and should always try to serve one another. It does not call for a fawning and fake “I’m no gooooood. I’m worse than everybody” false humility. It says we should have the mind of Christ.

I think perhaps a better translation of the first verse of the hymn would be that, “though he had the form and substance of God, Christ was not of a mind to see equality with God as something to be grabbed at and held onto tightly.” Rather, “he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave by being born in human likeness. “ But the hymn goes on to say that in addition to this great stooping down of Christ from the eternities to our pitiful mortal life, there was a second stage of humiliation. “Once he was found in human form, he further humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross.” The point is that Jesus died such a horrible and shameful death—the Roman Imperial punishment for political rebels, bandits, and terrorists, being slowly tortured to death publicly to set an example– that he died such a death unjustly, but willingly.

Now this passage expresses the idea of Christ’s emptying himself with the Greek word kenosis. This later became an important point of departure in Roman Catholic and reformation theology on the relation of the persons in the Holy Trinity, the “occultation” of the Divinity, and its abasement and making itself subject to the laws of nature in the incarnation. The great Anglican theologian Charles Gore developed the idea of kenosis as a means of understanding the limitations of the human consciousness of the historical Jesus. The traditional Christian hymn “Te Deum” expresses this in the phrase, “Thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb.”

But Paul’s point here is that the “mind” that was in Christ—indeed, that all who are “in Christ” already share—was one not of grasping, but of emptying, not of dictating, but one of obedient servitude or slavery.

This is the great point of the idea of kenosis in the Mind of Christ.

The Christian Church has a shocking doctrine, one that throughout its history has been repeatedly oversimplified by pious people: the doctrine of the incarnation expressed in the line in the creed about our One Lord Jesus Christ who, “became flesh of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became a human being.” Many church members think they are giving a highly orthodox answer when they define the Incarnation solely in terms of "The Divinity of Christ." But this is really heresy, and was so branded by the early Church. What the Incarnation actually affirms is that the man Jesus of Nazareth, known to his disciples as a fully human person, sharing the limitations and temptations of ordinary men, was also in a unique sense the self-expression of God.

This became clear to them when after his horrific and unjust death, he reappeared to them in bodily form—they knew that whatever it was they were seeing, it was not a ghost. They also knew, as St. Paul elsewhere says, that it was by raising Jesus from the dead that God revealed just who this Jesus actually was (Rom. 1). The clearest expression of the idea in the New Testament is in the Gospel according to St. John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth."

The idea has been put in many other ways over the centuries: Jesus was truly man, and at the same time truly God, is "God living a human life," "the manifestation of God in human terms," and "the fullest expression of Divine personality that is possible under the conditions of human life."

D. M. Baillie, a distinguished Scottish theologian, argued that this “100% God and 100% man” idea is perhaps best explained this in 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," said 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 men in refusing to claim any¬thing 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 he 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?" [[Preceding four paragraphs are adapted from Louis Cassels, Christian Primer: Adult Answers to Basic Questions about the Christian Faith (Doubleday: NYC, 1964; rpt. FMP 1981) 24-26.]]

But this is all the more the case when we talk about the mind of Christ and its emptying itself of all self-seeking, self-will, and even instinct for self-preservation. Especially in the second stage of humiliation described in the hymn-- Jesus Was a Palestinian Jew and let God lead him where God would. He ended up standing in opposition to the “religious” and “righteous” people of his day, and siding with traitors, drunkards, and whores. “For they,” he said, “recognize their need for God.”

Jews of all sects at that time had expectations for what a Messiah would be and do; God had another idea. Jesus, when faced with the prospect of his death by torture, prayed in Gethsemane that “this cup” would pass from him. The allusion is to Psalm 75:9 that refers to a cup brimming with “foaming, spiced wine” in the hand of God the dregs of which are punishment for “the wicked” of the world, an image called in Isaiah 51 “the cup of the wrath of God.” Despite his fear and desire for another outcome, Jesus says, “nevertheless, let what you want be done, Father, not what I want.” In the end he empties himself even further and, as Saint Paul quotes the hymn, “was obedient unto death, death upon the Cross.”

It is only in such surrender to God that we can find ourselves. It is only is such admission of total dependence on God that we can find a way out of our hopeless situation. Self-will is a great fraud. How can we talk to God face-to-face when we don’t yet have faces? We are pretty pathetic creatures, but ones that God loves nevertheless. He loves us foolishly. He’s “crazy about us.” That’s why he emptied himself, showed us the way, and paid whatever price our failings had set.

Just as Jesus accepted who he was and the tasks God had for him, we must accept who we are and what we must do to amend our lives. But this requires an open-ended listening. This requires total trust in God’s good intentions for us, in knowing, with Lady Julian of Norwich, “that all is well, and that all manner of things shall be well” in God’s intention.

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.

The Latin word from which we get the word humility is “Humilitas”, that is, close to the humus or the earth. Another way of saying it is “Down-to-earth.” It does not mean self-abasing or playing the drama-queen in thinking oneself as the least valued person on the planet or the worst of its sinners. C.S Lewis said that humility is the golden rule—treating others as you would be treated--applied to self-esteem. Charles H. Spurgeon, an English preacher in the 19th century, said, “Humility is to make a right estimate of one's self.”

In our meditation today, I want us to think about emptying ourselves of self-will and self-grasping. Think of how to make real in our own feeling and thinking the mind that is “in Christ.”


Here are two prayers, both from African Christians, that we can reflect on as we seek to empty ourselves.

O thou great Chief, light a candle in my heart, that I may see what is therein, and sweep the rubbish from thy dwelling place.

God in Heaven, you have helped my life to grow like a tree. Now something has happened. Satan, like a bird, has carried in one twig of his own choosing after another. Before I knew it he had built a dwelling place and was living in it. Tonight, my Father, I am throwing out both the bird and the nest.

In the name of God, Amen.