CHRISTMAS 2008
This sermon was preached by the Rector on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2008.
“…to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”
Here, on Christmas Eve, we celebrate what biblical scholar J.B. Phillips has called “by far the most significant event in the whole course of human history….What we are in fact celebrating,” Phillips wrote, “is the awe-inspiring humility of God, and no amount of familiarity with the trappings of Christmas should ever blind us to it. God’s intervening into human history came about with an almost frightening quietness and self-effacement, and as millions will testify, he will come once again with the same silence and the same devastating humility into any heart ready to receive him.”
Phillips is right.
Walter Wangerin, one of my favorite writers, in retelling the Christmas story wrote:
Once upon a time the world was dark, and the land where people lived was deep in darkness. It was as dark as the night in the daytime. It had been dark for so long that the people had forgotten what the light was like. This is what they did: they lit small candles for themselves and pretended that it was day. But the world was a gloomy place, and the people who walked in darkness were lonelier than they knew, and the lonely people were sadder than they could say.
But God was in love with the world.
God was in love with the world. Out of love for us - all of us - the good, the bad and the indifferent - God chose to become one of us. And I believe that that was God's intention from the very beginning. God did this not just to deal with our human sin - although that sin is real and is at least part of the reason why God chose to become human. But before that, before the fall of Adam and Eve, if you will, it was in the heart of God to share human life, to become human.
If we think it's Good News that God should want to share our humanity, there's more - God wants us to share in his divine life. I suppose had God simply become incarnate in Jesus and not launched into that whirlwind three years or so of preaching and teaching and healing, had Jesus not gathered around himself a new community of faith, and had the promised gift of the Holy Spirit not been given to the Church – and the world -on Pentecost, I suppose the Incarnation might not have changed anything. But it did change everything because God was not content simply to become human; God insisted on living that life fully and, in that living, sharing the Good News that such abundant life is available to all who desire it. God insisted on making the Incarnation not a dead-end, not something which God did once and which was then forgotten. God insisted on making the Incarnation permanent, an ongoing part of human life. God insisted on inviting men and women just like us, beginning with that first ragtag group of disciples, inviting them to become part of God's life in the world, to become the people in whom God becomes incarnate in each new age.
That is God's invitation to us in this holy season, the invitation to become part of the Incarnation, to become those people through whom God's life is shared with the world.
I remember being challenged once when I was a teenager about my Christian faith. Why, I was asked, did I believe this illogical faith. The answer I gave then is at least part of the answer I would give now. As I think about the people whom I admire, about the people whose lives have made a difference in this world, I find that most of them are people of faith, although not all identifiably Christian. They are men and women, and even children, who have responded to the invitation to Incarnation and are living in such a way that God's life is shared with the world through their lives. Some of them are people whose names have become familiar to all of us, people like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Desmond Tutu or Mother Theresa of
We have all, I hope, known people whose lives are a sharing of God’s life with the world. We have even, I suspect, been people like Karen Olson. But if we have failed to be like her, if we have failed to respond to the invitation to Incarnation, it is not too late. That invitation is renewed over and over again, and not just at Christmas, but minute by minute as we find ourselves in those places where God's life needs to be made present through us.
This invitation is not, to be quite honest, an invitation to a life of comfort, to a life without risks. It is, after all, the invitation to follow the One who went to the Cross because he would not stop proclaiming God’s reign of love, because he would not stop loving with God's love, because he would not stop sharing the Good News that God wants to be part of our human life, because he would not stop inviting people into this new relationship with God. No, the way is risky and difficult. To accept the invitation is to allow ourselves to be stretched, to be taught to love far beyond what we thought was our capacity to love, to place ourselves on what often appears to be the losing side in the struggle between good and evil.
But it is not the losing side, no matter how much evidence we may find to the contrary. It was not the losing side on that first Good Friday and Easter, even though the evidence of the crucifixion seemed overwhelming. And it is not the losing side now. The invitation to Incarnation comes with a promise, not a promise that those who chose to respond will never experience conflict, far from it, but a promise that no matter how intense the conflict, no matter how difficult the struggle, the final victory is God's. The invitation to Incarnation is an invitation to live in the faith that God is God and that God's love for this dark and troubled world will not be defeated. It is to live in the faith that the evil which has produced such incredible suffering in this world, even now in Darfur and
The invitation to Incarnation is here, and God is waiting for us to respond.
"O holy Child of
