CHRISTMAS 2005
The Revd Daniel Weir preached this sermon on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2005.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
For me, this first chapter of the Gospel according to
But Jesus, of course, is there, front and center, Jesus the Word, who was in the beginning with God and was - and is - God.
For me, the Good News of Christmas is the Good News of Incarnation: "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 Word became flesh. The One through whom all things came into being became flesh. Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, wrote about the Incarnation, this becoming flesh, in his Christmas greeting:
Incarnation
is God's shocking insistence that flesh and blood like ours
be the medium of God's Word.
No abstraction,
no lofty vision,
no finely wrought dogma,
no sacred tradition can mollify the shock of this truth:
As one of us
The Word comes to dwell among us and within us,
as a newborn child,
as Jesus.
May our flesh and blood too be made the route of Christ's continuing self-gift to our world
in words and deeds of love and truth,
mercy and indignation,
healing and forgiveness.
Let us dare to welcome the Word.
Can we accept the truth and welcome the Word as the Presiding Bishop invites us to? Can we accept the truth that God loves us so much that God became human? For most of us, most of the time, when we think about God, if we think about God, we see God as distant, perhaps as a stern judge, but rarely, I fear, as One who is so in love with us that he chose to take our frail human flesh.
This gospel proclamation, the proclamation that the world has been reconciled to God, who was in Christ fully present, fully involved in our humanity, this proclamation is the good news which we celebrate this Christmastide. This is the good news that is for us both "comfort and joy," the solid comfort and the profound joy that there is nothing in our lives, in the world with all of its pain and suffering, nothing which "will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord", because there is nothing at all which has not been embraced by God in Christ.
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.
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, and in doing so - and here's an incredible piece of Good News - to share God's very own life with us.
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. "But 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."
Ah, that may seem like a bit of a challenge to us - that we might, in the words of the Second Letter of Peter "become participants of the divine nature." Or, in the words of the Letter to the Ephesians, that we "may be filled with all the fullness of God." That may seem to be a daunting prospect for us, as insignificant as we are. Perhaps we would settle for something a little less intimate, a little less revolutionary.
But that, I believe, is the Good News. 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 on Pentecost, I suppose the Incarnation might not have changed anything. But it changed 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 deadend, not something that 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.
Remember Walter Wangerin's words, "Once upon a time the world was dark, and the land where people lived was deep in darkness." Is the world not still a dark and gloomy place? Don't we all have those all too personal worries and fears? The world is still dark and God is still in love with the world.
We might wish that God would choose some other way of spreading light into this dark world. We might wish that God would send fiery angels to bring light into the darkness. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury understands those wishes, and in his Christmas message wrote, “But Christmas reminds us of the one thing we know for sure - and that is God's way of responding to suffering. He doesn't wave a magic wand, or descend briefly from the sky to clean things up. He arrives on earth as a human being who will change things simply by the completeness of his love.”
The completeness of his love.
God has chosen us - just as God chose to become human on that first Christmas. We are those, as sharers in the mystery of Incarnation, as participants in the divine nature, we are those whom God wants to send into the world bearing the light of the Good News.
For some of us, and for many of our neighbors, Christmas is not an easy time. It is a time when the disappointments of our lives, the losses that we have suffered, the pain of sickness become even more acute in contrast to the mood of celebration all around us. Celebrating Christmas must be very difficult for those whose homes were destroyed by this year’s hurricanes. Celebrating Christmas must be very difficult for those who have been laid off in the latest wave of downsizing. Celebrating Christmas must be very difficult for those who homeless, those who are sick, those who are without a loved one who has died this past year.
Christmas will always be a sad time for some people. But what we can do is get it clear in our own minds and in our own lives that that kind of sadness is not something apart from Christmas, something for us to brush aside if we can, but is a reality which God came to deal with in Christ.
The grief of the widow or widower at the first Christmas after the death of a beloved spouse - God in Christ shares that grief. The disappointment of the laid off worker who can't afford presents for the children - God in Christ shares that disappointment. The pain of the person with AIDS or with cancer who spends this Christmas in a hospital bed - God in Christ shares that pain. The sorrow of the family whose home was destroyed by hurricane Katrina – God in Christ shares that sorrow. There is nothing that we experience as members of the human community that God in Christ does not share fully.
The task of bringing the Good News of God’s love into this dark world may seem daunting, even impossible, but the Good News is that our success is assured. God has already won the victory. "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it."
May we to whom the light of Christ has come, we whose hope is in the Word made flesh, we with whom God has chosen to share the divine life, we who have been called to be God's beloved children, may we accept the challenge of the Incarnation and bear the light of Christ into the darkness of this world.
May we take seriously the challenge of Christmas as expressed by the African-American theologian Howard Thurman:
“When the song of the angel is still, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their sheep, the work of Christmas begins; to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among people, to make music in the heart.”
Or that same challenge in the familiar words of Bishop Phillips Brooks:
O holy Child of
Cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel!
