Christmas Eve December 24, 2014
Is. 9:2-4,6-7 Ps.96:1-4,11-12
Titus 2:11-14 Luke 2:1-14
Imagine tonight that you and I are like trees who are constituted by
layers or rings of experiences. And so
tonight we are constituting our outer most layer of the occasions of our
personal experience, fortunately I am speaking of the expansion of our consciousness
and not of our waist lines because of all of the Christmas time sweets.
People who study trees can look at a cross section of the successive
layers of rings of a tree and measure age and they can also tell by analysis
something about the weather and climactic condition which the tree faced in a
certain annual cycle.
Let us look at ourselves tonight and at the life of church as comprising
successive but expanding concentric circles of something like a conical
spiral. We are ever surpassing ourselves
in future and subsequent states in the sum total occasions of existence. (This is the subtle and poetic way of saying that
we age and get older.)
To provide us a visualization of ourselves as the outer container of all
previous states of our becoming, I would like to use the Russian nesting dolls
also call Babushka dolls. They are dolls
within dolls
I would like to use these Babushka dolls to illustrate a two parallel
trips to the Christmas birth event in Bethlehem. The first of the two parallel trips to Bethlehem
is the corporate trip of the church in how the Christmas story came to
functions within the church. The other
is the personal trip to Bethlehem which we make in our own spiritual lives.
For the outer nesting doll, I have used a word and picture collage to
represent the presence of Christ by the Holy Spirit in the Christian
communities of over 1900 years. Indeed
this is quite a collage. It includes
Luther, Calvin, Cramner, Aquinas, Baptists, Amish, St. Francis, Pope Leo the
Great, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mennonites, Episcopalians,
Crusades, Martyrs, Monastics, Mormons, Monophysites, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Shakers and Methodists, Presbyterians, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and more,
because the outer container has to include all of the historical manifestations
of the Christ event.
We take the outer shell off to see what is contained beneath. What we find beneath are some of the earliest
communities of the Jesus Movement. What
we find is a Christ-centered Judaism within the various cities of the Roman
Empire. This Christ center Judaism
caught on with a significant number of Gentiles. This Christ-centered Judaism provided social
identity clubs for people involved in the migration to cities as significant urbanization
was taking place in the cities of the Roman Empire. This age of the church includes people who
were surprised by the very success of the message of Jesus Christ and the authentic
spiritual experience which took root in people's lives to bring about moral and
spiritual change. This experience also
provided such an excitement of discovery that people wanted to share this excitement
with others. This age includes the
collection and distribution of Christian
writings including the collection of the writings of the apostle Paul and his
disciples and other writing which later became accepted as books of the
official textbook of Christianity, The New Testament. In this phase of the church we find martyrs
who died for their faith. The conversion
of the Gentiles to the Gospel led to the Emperor Constantine and the Council of
Nicaea.
In an earlier phase of the Jesus Movement, we find persecuted minorities
communities who found great hope in holding on to justice in the form of
narratives about an imminent apocalyptic ending of the world with a super hero Son
of Man and Messiah coming to the rescue at any time. This was the time leading
up to the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the aftermath of the destruction of
Jerusalem in the year 70. The followers
of Jesus were forced into exile out of Jerusalem and portions of their homeland. Could the Christian movement survive if it lost
its birthplace and homeland? This exile
proved providential for the Christian movement but it also became crucial in
the separation of the followers of Jesus from the synagogue, since the success
of the Jesus Movement came to reside in the Gentile converts who lived in the
cities of the Roman Empire.
The next layer is the layer of the theology of St. Paul found in his
writings which are the earliest writings of the New Testament. This time was also the era of the collection
of authentic oral traditions which surrounded the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. St. Paul did not write a biography of Jesus
of Nazareth and he did not meet him in the flesh. St. Paul had a spiritual encounter with
Christ on the road to Damascus and his life was changed. And he preached this message of spiritual encounter
with the risen Christ. He used the great
Christ events as a spiritual metaphors of personal transformation. He said that he had been crucified with
Christ and that Christ had come to live within him. He wrote that he had been raised with Christ
into heavenly places and so the ascension of Christ was also an experience of
being transported to another reality which was both parallel and interactively
influential with the material reality of his world. St. Paul wrote that Christ dwelled in each
believer, not by natural means but through the experience of a person becoming
overshadowed or baptized by the Holy Spirit of God.
And that brings to us the Christmas Event. The event which would have been first
chronologically, was in fact a later addition to the writings of the Christian
communities. The Christmas stories are
not even included in the earliest written Gospel of Mark. So why do we have the Christmas Stories and
why do we arrive to encounter the infant Jesus in Bethlehem? If we have the Christmas stories of Jesus,
why not his early childhood and stories of his young adulthood? The success of the Jesus Movement in incorporating
new members meant that something happened which happens to all successful
movements or businesses. They become
institutionalized. Popularity and growth
necessitates institutionalization and incorporation. How does one teach the message that Christ is
born within the human person by the power of the Holy Spirit? How does one encrypt this message and encode
it within a story which is only for the eyes of the ones being initiated into
what was called the "mystery" of the revelation of Christ?
So we have the Christmas Story.
It purports to come first but really it was the spiritual genre to
provide the encrypted reality of "Christ within us" the hope of
glory. Blessed Mary is the paradigm of
every believer. She has the encounter
with the angelic messenger from the parallel heavenly realm with the
annunciation of conception and birth events which would not come by natural inducement. Sure enough, the birth happened and there were
many midwives to that birth event. Did
you know that St. Paul wrote that he "was in travail of birth" while
he waited for Christ to be born within the members of his community. The birth of Christ as a spiritual event
attracted the foreign Gentile community as signified by the magi who came from
afar. The birth of Christ into a
believer was not limited by socio-economic conditions; it could be witnessed
and experienced by peasant shepherds and it could be witnessed and experienced
by those wealthy enough to provide gold, frankincense and myrrh. The birth of Christ within the life of a
believer was not without consequences; one's life might be threatened by those
who were opposed to this life change. The Christmas story includes the temporary
flight to Egypt to escape death. This encodes the flight from Jerusalem for
many during the time of Roman siege. And those who were newly born might die because
of this spiritual birth of Christ within them. Martyrdom was a possibility. This reality is encrypted in the events of the
slaughter of the Holy Innocents. The
Christmas story writers used the genre of story-telling which was known by the
Roman audiences. Roman readers knew the
miraculous stories of the immaculate conceptions of the divine Emperors who had
comets arrive at their births and who had propaganda which proclaimed them as
bringers of peace and saviors of the world.
The Emperors had the Roman senates who voted to make them divine beings
and sons of gods. In contrast, angelic
hosts proclaimed Christ to be the Savior and Son of the Most High. One could understand how such Christian
literature could have been perceived as a threat to the Emperor in its
composition. This is why it was a
literature read within the communities of Christ and it proclaimed this parallel
kingdom of God which silently was happening at the same time as the kingdom of
the Caesars. This was a rich literature
of spiritual transformation as each person came to find this supernatural birth
of Christ within one’s very own being.
And so we seek the reality of the birth of Christ again tonight, not
locked up in the cute little story; rather the Christmas story is evidence of
the reality which we share with all Christians, namely, Christ has been born in
us. The birth of Christ is the mystery of the life
of God and the life of this parallel kingdom becoming a reality within our
lives. It is a true incarnation because
it changes the flesh and blood of our being; it changes our body language to be
and act differently. Do not let anyone
say to you that the spiritual birth of Christ is without material or bodily
effect. The effect is real and certain.
What
about you and I and the birth of Christ and our own layers of experience within
us? Can we with imagination take our
histories apart something like the layers of nesting dolls? How have you and I been constituted to arrive
to be all of the stages and phases of our history which we now contain in
ourselves?
Are we constituted by nagging doubt about the personal relevance of God,
Christ, the church, love and justice?
Are we constituted by uncertainty about grace and blessing because we
have experienced or seen too much harshness and cruelty to be able to believe
in the normalcy of goodness and justice?
Do we bear the wounds and the scars of our own failures and the failure
of other people to be perfect or even adequate to our needs? Are we constituted by our own American
Episcopalian self-reliant success and we have the power and wealth to negotiate
our own independent well-being and the well-being of our family so that we
don't think we "need" others and we often show that we don’t need
that troublesome body, the church, except for a few social functions? It is ironic that the church grew among
people migrating to a new identity in the Roman cities. It is ironic that the church is still
strongest with immigrating people trying to survive in a new country or place
and the church is the place for networking of people who don't have the means
of independent survival.
As you and I assess our currently constituted spiritual existence
tonight, I would ask us to ponder two things?
Have we lost freshness in life because we have limited ourselves to
sheer intellectual and the brute factual methods of science tonight? Have we forgot the aesthetic genres which
enable us to cry, and giggle and play and access the memory of our being born
as smiling, joyful babies who were that way for no reason at all? The Christmas story invites us to access and
recover our native joy tonight.
The second thing that we need to ponder is that because we have the power
and wealth to be self-reliant and independent, can we repent of this self-reliance
and independence which has caused us to forsake our roles within community? Can we repent of our self-reliance and use
power and strength and wealth to become midwives for the birth of the Holy
Child of Jesus into the lives of people in this world who exist in various
states of vulnerability?
The Christ child is found in the conditions of vulnerability; the story
of the Christ child includes a host of midwives, Mary, Joseph, the angels, the
shepherds, the magi, the star of Bethlehem and the sheep and the cows. We are all together in the midwifery of the
birth of Christ into the lives of people in our world. The chief alternative to self-reliance is
ministry which is being present to help others who cannot be so self-reliant.
So my friends, let us find in the Christmas Story, the new experience of
our native joy of birth and let it be for us tonight a renewal. But also my friends, let us forsake our
self-reliant and independent ways which our power and wealth has allowed us to
attain, and let us embrace this ministry of midwifery, of being those who are
present to help others find and discover the birth of Christ in their lives in
this wonderful experience of joy.
Tonight as we live in the latter days, or in our latest days, but let us
return to the impossible, the event of our births. We can do this as we project upon the story
of the birth of Christ and as we behold in the eyes of infants and children
this state of nascent joy.
Merry
Christmas, to all who have had the Christ born within you. And Merry Christmas to all of us who now are
called to be midwives for the birth Christ in others and who are also called to
tend to those who are in the state of vulnerability. Let us become midwives for the birth of
Christ, tonight. Amen.
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