Dylan's lectionary blog

Christmas Day: The Feast of the Nativity

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You can find links to all of the potential readings here. There are three sets, to be used according to the time of the service, but at any service, I don't think I'm presumptuous in thinking that the sermon is going to be about Christmas, the Incarnation, and what it means for us.

Many times in my youth, I heard that Christmas is the time when God bridged the gap between heaven and earth, or between spirit and flesh. But that's not what the Incarnation did for us. Creation did that for us. The Gospel of John makes that very clear: for its author, “the beginning of the Good News” of the Son of God, to borrow Mark's phrase, is in Creation. The Good News begins for John in that moment in the very beginning when “all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:3). The Gospel of John might have more rhetoric of “us vs. them” than any other canonical gospel (it comes of the intensity of persecution the community felt), but it makes very, very clear from its very beginning of its story that the beginning, middle, and end of the story of the world is one of love -- intimate and unwavering love.

[CORRECTION 12-22-05: I removed the paragraph about the word for “love” in John 3:16. It is NOT eros; I was working from memory, and my memory failed me! Many thanks for those who caught the error. But if you look at how the four Greek terms for “love” in Hellenistic literature, I think you'll still find that the terms blur together far more than we often let on. And my main point -- that God has been intimately involved with physical bodies, which he declared to be “very good” in Genesis 1:31, from Creation.]

So let me tell you what Christmas is NOT about: It is not about a God who can barely stand smelly fleshy people until becoming one. It is not about healing a rift between the spiritual and the physical. Here's what it is about, or the start of it: In the very beginning, John tells us -- before there were any people to need redeeming -- God was present with and active in the world, loving every human being intensely, passionately, faithfully.

As you can guess, my top choice of classic Christmas carol lines to rewrite would be, “Lo, he abhors not the virgin's womb,” which seems to me to say more about how many people think that bodies -- and women's bodies in particular -- are icky than it does about solid biblical theology. That story often told about the physical world being hopeless and at least a little disgusting to God until God hold's God's nose and plunges into humanity is NOT the story of Christmas.

If anything, the story of Christmas has the opposite message. If I had to sum up the Incarnation in a nutshell, I'd say that it means that as Christians, we hold the fullest revelation of God's purposes on earth and of God's very character to be in the flesh-and-blood person of Jesus of Nazareth, whose birth we celebrate in the Feast of the Nativity. Among many, many other things, that means that there is NOTHING intrinsic to human life that God shrinks from.

But is that the meaning of Christmas? I'd say it isn't. It's part of it, but Christmas is much richer than “God loves you, and doesn't think you or your body is icky.” Christmas isn't about bridging the gap between God and humanity, because God has never left us, even when we've naively tried to leave God, and even when our behavior is far from what God is doing on earth. But it is about closing another gap, another kind of transcendence.

I hesitate to use the word “transcendence,” as it's awfully abstract, but I can't think of a better one. It's an awkward use not least because it's often used so crudely, as if God “transcending,” being beyond what's right here, meant that God is hanging out on some distant moon. Some biblical writers use imagery that sounded a little like that, imagery of God sitting on a throne in the heavens and using the earth as a footstool and so on, but it's a poet's image. The prophets in particular (and props to Scott Bartchy, my Ph.D. supervisor, for turning me on to this) also talked in a way that suggests God's transcendence, God's going beyond as well as being in the world we experience, is about time. God is with us right here and right now, but God is also ahead of us, beckoning us toward a future in which the world is all about love -- as obviously as it is truly.

That probably still sounds a little abstract. Let me put it this way: the Gospel According to Luke, the source of our gospel reading in two of our three sets of readings for Christmas, tells us how Jesus taught his followers to pray: that God's kingdom would come and God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven. That was no dry recitation, and it was no wild, speculative hope of someone in darkness saying, “I hope someone out there has a match.” It was the passionate declaration of someone who SAW it, who KNEW it, whose very life penetrated the barrier between the now that we live in and the future we and our world were made for: God's kingdom come, God's will done in every way on earth. The life we celebrate at Christmas is God's future breaking into the present, and it's like a circuit made complete; God's justice, God's powerful love, courses through.

Advent, when we fully enter into it, is a season in which we reflect on God's dream for the world and for us. We study it, we long for it, we sing about it prayerfully, wholeheartedly. And when we can make the time and the space in our busy lives to have these experiences -- and sometimes when we can't or don't, because God is, after all and always, gracious -- we can almost see it and smell it and taste it. And the dream is that vivid, we have a sense of just how close we are to being THERE. If you haven't had that experience, or even if you have, it's worth taking a moment on Christmas Day to close your eyes or open them -- whatever is most conducive to this kind of dreaming for you -- and pause to imagine what the world would look like with every longing of the prophets fulfilled: People living in harmony with one another, with God, and with the world we live in -- no enmity or envy or greed or hunger. You have what you need, and are made content by others having what they need. Dream the prophets' dream, and take a look around at a world in which nothing separates us from one another or from God. Smell it and taste it; drink it in.

That getting in touch with the prophets' vision, with the future God intends for us and for the whole Creation God loves passionately, is Advent.

And now comes Christmas.

The hope of the prophets, that longed-for “someday,” is born in flesh among us NOW. The Word of God whose love gave birth to the world is here among us! It's no pie in the sky; it's a child, revealed to the hosts of heaven and the shepherds shivering in the cold outside the village. The life that has come among us is none other than the light of the world. No darkness can overcome it; all the ends of the earth will see God's salvation, deliverance from everything that separates us from one another and from God.

That's why they say this is Good News. And here's something that just might be the best part of it: when we proclaim that God's Word was made flesh to live among us, we're not just talking about an event in the first-century Roman province of Palestine. Every time we gather together to live into the way of Jesus, we are the Body of Christ, and the life-giving Word that powers the universe finds flesh among us. If it's hard for you to drink in the hope of the prophets by imagining -- if there what comes to mind for you is broken relationships, worries, or fears, and if you can't imagine a light that could reach the whole world -- then the invitation that comes to us this Christmas season is as much or more for you. Stay with us, with these little candle-lit groups clustered around the world. For all our flaws and foibles, God's grace breaks through among us, and the angels' song echoes as our learning to forgive and bless one another points to the full realization of the love for which and in which the world was born.

Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace for the world God loves!

Thanks be to God!

Christmas Day: The Feast of the Nativity

Printer-friendly version

You can find links to all of the potential readings here. There are three sets, to be used according to the time of the service, but at any service, I don't think I'm presumptuous in thinking that the sermon is going to be about Christmas, the Incarnation, and what it means for us.

Many times in my youth, I heard that Christmas is the time when God bridged the gap between heaven and earth, or between spirit and flesh. But that's not what the Incarnation did for us. Creation did that for us. The Gospel of John makes that very clear: for its author, “the beginning of the Good News” of the Son of God, to borrow Mark's phrase, is in Creation. The Good News begins for John in that moment in the very beginning when “all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:3). The Gospel of John might have more rhetoric of “us vs. them” than any other canonical gospel (it comes of the intensity of persecution the community felt), but it makes very, very clear from its very beginning of its story that the beginning, middle, and end of the story of the world is one of love -- intimate and unwavering love.

[CORRECTION 12-22-05: I removed the paragraph about the word for “love” in John 3:16. It is NOT eros; I was working from memory, and my memory failed me! Many thanks for those who caught the error. But if you look at how the four Greek terms for “love” in Hellenistic literature, I think you'll still find that the terms blur together far more than we often let on. And my main point -- that God has been intimately involved with physical bodies, which he declared to be “very good” in Genesis 1:31, from Creation.]

So let me tell you what Christmas is NOT about: It is not about a God who can barely stand smelly fleshy people until becoming one. It is not about healing a rift between the spiritual and the physical. Here's what it is about, or the start of it: In the very beginning, John tells us -- before there were any people to need redeeming -- God was present with and active in the world, loving every human being intensely, passionately, faithfully.

As you can guess, my top choice of classic Christmas carol lines to rewrite would be, “Lo, he abhors not the virgin's womb,” which seems to me to say more about how many people think that bodies -- and women's bodies in particular -- are icky than it does about solid biblical theology. That story often told about the physical world being hopeless and at least a little disgusting to God until God hold's God's nose and plunges into humanity is NOT the story of Christmas.

If anything, the story of Christmas has the opposite message. If I had to sum up the Incarnation in a nutshell, I'd say that it means that as Christians, we hold the fullest revelation of God's purposes on earth and of God's very character to be in the flesh-and-blood person of Jesus of Nazareth, whose birth we celebrate in the Feast of the Nativity. Among many, many other things, that means that there is NOTHING intrinsic to human life that God shrinks from.

But is that the meaning of Christmas? I'd say it isn't. It's part of it, but Christmas is much richer than “God loves you, and doesn't think you or your body is icky.” Christmas isn't about bridging the gap between God and humanity, because God has never left us, even when we've naively tried to leave God, and even when our behavior is far from what God is doing on earth. But it is about closing another gap, another kind of transcendence.

I hesitate to use the word “transcendence,” as it's awfully abstract, but I can't think of a better one. It's an awkward use not least because it's often used so crudely, as if God “transcending,” being beyond what's right here, meant that God is hanging out on some distant moon. Some biblical writers use imagery that sounded a little like that, imagery of God sitting on a throne in the heavens and using the earth as a footstool and so on, but it's a poet's image. The prophets in particular (and props to Scott Bartchy, my Ph.D. supervisor, for turning me on to this) also talked in a way that suggests God's transcendence, God's going beyond as well as being in the world we experience, is about time. God is with us right here and right now, but God is also ahead of us, beckoning us toward a future in which the world is all about love -- as obviously as it is truly.

That probably still sounds a little abstract. Let me put it this way: the Gospel According to Luke, the source of our gospel reading in two of our three sets of readings for Christmas, tells us how Jesus taught his followers to pray: that God's kingdom would come and God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven. That was no dry recitation, and it was no wild, speculative hope of someone in darkness saying, “I hope someone out there has a match.” It was the passionate declaration of someone who SAW it, who KNEW it, whose very life penetrated the barrier between the now that we live in and the future we and our world were made for: God's kingdom come, God's will done in every way on earth. The life we celebrate at Christmas is God's future breaking into the present, and it's like a circuit made complete; God's justice, God's powerful love, courses through.

Advent, when we fully enter into it, is a season in which we reflect on God's dream for the world and for us. We study it, we long for it, we sing about it prayerfully, wholeheartedly. And when we can make the time and the space in our busy lives to have these experiences -- and sometimes when we can't or don't, because God is, after all and always, gracious -- we can almost see it and smell it and taste it. And the dream is that vivid, we have a sense of just how close we are to being THERE. If you haven't had that experience, or even if you have, it's worth taking a moment on Christmas Day to close your eyes or open them -- whatever is most conducive to this kind of dreaming for you -- and pause to imagine what the world would look like with every longing of the prophets fulfilled: People living in harmony with one another, with God, and with the world we live in -- no enmity or envy or greed or hunger. You have what you need, and are made content by others having what they need. Dream the prophets' dream, and take a look around at a world in which nothing separates us from one another or from God. Smell it and taste it; drink it in.

That getting in touch with the prophets' vision, with the future God intends for us and for the whole Creation God loves passionately, is Advent.

And now comes Christmas.

The hope of the prophets, that longed-for “someday,” is born in flesh among us NOW. The Word of God whose love gave birth to the world is here among us! It's no pie in the sky; it's a child, revealed to the hosts of heaven and the shepherds shivering in the cold outside the village. The life that has come among us is none other than the light of the world. No darkness can overcome it; all the ends of the earth will see God's salvation, deliverance from everything that separates us from one another and from God.

That's why they say this is Good News. And here's something that just might be the best part of it: when we proclaim that God's Word was made flesh to live among us, we're not just talking about an event in the first-century Roman province of Palestine. Every time we gather together to live into the way of Jesus, we are the Body of Christ, and the life-giving Word that powers the universe finds flesh among us. If it's hard for you to drink in the hope of the prophets by imagining -- if there what comes to mind for you is broken relationships, worries, or fears, and if you can't imagine a light that could reach the whole world -- then the invitation that comes to us this Christmas season is as much or more for you. Stay with us, with these little candle-lit groups clustered around the world. For all our flaws and foibles, God's grace breaks through among us, and the angels' song echoes as our learning to forgive and bless one another points to the full realization of the love for which and in which the world was born.

Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace for the world God loves!

Thanks be to God!

Comments

Christmas Day: The Feast of the Nativity

Printer-friendly version

You can find links to all of the potential readings here. There are three sets, to be used according to the time of the service, but at any service, I don't think I'm presumptuous in thinking that the sermon is going to be about Christmas, the Incarnation, and what it means for us.

Many times in my youth, I heard that Christmas is the time when God bridged the gap between heaven and earth, or between spirit and flesh. But that's not what the Incarnation did for us. Creation did that for us. The Gospel of John makes that very clear: for its author, “the beginning of the Good News” of the Son of God, to borrow Mark's phrase, is in Creation. The Good News begins for John in that moment in the very beginning when “all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:3). The Gospel of John might have more rhetoric of “us vs. them” than any other canonical gospel (it comes of the intensity of persecution the community felt), but it makes very, very clear from its very beginning of its story that the beginning, middle, and end of the story of the world is one of love -- intimate and unwavering love.

[CORRECTION 12-22-05: I removed the paragraph about the word for “love” in John 3:16. It is NOT eros; I was working from memory, and my memory failed me! Many thanks for those who caught the error. But if you look at how the four Greek terms for “love” in Hellenistic literature, I think you'll still find that the terms blur together far more than we often let on. And my main point -- that God has been intimately involved with physical bodies, which he declared to be “very good” in Genesis 1:31, from Creation.]

So let me tell you what Christmas is NOT about: It is not about a God who can barely stand smelly fleshy people until becoming one. It is not about healing a rift between the spiritual and the physical. Here's what it is about, or the start of it: In the very beginning, John tells us -- before there were any people to need redeeming -- God was present with and active in the world, loving every human being intensely, passionately, faithfully.

As you can guess, my top choice of classic Christmas carol lines to rewrite would be, “Lo, he abhors not the virgin's womb,” which seems to me to say more about how many people think that bodies -- and women's bodies in particular -- are icky than it does about solid biblical theology. That story often told about the physical world being hopeless and at least a little disgusting to God until God hold's God's nose and plunges into humanity is NOT the story of Christmas.

If anything, the story of Christmas has the opposite message. If I had to sum up the Incarnation in a nutshell, I'd say that it means that as Christians, we hold the fullest revelation of God's purposes on earth and of God's very character to be in the flesh-and-blood person of Jesus of Nazareth, whose birth we celebrate in the Feast of the Nativity. Among many, many other things, that means that there is NOTHING intrinsic to human life that God shrinks from.

But is that the meaning of Christmas? I'd say it isn't. It's part of it, but Christmas is much richer than “God loves you, and doesn't think you or your body is icky.” Christmas isn't about bridging the gap between God and humanity, because God has never left us, even when we've naively tried to leave God, and even when our behavior is far from what God is doing on earth. But it is about closing another gap, another kind of transcendence.

I hesitate to use the word “transcendence,” as it's awfully abstract, but I can't think of a better one. It's an awkward use not least because it's often used so crudely, as if God “transcending,” being beyond what's right here, meant that God is hanging out on some distant moon. Some biblical writers use imagery that sounded a little like that, imagery of God sitting on a throne in the heavens and using the earth as a footstool and so on, but it's a poet's image. The prophets in particular (and props to Scott Bartchy, my Ph.D. supervisor, for turning me on to this) also talked in a way that suggests God's transcendence, God's going beyond as well as being in the world we experience, is about time. God is with us right here and right now, but God is also ahead of us, beckoning us toward a future in which the world is all about love -- as obviously as it is truly.

That probably still sounds a little abstract. Let me put it this way: the Gospel According to Luke, the source of our gospel reading in two of our three sets of readings for Christmas, tells us how Jesus taught his followers to pray: that God's kingdom would come and God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven. That was no dry recitation, and it was no wild, speculative hope of someone in darkness saying, “I hope someone out there has a match.” It was the passionate declaration of someone who SAW it, who KNEW it, whose very life penetrated the barrier between the now that we live in and the future we and our world were made for: God's kingdom come, God's will done in every way on earth. The life we celebrate at Christmas is God's future breaking into the present, and it's like a circuit made complete; God's justice, God's powerful love, courses through.

Advent, when we fully enter into it, is a season in which we reflect on God's dream for the world and for us. We study it, we long for it, we sing about it prayerfully, wholeheartedly. And when we can make the time and the space in our busy lives to have these experiences -- and sometimes when we can't or don't, because God is, after all and always, gracious -- we can almost see it and smell it and taste it. And the dream is that vivid, we have a sense of just how close we are to being THERE. If you haven't had that experience, or even if you have, it's worth taking a moment on Christmas Day to close your eyes or open them -- whatever is most conducive to this kind of dreaming for you -- and pause to imagine what the world would look like with every longing of the prophets fulfilled: People living in harmony with one another, with God, and with the world we live in -- no enmity or envy or greed or hunger. You have what you need, and are made content by others having what they need. Dream the prophets' dream, and take a look around at a world in which nothing separates us from one another or from God. Smell it and taste it; drink it in.

That getting in touch with the prophets' vision, with the future God intends for us and for the whole Creation God loves passionately, is Advent.

And now comes Christmas.

The hope of the prophets, that longed-for “someday,” is born in flesh among us NOW. The Word of God whose love gave birth to the world is here among us! It's no pie in the sky; it's a child, revealed to the hosts of heaven and the shepherds shivering in the cold outside the village. The life that has come among us is none other than the light of the world. No darkness can overcome it; all the ends of the earth will see God's salvation, deliverance from everything that separates us from one another and from God.

That's why they say this is Good News. And here's something that just might be the best part of it: when we proclaim that God's Word was made flesh to live among us, we're not just talking about an event in the first-century Roman province of Palestine. Every time we gather together to live into the way of Jesus, we are the Body of Christ, and the life-giving Word that powers the universe finds flesh among us. If it's hard for you to drink in the hope of the prophets by imagining -- if there what comes to mind for you is broken relationships, worries, or fears, and if you can't imagine a light that could reach the whole world -- then the invitation that comes to us this Christmas season is as much or more for you. Stay with us, with these little candle-lit groups clustered around the world. For all our flaws and foibles, God's grace breaks through among us, and the angels' song echoes as our learning to forgive and bless one another points to the full realization of the love for which and in which the world was born.

Glory to God in the highest heaven, and peace for the world God loves!

Thanks be to God!

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