Radiant Leaven in the Dough

On this, the twelfth and last day of Christmas, I offer a couple of poems by Br. Roger of Taize. They remind us, as the carol has it, "No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin, where meek souls will receive him still, the dear Christ enters in." And that we who rejoice to sing of the hope and peace and joy wrought by the birth of the Baby Jesus are called to embody that hope and peace and joy by the power of his Spirit to those around us.

O Christ,
you offer us a Gospel treasure;
you place in us a unique gift –
the gift of bearing your life.
But, to make it clear
that the radiance comes from you
and not from us,
you have placed this incomparable gift
in vessels of clay,
in hearts which are poor.
You come to make your home
in the frailty of our beings,
there and nowhere else.
In this way, we know not how,
you make us, poor and vulnerable as we are,
the radiance of your presence
for those around us.


Lord Christ
the mystery of your presence is beyond price,
and mysterious the road on which you wait
to lead us to the Father.
Even when we understand
so little of your life,
your Spirit who dwells in our hearts
makes God
comprehensible to us.
And you work a miracle:
you make us into living stones
in your body, your church.
O Christ, you are Love,
and you do not want us to be judges
who stand on the outside and condemn,
but rather leaven in the dough
of every community,
and of the human family –
a ferment able to raise the enormous weight
of all that has become stiff and hardened.

The First Day of Christmas: How God Brings His Love to Bear
 

Like Fire in Iron

How can the Godhead be in the flesh? And why? For the eleventh day of Christmas, here is Basil of Caesarea’s (330-379) answer:

God is on earth, God is among us, not now as lawgiver–there is no fire, no trumpet blast, no smoke-wreathed mountain, dense cloud, or storm to terrify, whoever hears him–but as one gently and kindly conversing in a human body with his fellow men and women. God is in the flesh. Now he is not acting intermittently as he did through the prophets. He is bringing back to himself the whole human race, which he has taken possession of and united to himself. By his flesh he has made the human race his own kin.

But how can glory come to all through only one? How can the Godhead be in the flesh? In the same way as fire can be in iron: not by moving from place to place but by the one imparting to the other its own properties. Fire does not speed toward iron, but without itself undergoing any change it causes the iron to share in its own natural attributes. The fire is not diminished and yet it completely fills whatever shares in its nature. So it is also with God the Word. He did not relinquish his own nature and yet he dwelt among us. He did not undergo any change and yet the Word became flesh. Earth received him from heaven, yet heaven as not deserted by him who holds the universe in being.

Let us strive to comprehend the mystery. The reason God is in the flesh is to kill the death that lurks there. As diseases are cured by medicines assimilated by the body, and as darkness in a house is dispelled by the coming of light, so death, which held sway over human nature, is done away with the coming of God. And as ice formed on water covers its surface as long as night and darkness last but melts under the warmth of the sun, so death reigned until the coming of Christ; but when the grace of God our savior appeared and the Sun of Justice rose, death was swallowed up in victory, unable to bear the presence of true life. How great is God’s goodness, how deep his love for us.

(Homily on Christ’s Ancestry)

The Twelfth Day of Christmas: Radiant Leaven in the Dough

The First Day of Christmas: How God Brings His Love to Bear

Mercy Incarnate and Personified

For the tenth day of Christmas, something from John Paul II's wonderful Encyclical on the Mercy of God:

Although God “dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Timothy 6:16), he speaks to man by means of the whole universe: “ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Romans 1:20). This indirect and imperfect knowledge, achieved by the intellect seeking God by means of creatures through visible world, falls short of “vision of the Father”” “no one has ever seen God,” writes Saint John, in order to stress the truth that “the only Son , who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (John 1:18). This “making known” reveals god in the most profound mystery of his being, one and three, surrounded by “unapproachable light.” Nevertheless, through this “making known”  by Christ we know God above all in his relationship of love for man: “philanthropy” (Titus 3:4). It is precisely here that “his invisible nature”: becomes in a special way “visible,” incomparably more visible than through all the other “things that have been made”: it becomes visible in Christ and through Christ, through his actions and words, and finally through his death on the cross and his resurrection.

In this way, in Christ and through Christ, God also becomes visible in his mercy; that is to say, there is emphasized that attribute of the divinity which the Old Testament, using various concepts and terms, already defined as “mercy.” Christ confers on the whole Old Testament tradition about God’s mercy a definitive meaning. Not only does he speak of it, and explain it by the use of comparisons and parables, but above all he himself makes it incarnate and personifies it. He himself, in a certain sense, is mercy. To the person who sees it in him–and finds it in him–God becomes “visible” in a particular way as the Father “who is rich in mercy” (Ephesians 2:4).

. . . .

The truth revealed in Christ, about God the “Father of mercies” (2 Corinthians  1:3) enables us to “see” him as particularly close to man especially when man is suffering, when he is under threat at the very heart of his existence and dignity.

The Eleventh Day of Christmas: Like Fire in Iron

First Day of Christmas: How God Brings HisLove to Bear

The Double-Movement of the Incarnation

For your edification the ninth Day of Christmas, something from French theologian, Jean Daniélou (1905-1974):

Jesus is the action of God coming towards man to save him and lead him to the Father. In Him, therefore, is revealed the fullness of the mystery of God’s love. But He is also the Man who, raised up by God, mounts towards the Father and thus fulfills the vocation of man. He is at once – let us repeat – the movement of God towards man and the movement of man towards God.

The Tenth Day of Christmas: Mercy Incarnate and Personified

First Day of Christmas: How God Brings His Love to Bear

Hope, Joy, & Dignity Rooted in Christmas

On the seventh day of Christmas, something from another great theologian/Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey (1904-1988):

It is because we believe God has an answer to man’s predicament, the answer of the Word-Made-Flesh at Bethlehem, that we have hope, and, having hope, are rejoicing once again at Christmas.

Christians for whom this hope is a reality have been able to rejoice even when they have been in the word’s darkest places. It is It was in prison in Rome with the prospect of death awaiting him that St. Paul wrote, “Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say, rejoice . . . In nothing be anxious, the Lord is at hand.”

The proof of our Christian hope is the existence of men and women who have lived by it, and have radiated its joy even in dark and heartbreaking circumstances.

Our rejoicing at Christmas is not an escape from life’s grim realities into a fancy realm of religion and festivity. Rather it is a joy that, as we face and feel the world’s tragedy, we know that God has an answer, an answer for mankind to receive. In a word, this is a time of hope. 

Christmas says: Christ has taken humanity to himself, and so every man and woman and child in the world is loveable and infinitely precious. And, in response, men and women can treat each other–whatever their race or color–in the light of Bethlehem; or they can, in rejecting the human dignity of their fellows, reject their own dignity too.

(from Through the Year with Michael Ramsey, Margaret Duggan, ed.)

Eighth Day of Christmas: As Rain Falls on the Earth

First Day of Christmas: How God Brings His Love to Bear

Jesus = Something that's Going on Eternally

This year, the sixth day of Christmas falls on the first Sunday of Christmas. The lessons of the lectionary appointed for Episcopalian churches this Sunday include John1:1-18. Here is a video reflection on that pasage by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury (the text is below as well):

It's a slightly strange way to start a Gospel you might think. We expect something a bit more like the beginning of the other Gospels: the story of Jesus's birth perhaps or his ancestry, or the story of Jesus's arrival on the public scene.
 
But at the beginning of St John's Gospel what St John does is to frame his whole story against an eternal background. And what he's saying there is this: as you read this Gospel, as you read the stories about what Jesus does, be aware that whatever he does in the stories you're about to read is something that's going on eternally, not just something that happens to be going on in Palestine at a particular date.
 
So when Jesus brings an overflow of joy at a wedding, when Jesus reaches out to a foreign woman to speak words of forgiveness and reconciliation to her, when Jesus opens the eyes of a blind man or raises the dead, all of this is part of something that is going on forever. The welcome of God, the joy of God, the light of God, the life of God - all of this is eternal. What Jesus is showing on Earth is somehow mysteriously part of what is always true about God. 

And that's why it's central to this beginning of John's Gospel - that he says the light shines in the darkness and the darkness doesn't swallow it up. How could the darkness swallow it up? If these works of welcome and forgiveness, of light and life and joy, are always going on, then actually nothing can ever make a difference to them.
 
And that's why at the climax of this wonderful passage, St John says, the Word of God, the outpouring of God's life, actually became flesh and blood. And we saw it - we saw in this human life the eternal truth about God. We saw an eternal love, an eternal relationship; we saw an eternal joy and a light and a life.

So as we read these stories we know that nothing at all can make a difference to the truth, the reality, they bring into the world. This is indeed the truth; this is where life is to be found. And this explains why at the end of St John's Gospel, he famously says that if we tried to spell out all that this means, there would be no end of the books that could be written.

So in the light of that overflowing joy and everlasting truth, I wish you every blessing and happiness for this Christmas and the year ahead.

Seventh Day of Christmas: Hope, Joy, and Dignity Rooted in Christmas

First Day of Christmas: How God Brings His Love to Bear

The Ultimate Truth About God

For the fifth day of Christmas, I have another quote from William Temple who I quoted on the third day of Christmas. There he said that Jesus, as the incarnation of the eternal Word, is the self-utterance of God. Here he offers more of what that means:

The life of Christ is a momentary manifestation of eternal truth; and it is God for us as a devotional exercise to sometimes to read the Gospels, turning all the past tenses into the present, and to remember that what we read there is an expression, quite strictly, under all conditions of the time and place in which the expression took place, of what is always true. And the culmination of this utterance is the Passion. The ultimate truth about God and His relation to the finite spirits is this, that ‘when He is reviled He reviles not again, and when He suffers, He threatens not’.

(About Christ, SCM Press LTD, London, 1962, p. 63)

Sixth Day of Christmas: Jesus = Something that's Going on Eternally

First Day of Christmas: How God Brings His Love to Bear

Jesus = the Self-utterance of God

The third day of Christmas is the Feast of Saint John the Evangelist. In the magisterial prologue to the Gospel of John, we are given a cosmic background to the Christmas story:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light. The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. 1He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not. 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 nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. John bore witness to him, and cried, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me ranks before me, for he was before me.'") And from his fulness have we all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.

Here is a brief reflection from Archbishop William Temple (1881-1944):

The Word became flesh. The Word did not merely indwell a human being. Absolute identity is asserted. The Word is Jesus; Jesus is the Word. And it is said that the Word became flesh because “flesh is that part of human nature commonly associated with frailty and evil; commonly, but not necessarily. In Jesus the flesh is the completely responsive vehicle of the spirit. The whole of Him, flesh included, is the Word, the self-utterance of God.

(From Readings in St. John’s Gospel) 

Fourth Day of Christmas: On Rachel's Lament and Not Looking Away

First Day of Christmas: How God Brings His Love to Bear

Jesus = Peace

The second day of Christmas is the Feast of Saint Stephen, deacon and first martyr of the Church. Stephen's last words before he died were a prayer for those who were stoning him, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” Thus, he proved himself worthy to bear the name of Christ who commanded, "But I say to you that hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you" (Luke 6:27-28) and who himself prayed from the cross,  "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34).

As we celebrate the coming of the Prince of Peace and sing of peace on earth, good will to all, we would do well to embrace the daily witness/martyrdom of peaceableness. Here is something along those lines from Gregory of Nyssa ( c.335-386):

He is our peace, who has made both one. Since Christ is our peace, we shall be living up to the name of Christian if we let Christ be seen in our lives by letting peace reign in our hearts. He has brought hostility to an end, as the apostle said. Therefore, we must not allow it to come back to life in us in any way at all but must proclaim clearly that it is dead indeed. God has destroyed it in a wonderful way for our salvation. We must not, then, allow ourselves to give way to anger or bear grudges, for this would endanger our souls. We must not stir up the very thing that is well and truly dead, calling it back to life by our wickedness.

But as we bear the name of Christ, who is peace, we too must put an end to all hostility, so that we may profess in our lives what we believe to be true of him. He broke down the dividing wall and brought the two sides together in himself, thus making peace. We too, then, should not only be reconciled with those who attack us from without, we should also bring together the warring factions within us, so that the flesh may no longer be opposed to the spirit and the spirit to the flesh. Then when the mind that is set on the flesh is subject to the divine law, we may be refashioned into one new creature, into a man of peace. When the two have been made one we shall then have peace within ourselves.
 

The definition of peace is that there should be harmony between two opposed factions. And so, when the civil war in our nature has been brought to an end and we are at peace within ourselves, we may become peace. Then we shall really be true to the name of Christ that we bear.

When we consider that Christ is the true light far removed from all falsehood, we realize that our lives too should be lit by the rays of the sun of justice, which shine for our enlightenment. These rays are the virtues by which we cast off the works of darkness and conduct ourselves becomingly as in the light of day. Then, when we refuse to have anything to do with the darkness of wickedness and do everything in the light, we ourselves shall also become light and our works will give light to others, for it is in the nature of light to shine out.

But if we look upon Christ as our sanctification, then we should keep ourselves free from all that is wicked and impure both in thought and in deed and so prove ourselves worthy to bear his name, for we shall be demonstrating the effect of sanctification not in words but in our actions and in our lives. 

As  a bonus for thr Feast of Saint Stephen, here is one of my favorite songs of the season:

Third Day of Christmas: Jesus = the Self-utterance of God

First Day of Christmas: How God Brings His Love to Bear

How God Brings His Love to Bear

To kick of the twelve days of Christmas, here is something from Austin Farrer (1904-1968), one of the great Anglican theologians of the 20th century and a friend of C. S. Lewis who preached at Lewis' funeral:

How can I matter to him? we say. It makes no sense; he has the world, and even that he does not need. It is folly even to imagine him like myself, to credit him with eyes into which I could ever look, a heart that could ever beat for my sorrows or joys, and a hand he could hold out to me. For even if the childish picture be allowed, that hand must be cupped to hold the universe, and I am a speck of dust on the star-dust of the world.

Yet Mary holds her finger out, and a divine hand closes on it. The maker of the world is born a begging child; he begs for milk, and does not know that it is milk for which he begs. We will not lift our hands to pull the love of God down to us, but he lifts his hands to pull human compassion down upon his cradle. So the weakness of God proves stronger than men, and the folly of God proves wiser than men. Love is the strongest instrument of omnipotence, for accomplishing those tasks he cares most dearly to perform; and this is how he brings his love to bear on human pride; by weakness not by strength, by need and not by bounty.

The Second Day of Christmas: Jesus = Peace

The whole life of Christ was a continual Passion

On this 12th and last day of Christmas our attention begins to turn toward the life lived by the one whose coming we have been celebrating. Here is something from the great Anglican preacher and poet, John Donne (1572-1631):

The whole life of Christ was a continual Passion; others die martyrs but Christ was born a martyr. He found a Golgotha (where he was crucified) even in Bethlehem. Where he was born; for to his tenderness then the straws were almost as sharp as the thorns after, and the manger as uneasy at first as the cross at last. His birth and his death were but one continual act, and his Christmas day and his Good Friday are but evening and morning of one and the same day.

- The Showing Forth of Christ, a Christmas Sermon (The Showing Forth of Christ, Sermons of John Donne, selected and edited by Edmund Fuller)

And here is one of Donne's poems exploring a similar theme:

Upon The Annunciation and Passion Falling Upon One Day.
(March 25th, 1608)

Tamely, frail body, abstain to-day; to-day
My soul eats twice, Christ hither and away.

She sees Him man, so like God made in this,
That of them both a circle emblem is,
Whose first and last concur; this doubtful day
Of feast or fast, Christ came, and went away.

She sees Him nothing, twice at once, who’s all;
She sees a Cedar plant itself, and fall;
Her Maker put to making, and the Head
Of life, at once, not yet alive, yet dead.

She sees at once the Virgin Mother stay
Reclused at home, public at Golgotha;
Sad and rejoiced she’s seen at once, and seen
At almost fifty, and at scarce fifteen.

At once a Son is promised her, and gone;
Gabriell gives Christ to her, He her to John;
Not fully a mother, She’s in orbity [bereavement];
At once receiver and the legacy.

All this, and all between, this day hath shown,
Th’ abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one–
As in plain maps, the furthest west is east–
Of th’ angels Ave, and Consummatum est.

How well the Church, God’s Court of Faculties
Deals, in sometimes, and seldom joining these!

As by the self-fix’d Pole we never do
Direct our course, but the next star thereto,
Which shows where th’other is, and which we say
–Because it strays not far–doth never stray;
So God by His Church, nearest to Him, we know
And stand firm, if we by her motion go;
His Spirit, as His fiery pillar, doth
Leade, and His Church, as cloud; to one end both.

This Church, by letting those days join, hath shown
Death and conception in mankind is one;
Or ’twas in Him the same humility,
That He would be a man, and leave to be;
Or as creation He hath made, as God,
With the last judgement, but one period,
His imitating Spouse would join in one
Manhood’s extremes: He shall come, He is gone;
Or as though one blood drop, which thence did fall,
Accepted, would have served, He yet shed all,
So though the least of His pains, deeds, or words,
Would busy a life, she all this day affords;
This treasure then, in gross, my soul, uplay,
And in my life retail it every day.

Tortured Wonders Restored

On the 11th day of Christmas, here is something from Tortured Wonders: Christian Spirituality for People, Not Angels by Rodney Clapp:

The Anglican poet George Herbert, in his eloquent way, got it just right. We are together and each of us “once a poor creature” simply lost and self-destructing, yet also “now a wonder” remembered and revisited by the Spirit. We are a wonder tortur’d in space/Betwixt this world and that of grace,” the grace of a new heaven and a new earth, of creation whole in all its parts. Christian spirituality, then, is spirituality for tortured wonders. (p. 23)

. . .

The incarnation acknowledges that the human being is a creature of great value that has been seriously wrecked–but insists that (unlike a wrecked automobile) neither the whole nor any part of it can be rejected or forgotten. Even damaged, bent, and distorted, the human being retains inestimable worth: as a whole and in its parts. (p. 38)

. . .

In Christ God assumes or takes humanity into God’s self. Orthodox Christian spirituality denies that humanity, whatever its powers and aspirations, can save itself from its own wreckage, its own self-destruction. Yet it is true humanity, or humanness, that will be saved. The original creation, though marred in and by sin, will not be tossed away and forgotten, as a potter might trash inferior clay and move onto a new and different clay pit. Nor will God forget about the human project altogether. . . . Humanity will be assumed and resumed, restored to its pristine wholeness and reset on the path to the maturation and fullness of that wholeness. (p. 40)

Tortured Wonders is a fine book on spirituality in light of the Incarnation. That means, among other things, that it takes seriously the essential fact that we are bodies.

Here is the whole poem by George Herbert (1593-1633) from which the title of Clapp's book is taken:

AFFLICTION. (IV)

BROKEN in pieces all asunder,
Lord, hunt me not,
A thing forgot,
Once a poor creature, now a wonder,
A wonder tortured in the space
Betwixt this world and that of grace.

My thoughts are all a case of knives,
Wounding my heart
With scattered smart ;
As wat'ring-pots give flowers their lives.
Nothing their fury can control,
While they do wound and prick my soul.

All my attendants are at strife
Quitting their place
Unto my face :
Nothing performs the task of life :
The elements are let loose to fight,
And while I live, try out their right.

Oh help, my God ! let not their plot
Kill them and me,
And also Thee,
Who art my life : dissolve the knot,
As the sun scatters by his light
All the rebellions of the night.

Then shall those powers which work for grief,
Enter Thy pay,
And day by day
Labour Thy praise and my relief :
With care and courage building me,
Till I reach heav'n, and much more, Thee.

God’s Favor, Joy, and Peace Born in Our Midst

Today is the 10th day of Christmas. Here is the sermon on
Luke 2:1-20 I preached on Christmas eve:

Imagine someone who knew little or nothing about Christmas trying to make sense of it given the mixed messages in American pop culture. Imagine for example, a Chinese exchange student who has just returned home after one semester here. He has been here for a little over half of December. He has seen lawn decorations. He has heard Christmas music at the mall. Maybe he’s seen a Christmas special or two on television. Let’s imagine his name is “Hu Zher”. How might Hu Zher try to describe the Christmas story to his friends back home who similarly know next to nothing about it? Given the competing stories and images floating around, maybe something like this:

A celestial being appeared on top of a tree to some shepherds announcing the auspicious birth of a boy-child of great destiny. The celestial being was so bright and colorful as to make a deep impression on the shepherds. They immediately cut down a tree and decorated it with lights. Ever since, Christians put trees in their homes as a memorial of this event and the birth of the boy-child, Jesus.

Jesus was born in a stable with a cow, some sheep, a donkey, and a deer with a bright red nose.

The baby Jesus is full of magic and glows. In his presence the animals talk, the deer flies, and piles of snow come to life and dance and sing and play.
Sages from far away came to honor the destiny child. They knelt before him and offered him gifts. The most famous sage who came to kneel before him was from the far north. He wore a fur-lined red suit. He brought a large bag of gifts for the baby Jesus. In return, the baby gives him the red-nosed deer. And ever since, in honor of this event, that sage, Santa Claus, who appears to be something like one of the immortals, roams the earth in December to give gifts to good children.

The baby was born to deliver people from a mean green monster called a Grinch who wanted to steal people’s joy.

Unlike Hu Zher, most of us are able to keep the several competing stories associated with Christmas a little less garbled and confused. But there are other stories that compete for our attention as well at this time of year. The pervasive story of consumption insists that our happiness – and the happiness of those we love – depends on buying and having the right things. More personally, many of us have been given stories about ourselves that might play more loudly this time of year – stories about our own inadequacy, our being unlovable, or our never quite measuring up. These stories can also confound our ability to hear clearly the Christmas story and leave us feeling garbled and confused.

Other things make this season feel garbled and confused. We hear about peace, and love, and the hopes and fears of all the years. But, the frenetic pace of the Christmas rush makes for little peace. We hope things will turn out wonderfully at our Christmas gatherings, but fear they won’t. And often enough, our gatherings remind us of the fragility or brokenness of our relationships, of our love.

I wonder if December isn’t just an intensification or a condensation of the condition of our lives more generally. The story of our lives is full of hopes and fears, of deep yearning for love and peace and joy. But often our lives and the world around us seem as garbled and confused as Hu Zher’s version of the Christmas story.

If we look at the ungarbled version of Jesus’ birth as recorded in the first two chapters of Luke, we have a sort of condensation of the whole gospel. They are a sort of overture of the essential themes that will be played out in the rest of the story of Jesus. This is particularly true of the angelic appearance to the shepherds: “An angel of the Lord stood before the shepherds, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.’” After declaring this good news and sending the shepherds to Bethlehem to see for themselves, the angel is joined by a heavenly choir singing, "Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!" And there we have a summary of the gospel. Through the angel, good news is made known to us that God favors us and has come to us as savior bringing peace and joy.

The first thing the angel says to the shepherds is the first thing God or God’s messenger always says when appearing to humans: “Do not be afraid.” We are finite creatures vulnerable to loss and pain and death. Confusion, fear, and anxiety – real and imagined – are part of our natural condition. At times they seem overwhelming, casting a shadow over our lives. But into the midst of our fear and anxiety, Jesus is born bringing the promise that God is with us in all things to strengthen and encourage and, ultimately, to deliver us from all that we fear. And nothing – nothing – can separate us from the love we know in Jesus. If this story is anything like true we can begin to live beyond fear. Brothers and sisters, hear it clearly tonight and carry it in your hearts forever: Do. Not. Be. Afraid.

But why do you suppose the shepherds were terrified in the first place? Given that they were probably not the most pious characters, maybe they felt the way we feel when we see a police car in our rear view mirror – have I done something wrong? And isn’t that often how we think about God? A cosmic ‘gotcha’ moment would be terrifying. But I wonder if it was something else: the glory of the Lord shown round about them. To be engulfed in the glory of the Lord would mean being engulfed in overwhelming power and goodness. But it would also mean being engulfed in the splendor of unbearable beauty and joy. I suspect Dante has it right when he suggests that being in the presence of those like the angel of the Lord, or in Dante’s case, Beatrice – to be in the presence of those who are saturated with divine glory would undo us. It is the bright, unbearable splendor of God’s beauty, goodness, and joy that overwhelms and terrifies the shepherds. Part of the good news the angel brings is that that beauty, goodness, and joy has been born in Bethlehem and this baby will make it possible for us to bear, and enter fully into, God’s beauty, goodness, and joy.

This is good news to all people. In Jesus, God has shown his favor – his loving, tender, attention. "For God so favored the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16). God favors you. God cherishes you. God delights in you. God favors you and desires goodness, joy, and peace for you. Ponder that in your heart. God has demonstrated his favor towards us by being born in the midst of our sin-garbled and confused world as Savior, Messiah, and Lord that we might have life abundantly and eternally. That is good news of great joy for all the people.

This is good news of great joy. Jesus said he came that his joy may be in us, and that our joy may be full (John 15:11). God desires for you to be full of joy – not mere happiness or pleasure, but the deep and abiding sense of well-being knowing that life – your life – is good. With Jesus comes the promise that all that is unjoy in our lives and in the world can be undone.

This is good news of peace. Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid” (John 14:27). It is telling how often Jesus says “Peace be with you” or “Go in peace” or encourages people to focus on “the things that make for peace” (Luke 19:42). God desires peace for you and for the world – deep and abiding personal peace and contentment of spirit as well as peace between people and the end of violence. With Jesus comes the promise that all that is unpeace in our lives and in the world can be undone.

We will not go too far afield if we understand sin as the attitudes and behaviors in us and in the world that block, deny, or diminish joy and peace from our own selves and from one another. It is to address the unjoy and unpeace of the world, that Jesus was born. In Jesus, God’s favor, joy, and peace are manifest and made available to us. He has come to save us from all that is in us and all that is in the world that keeps us from entering fully into God’s favor.

We are like the shepherds – good news has been brought to us. The scriptures, the saints, and other witnesses are our angels. We can again and again go to the One born in our midst. His favor, joy, and peace can be born in our hearts, shape our lives, and transform our world. If you have never knelt before him, I encourage you tonight to come. If it has been a long time since you knelt before him, I encourage you tonight to come. And may we all, like the shepherds, leave tonight glorifying and praising God for all we have heard and seen. Let us make known what has been told to us. May his light shine in the garbled darkness and confusion of this world.

In the light of this story the stories of our lives become less garbled and confused. In the light of this story, new light shines on all other stories. All good stories reflect something of the light of the good news of great joy contained in this story – including those stories that compete with it this time of year, the stories that confused Hu Zher. For all who have felt like Rudolph – outcasts who have been laughed at, called names, and been excluded from joining in any “reindeer games,” you are welcomed into God’s favor, joy, and peace. For all who have felt frozen, cold, or lifeless, new life is possible. And all that is within us and in the world that blocks, denies, or rejects the favor, joy, and peace of God – all that is Grinch-like – can be transformed. Our hearts can expand threefold and more. Let there be no confusion. This story, the story of the birth of Jesus, is the assurance of God’s favor and the promise that all that is unjoy and unpeace is undone.

And that is good news of great joy for all the people.
Merry Christmas.

Transformation from the Inside by Divine Participation

Something from theoretical physicist and Anglican priest/theologian John Polkinghorne for the 9th day of Christms:

Human redemption comes through divine involvement, and not by an act of divine magic. The incarnation is the narrow point in which the large claim of universal salvific validity stemming from a particular life and death must balance. The human condition is such that it cannot be dealt with simply be an authorized representative (the Hebrew idea of shaliach), however inspired, but it requires actual divine participation. It is therefore essential, if Jesus is Savior, that God is fully present in him throughout. In Athanasius' words, 'He became man that we might become divine,' so that we might share in the life of God and consequently that the life of God might be in him. Yet the Redeemer is not a gnostic Christ imparting the secrets of divine wisdom, who could indeed be a heavenly figure in human disguise. The mystery of our redemption is something altogether deeper than that. It proceeds, not from the outside by illumination, but from the inside by participation. We need transformation, not information.

The Faith of a Physicist, p. 135

The Vulnerable Love of God

On the 7th day of Christmas, something from William Placher on the vulnerable love of God incarnated in Jesus:

To read the biblical narratives is to encounter a God who is, first of all, love (1 John 4:8). Love involves a willingness to put oneself at risk, and God is in fact vulnerable in love, vulnerable even to great suffering. God’s self-revelation is Jesus Christ, and, as readers encounter him in the biblical stories, he wanders with nowhere to place his head, washes the feet of his disciples like a servant, and suffers and dies on a cross–condemned by the authorities of his time, undergoing great pain, “despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity” (Isaiah 53:3). Just this Jesus is the human face of God, not merely a messenger or a prophet but God’s own self come as self-revelation to humankind. If God becomes human in just this way, moreover, then that tells us something of how we might seek our own fullest humanity–not in quests of power and wealth and fame but in service, solidarity with the despised and rejected, and willingness to be vulnerable in love.

Narratives of a Vulnerable God, p. xiii

Jesus = the very face of God

We continue to commemorate the mystery of the Incarnation on the 6th day of Christmas:

Scottish theologian Thomas Torrance tells about how, as a young army chaplain, he held the hand of a dying nineteen-year-old soldier, and then, back in Aberdeen as a pastor, visited one of the oldest women in his congregation–and they both asked exactly the same question: “Is God really like Jesus?” And he assured them both, Torrance writes, “that God is indeed really like Jesus, and that there is no unknown God behind the back of Jesus for us to fear; to see Jesus is to see the very face of God."

William Placher, Jesus the Savior, p. 21 (quoting Torrance, Preaching Christ Today, p. 55)

There is a phrase associated with two of the greatest Anglican thinkers of the last generation, Michael Ramsey and John V. Taylor: ‘God is Christlike and in him there is no unChristlikeness at all'. What is seen in Jesus is what God is; what God is is the outpouring and returning of selfless love, which is the very essence of God’s definition, in so far as we can ever speak of a ‘definition’ of the mystery.

Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust, p. 70

It is because of Jesus that we grasp the idea of a God who is entirely out to promote our life and lasting Joy. . . Here is a human life so shot through with the purposes of God, so transparent to the action of God, that people speak of it as God's life 'translated' into another medium. Here God is supremely and uniquely at work.

Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust, p. 57

His secret beauty on our own scale

On the 5th day of Christmas:

One of the most convicting aspects of Christianity, if we try to see it in terms of our own day, is the contrast between its homely and inconspicuous beginnings and the holy powers it brought into the world. It keeps us in perpetual dread of despising small things, humble people, little groups. The Incarnation means that the Eternal God enters our common human life with all the energy of His creative love, to transform it, to exhibit to us its riches, its unguessed significance; speaking our language, and showing us His secret beauty on our own scale.

- Evelyn Underhill, The School of Charity

God Endured What He Decreed

The fourth day of Christmas, Holy Innocents, calls to mind these thoughts from Dorothy Sayers and Charles Williams:

Dorothy Sayers:

What does the Church think of Christ? The Church’s answer is categorical and uncompromising, and it is this: That Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter from Nazareth, was in fact and in truth, and in the most exact and literal sense of the words, the God “by whom all things were made.” His body and brain were those of a common man; his personality was the personality of God, so far as that personality could be expressed in human terms. He was not a kind of demon pretending to be human; he was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to be “like God”—he was God.

Now, this is not just a pious commonplace: it is not a commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—he [God] had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.

- The Greatest Drama Ever Staged, The Whimsical Christian

Charles Williams:

The original act of creation can be believed to be good and charitable; it is credible that Almighty God should deign to create beings to share His Joy. It is credible that he should deign to increase their Joy by creating them with the power of free will so that their joy should be voluntary. It is certain that if they have the power of choosing joy in Him they must have the power of choosing the opposite of joy in Him. . .

He could have willed us not to be after the Fall. He did not. Now the distress of creation is so vehement and prolonged, so tortuous and torturing, that even naturally it is revolting to our sense of justice, much more supernaturally. We are instructed that He contemplates, from His infinite felicities, the agonies of His creation, and deliberately maintains them in it. . . The whole creation groaneth and travaileth together. (Romans 8:22)

This is a creation then that ‘needs’ (let the word be permitted) justifying. The Cross justifies it to this extent at least–that just as He submitted us to His inexorable will, so He submitted Himself to our wills (and therefore to His). He made us; He maintained us in our pain. At least, however, on the Christian showing, He consented to be Himself subject to it. If, obscurely, He would not cease to preserve us in the full horror of existence, at least He shared it. This is the first approach to justice in the whole situation. Whatever He chose He chose fully, for Himself as for us. This is, I think, unique in the theistic religions of the world. I do not remember any other in which the Creator so accepted the terms of His own terms–at least in the limited sense of existence upon this earth. It is true that His life was short. His pain (humanly speaking) comparatively brief. But at least, alone among the gods, He deigned to endure the justice He decreed.

- The Cross (from Charles Williams: Selected Writings, chosen by Anne Ridler)

The Stupendous Theme of Christianity

For the 3rd day of Christmas, here is some more from E. L. Mascall (1905-1993):

“The stupendous theme [of Christianity is] that God’s ultimate purpose for the human race and for the whole material universe is that they should be taken up into Christ and transformed into a condition of unimaginable glory, and that it is for this that God took our human nature, in which spirit and matter are so mysteriously and intricately interwoven.” The Christian Universe, p. 109

The Humanity of Christ

For the 2nd day of Christmas, here is something from E. L. Mascall (1905-1993) on the humanity of Christ:

“It was human nature, not a human person, that God the Son united to himself when he became man. Thus, both the state of fallenness and the state of redemption appertain in the first place to the human race as such, and then to individual men and women as members of it; and this does not mean that God is not interested in us as individuals, but that he is interested in us as the kind of individuals we are, namely members of one another.” The Christian Universe, p. 104-105