Christmas Day: The Visited Planet

How many of you remember the moon landing?  It will be 50 years ago next year. I remember the images of people watching the flickering black and white TV’s through store windows all over the world, even in countries that were our sworn enemies. It was a breathtaking and unifying moment for humanity. 

Apollo 11 was the first successful manned mission to the moon. Of the previous 18 unmanned attempts, 13 were failures. Most of us forget that this one almost failed too--the Lunar Rover almost didn’t land on the moon.  When astronaut Neil Armstrong finally set it down, he had had to override the automatic systems that tried to land it a location far too rocky. Even after he took over the controls, he had to abort three times before he could touch down.  When he finally shut down the systems, exactly 20 seconds of fuel remained.  

What words can describe this mission? Brave. Risky. Audacious. Hopeful.   What makes the human spirit capable of such imagination and courage?  What makes us dare to be so bold?  What makes us want to reach out so far beyond ourselves?

I thought of this mission when I encountered a phrase by the writer Philip Yancey, who wrote of our Gospel’s theme as “the visited planet.”  The common threads between the Apollo Mission and God’s incarnation of Jesus were two-fold for me—one, the cosmic implications of both God’s divine mission and the human Apollo mission; and two, the breathtaking risk and vulnerability and beauty that are contained in both.  It says so much about how high we can soar, when we are at our best.  And it says so much God’s love for us, that God came down and visited us not just as Spirit, but as one of us.

I don’t have to tell you this Christmas day that a baby has been born. That’s why we are here on a Tuesday! We sing the story in our hymns. If our whole Christian story were on a Google map, we would be zoomed in on that scene in Bethlehem.  We could see the details at an intimate level: the young mother, a humble manger, sheep and shepherds, cows, donkeys, straw, and probably, animal poop. All this helps us visualize that Jesus was, indeed, 100 percent human. And it seems a perfectly sensible place for at least two of our Gospels to begin the story about Jesus: at his birth.

Now John’s Gospel, today’s level, comes from a different perspective.  It’s tackling the story of this audacious, risky, breathtaking mission of God, to incarnate Godself into our very world. The Word made flesh. It’s a mission from another world.

Mixed media art by Trygve Skogran

So to grasp John’s point, we have to zoom out--all the way up into the cosmos.  Bethlehem is not even a tiny speck from here.  John ‘s big picture perspective is clear from the very start, with the words “In the beginning.”  We can’t help notice these are the first words of Genesis, and that’s exactly what John’s first-century followers would have noticed, too. It’s why John used them.  “In the beginning, the Word.”   

Now what was Word?  Word in Greek is Logos -- the principle of divine reason and creative order.  John is beginning to establish a very big idea here--that Jesus is this Logos.  He’s saying, “The very Word through whom all things were made, and challenged the darkness at Creation--that Word has come to us,” John is telling us, “to challenge the darkness we live in.”  Whereas the Genesis story climaxes with the creation of humans, the climax John points to is God’s next project--the arrival of Jesus--God as a most particular human. And so once again, God is saying, “Word is present among you. Now, let there be light!” 

This is not a different God. And it’s not a God version 2, for the Word is eternal, and has always been the second person of the Trinity. But this is a new mission from God--to be known to us, and by us, in a most intimate and saving way. 

What the birthplace of Jesus actually looks like on Google Maps

So if to know Jesus is to know God, then what does this Jesus tell us about God?

One, we learn that God is humble. The idea of a humble God was an oxymoron in John’s time. In fact, there were some at the time of this Gospel who didn’t think Jesus was as important as John the Baptist. We know John the Baptist as a wilderness prophet who ate locusts and wild honey, and dressed in clothes of camelhair.  If Jesus is so humble that he is being compared unfavorably to John the Baptist--?  It was very hard for people to accept that the God of power and glory would come to us in such a humble form.  Yet, this is the Jesus mission.  Not God as a warrior or king, God of Sun or Thunder. Instead, a God who said, “I am the Good shepherd. I know my flock, and my flock knows me.”

The next thing we learn about God in the incarnation of Jesus is that God is relationship.  First, there is God’s relationship with Jesus:  The Word was present at creation, but we did not really know the second person of the Trinity, let alone Word as God’s Son, living among us and with us, calling God his father. This also tells us about God’s relationship with us. Because if God is the Father, we must understand that God is giving up the Son for our sake. This is an outpouring of love: so committed is God to us that God sent the Son to be with us. The Son suffers a death as acutely as any other human would suffer.  The Father suffers the death of the Son. For so God loved the world. For so God loved us. God is relationship.

Finally, we learn something about God’s power, because the rocket fuel that powered God’s mission to us, is the power of love. The love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, the love of Jesus for us.  The love represented in every story Jesus tells us and every one he touches:  the love of the father for his prodigal son, the love of the Good Samaritan for his neighbor, the love of Jesus for the Canaanite woman, of Jesus for his friend Lazarus, and the sacrificial love Jesus showed in giving his life for us. This is not giving God giving UP God’s power. This is God showing us the ultimate power:  the power of love.

We recalcitrant and distractible humans apparently needed God in our faces to learn this. So God visited a planet known for its violence, and came to a people who had a history, God well knew, for scorning prophets, a people who would do violence to God’s very Son.

Like Jesus, we too are born in the flesh, in a world full of violence, a world at times chaotic, as well as achingly beautiful.  We are also born in the image of God. The Genesis story that John refers to also tells us:  “So God created humankind in God’s image; in the image of God God created them.”  It’s easier for us to understand being in the image of Jesus than the image of God the Father. It’s easier for us to know love when love comes down to dwell in our hearts. It’s easier for us to be the light of the world when the light has come down and pierced the darkness.  God approaches us as Jesus to show us what it means to be human, by showing us what it means to be divine.  

And it is easier to understand why we would send a rocket to the heavens when we remember we are in the image of the one who took the audacious risk of visiting our planet and becoming flesh to us this Christmas day. It was an act so cosmic that the great scientists of that time – the ones we know as the wisemen - were already on the road to Bethlehem by now, knowing something world-changing was happening under that star. It was a reaching act of love, seeking our hearts, meeting our own vulnerability with the vulnerability of God in Jesus. And we have never been the same.

The power of love fueled this act, and that same love empowers us to meditate on what Jesus shows us about the nature of God—God’s humility, relationship, and love so that we can reflect them as God’s image-bearers to each other.  Because Jesus has shown us how.  God has visited our planet and pitched a tent among us.  

So let us zoom down to that manger scene, at the smallness and tenderness and vulnerability of this little human baby who was sent to live his life as a teacher, and healer and prophet and way-shower to us—and also to endure great suffering on the cross to show us the power of love even over death.  And then, after we have appreciated that intimate scene for a time--let’s zoom out, and contemplate that of all the great projects the God of the universe could have undertaken, God undertook this one. For us. 

Oh the wonder of God’s love!! 

Lectionary Readings:  Isaiah 52:7-10; Psalm 98; Hebrews 1:1-12; John 1:1-14

Preached Christmas Day, St Gabriel Episcopal Church, Portland, OR 

Sometimes the night is so long

I preached this sermon at our Longest Night service, which we've been holding each year on the Winter Solstice to acknowledge that for some, the holidays loom. 

I’m a huge fan of the singer Storm Large. (Yes, that’s her real name.) Supremely talented and versatile, she first burst onto the scene as a contestant on the tv show Rock Star Supernova, but now is more likely to be found singing torch songs for Pink Martini. She’s a character—at times, bawdy, brutally honest, always hilarious. She calls her Christmas Show, which I attended last year, “Storm Large’s Holiday Ordeal.” 

That rings true for me.  This season of light which we devoutly need to be a time of beauty and peace, is for as many reasons as there are people gathered here--an ordeal. And on this night, the longest night, we gather to express that, and to look for comfort.

Full disclosure:  This is a longest night for me, as well. Participating in this service is my own act of healing. For on the 8^th day of Christmas many decades ago, I lost my parents and brother in an accident, and mixed in with some of the joy and beauty of this time, is the sadness which for me is now old – a yearning for home as it lived in my heart so many years ago. It is no longer an active grief, but is still a wistful presence of absence that all the distractions and busy-ness of the preparation for Christmas cannot abate.  

And not for lack of trying on my part.

As I go out into the shops to buy gifts for family and friends, I find myself drawn to the beauty of décor, beckoning me to buy. As I drive around and see homes lit for Christmas, I find myself comparing my modest wreath to them. Perhaps better lights, more beautiful decorations, will bring me joy.  The cookies in every kitchen and on every table, here, at William Temple House, where I also work, and every home I visit:  Perhaps their sweetness will melt into me.  The egg nog—its buttery richness cloaking my insides like a down comforter, perhaps it will cushion that small, hard place in me.

We make it work, don’t we?  We grow up, we move on. But we carry the marks of suffering, inwardly and outwardly. And like Harry Potter’s scar, which throbs when the darkness of Lord Voldemort is near, we feel them more acutely during the holidays.

And because we can look out at a world where the headlines seem more chaotic every hour, our bodies having aged another year, the ones we miss no nearer to us than ever -- the darkness seems real. And our pain is objectively true, and valid. There is no health or help in denying that. We may find little cause for optimism in the present moment. For optimism is based on observable facts. I am cautiously optimistic, for instance, that it will not rain on Christmas Day. But the forecast may change, and my optimism will waver.

            Hope is different. Hope endures--because hope is a decision. Our hope is in the light of God. Even when that light is a tiny pinprick, hope pierces the darkness. Hope is an affirmation of something even truer than our present experience. This ultimate truth is not, unfortunately, that we will not suffer. For the light of God became incarnate as a human being, as one who suffered. Yet the reality of Jesus’s suffering exists alongside a greater truth, that he came into the world in power, to shine a light of hope for all eternity, a hope stronger than any circumstance or force of this world. Does this light tell us our pain is an illusion? It does not, for God Godself endured pain. Our God was crucified, and yet triumphed over pain and death, to show us that it is possible. This is our hope and our strength.

Richard Rohr once wrote that there are two great spiritual questions, questions that all of modern psychology and the self-help industrial complex cannot answer. They are:

What do I do with my power?  And… What do I do with my pain?   

What do I do, Lord, with the pain I wish away? The pain that comes from real things that have happened to me, what has been taken from me or lost, the pain of disappointment and sadness from the circumstances of my life. And please, Lord, no gauzy sayings, like: “I don’t give you anything that you can’t handle.” Or, “at least you have your health, or your friends, or your cat,” Don’t tell me, “Everything happens for a reason”?  Tell me what to do, Lord, with this pain?

Come to me, says God. Use my power to carry you. Not the power to bring back someone we love, to go back to our youth, to reverse a car accident. These are the facts of our lives, rooted in our mortality, some of them rooted in human-built systems that are imperfect, or sinful, or unjust. We carry their scars and they cannot be erased. Our power is hope in Christ, the power that allows us to live fully even in the midst of our pain. This is no fix or cover-up—it is coming to know a God who suffered for us and with us. Henri Nouwen, in his book, Turn My Mourning into Dancing, writes about it as a process:

First, we count our losses, and we acknowledge the pain that comes from them. We acknowledge also the ways we have sought to deny our pain and the ways this has limited us from becoming who we truly are in Christ.

Second, we let go of our insistence that things be different, that what happens to us in this world is the summation of our lives and our worth to God. We stop litigating our life’s injustices to God. We accept that stuff happens. (Although God really doesn’t mind if we have to shake our fists at the heavens from time to time. Look at Job!! I think God just says, “Oh, honey. I know.”)

Third, rather than feeling ashamed of our vulnerability, we consider that, in our smallness, like a child, we can accept the hand of Christ to walk with us. Rather than regret our smallness, instead, we glory in the largeness of our God.

Finally, we locate gratitude to God as our center point. We rejoice in the beauty revealed in the world, for all beauty comes from God, and God is at work even amidst our suffering. Our suffering reflects our very humanity. If we did not know loss, we could not know love. If we did not fail, we must never have tried. So we open our eyes to where God reveals beauty to us in spite of it all—even because of it all. Today, I spied an osprey nest atop a billboard along I-205. Thank you, Holy One, for beauty even amidst soul-crushing rush-hour traffic.

I first approached my suffering as a hurdler. For so long, I thought of my pain as something to leap over, to surmount.  I kept striving, looking for an easy victory. No matter how many times I tried, I just crashed into the hurdles. I wasn’t getting anywhere. So one day, I got down on my knees and began to crawl under the hurdles. What I feared was humiliation. What I experienced instead was the sweetness of humility. Here I am, Lord, I said, my knees bloodied from crawling. But crawling moved me forward. From my knees, I could turn my face to God. And, God lifted me up and welcomed me home.

That we are defined by our suffering and that the darkness of the world has the last word, can feel like a present reality. But it is a bad dream, a dream from which we can awake. Being here today is a sign of wakefulness. On this longest night, we look to the light and we take it into ourselves, a flame of hope to warm us and encourage us.

The wonderful Anglican priest and poet Malcolm Guite wrote,          

                                     So every trace of light begins a grace

In me, a beckoning. The smallest gleam
Is somehow a beginning and a calling;
“Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream

For you will see the Dayspring at your waking,
Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking”.

There is no need to make joy and suffering opposites: they are not separated from each other. Our capacity to witness to both the darkness and the light, is something we share with God, whose revelation to us in Christ--one who was both crucified and triumphant, killed and yet transcended death--is trying to teach us something. So tonight we stand together in truthful witness to our pain, and still in hope, turning toward the light. And when we seek it, we find it, along with the capacity for our joy and growth, for we have come into the heart of God, into communion with Christ, the wounded healer, and Christ is with us.

Thanks be to God.