Nativity of the Lord: Cycle A 22-23
THE NATIVITY OF THE LORD (CHRISTMAS)
Isaiah 52:7-10 | Hebrews 1:1-6 | John 1:1-18
Oh God, who wonderfully created the dignity of human nature and still more wonderfully restored it, grant, we pray, that we may share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God forever and ever, amen.
I was just thinking one of the wonderful things about being a priest, about being able to be in a position to help people understand the most amazing book, the scriptures. They’re amazing. They’re filled with truth, but they can be used, because there’s so much in it that you can take out of context, and you can become a person who preaches something that is provable only by a word or two or three lines, and you can be doing some tremendous harm. So I’m in awe of my responsibility, and I take it seriously. How can I, as a human being, be an instrument for God to reveal to the people that he has written this book for so that we can receive what is offered? And what is offered is an extraordinary testament. It’s interesting. We don’t call it the old story and the new story. We call it the Old Testament and the New Testament, and both of those mean that ⎯ the word means that there is something that is being longed for to be given from the one who makes the testament. It’s usually when a person dies. They read the testament. What do you want? How do you want your things, the thing that you ⎯ the wisdom that you had, the money you had, where do you want it to go? And you want it to go to the people, to everyone. So think of the Old and the New Testament as a message that has been given to those after this work was finished, and what’s so interesting about the Bible is it’s both anthropological and theological. It teaches us about human beings’ nature and God’s nature, and it begins with a nature of God that is very much partial. It’s so important to remember that. The Old Testament is partially who God really is. Partially, that’s the word in Hebrews. But what does that mean? It means very much that we’re looking at the whole story of the Bible, and it’s about God revealing himself to humans and human beings responding to that. The process is to bring human beings into who they were called to be. We’re called to be like God. He created us like him but gave us the most extraordinary gift of free will so that we can do whatever we want with this thing we call ourselves. We can support it, love it, encourage ourselves to take care of the things that are most essential for us, or we can be using our power as a human being for destruction, for evil.
You wonder, “Why did God create us with free will?” And it strikes me that he did it, because he’s created so many things that are so beautiful and perfect and self-sustaining in a sense, meaning they don’t have to be looked after. You don’t have to remind the leaves to put their leaves back out; it’s spring. But human beings need constant reminders. We have to be told over and over again, reminded over and over again of who we really are intended to be. And so if you look at the Old Testament, what part of God is revealed? Well, it’s the part of God that is for justice. He’s there, because he longs for his people to understand something about their nature. We evolve from creatures of a lower consciousness where we are basically self-centered, maybe only concerned about ourselves and our own family, our own tribe, our own friends, and everyone else is valueless. And we keep evolving from that point, and so one of the things that God starts his relationship with us with is a call to gather a people together and call it a community and call it his own. And then he takes care of them, and the world of the Old Testament was a world of great violence. And so the way that God manifests himself to people who had hundreds of gods to choose from, he wanted them to believe that he was the only God, and he did it by his might, his strong arm helping them, in a violent world, to be protected from their enemies. And God had no problem destroying the enemies of his people, but he also didn’t have any qualms or any hesitation to also destroy those who he called his own who would turn against him and choose another god. So he was a God of violence in some ways, yet over and over again there’s glimpses of what’s coming, recognition that this isn’t complete, that there’s someone coming, a Messiah that will change the world.
And how will he change it? Well, God gave the law in the Old Testament, and he spoke mostly through prophets, and the prophets would tell people what to do. So you see in the Old Testament, it’s based on a God who is willing to destroy enemies or you if you didn’t believe in him, and he also was a God that was very much interested in us doing what we’re told. And what we were told is to pay attention to him as the only God and to deal with our brothers and sisters with a kind of right behavior. Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Don’t kill. Don’t break your promises. Be satisfied with who you are. Wonderful wisdom and ideal to follow, but if we didn’t follow ⎯ in the Old Testament, if they didn’t follow it, it would be destruction, rejection. Just know that those commandments were then transformed into 360 rules and laws. So people in the Old Testament lived with the God of justice. They were told what to do. If they didn’t do it, they were told they were destroyed. That is carried over in the New Testament. At least it was in my life. I was told as a young boy that, if I did something bad, God didn’t like bad little boys, and he would send them to hell. So it’s like there’s this hangover from the Old Testament into the New Testament. Yet we need to look at what the New Testament is really saying, because without it, we end up still returning to a kind of violent religion where God is a god who looks at you, and you’re not who you should be, and he’s disgusted. He’s discouraged. He walks away. We have to do everything we can to fix ourselves so that he will like us again. He will love us again if we only stop doing the bad things we do. That’s all Old Testament, but listen to this new wonderful testament, what Jesus, the Son of God who is God, who sits now with God at his side ⎯he’s the one that was there at the very beginning of creation. He’s always existed. It’s a great mystery, but think of him simply as a way of seeing the God who fully is who he is. And we weren’t ready for that God, because we couldn’t, as we were in our evolution, we weren’t ready to take on something as beautiful and as marvelous as the power of love.
We move from the Old Testament, from law, to the New Testament of love, acceptance, forgiveness, but there’s something you need to pay attention to in this beautiful gospel of John, who saw Jesus, I think, more clearly than the other disciples. And he had some intuitive sense of the mystery of all of this. He knew there was something extraordinary about this man that was more than just his miracles, and what it is, is that he is literally ⎯ Jesus is the word, the word made flesh. And what is the word? The word in this sense, I think, is truth. The truth of who God is, is Jesus, and what he longs for you to feel in this revelation is that this thing that he is, is a power that he infuses into us so that divinity becomes for the first time in our humanity. Before, divinity was outside our humanity demanding things. Now it’s inside of us empowering us to do things. It’s a radical shift, and I love the images of what this insight, this word made flesh comes ⎯ what comes with it. And what comes with it is a recognition of what life really is, and the life that you lead is filled with this divinity, and then you’re called light, life of God in you, and then you are the light. You enlighten people by your very presence. It’s a marvelous way of imagining how radically different the Old Testament is from the New Testament.
There’s a violence to the Old Testament. Judgment is everywhere in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, there is not judgment. There is reconciliation, forgiveness, understanding, empowerment, and when you think about these gifts, we know that they are something that human nature responds to. Many people are afraid to tell people that they can be so easily forgiven. People have a mentality that’s still in the Old Testament, and justice has to be served. No one can get away with having done something wrong and having God write it off. They want people to be punished, and it’s interesting that that’s an instinct in human beings that comes from a lower level of consciousness. And when we move up higher into that consciousness, we begin to see the beauty of this, how wonderful it is to experience that kind of response to our weaknesses, our frailty, our brokenness and to know that all he wants is fullness, fullness in us. And I don’t know why we doubt the effect of this kind of love and would rather control people with laws and rules. I think perhaps it’s because many people maybe are at such a lower level of consciousness that they have to be dealt with that way. That may be true, but it’s also true that people can be transformed by being given a gift that is beyond measure.
Christmas is the gift-giving time. If you wonder why we give gifts at Christmas, it’s partly because the magi offered gifts, but still it’s really, I think, an underscoring of the gift that we have received, the abundance of this light that is dwelling in us, resonating love, forgiveness, interest, a longing for others to grow and to evolve and change without being competitive, without being judgmental. And if we think that that’s easy for human beings to do, we miss the point that human beings were made for a partnership with divinity. It’s a perfect blend, and without it, we fall back into the Old Testament. So my gift to you on this Christmas day is this gift of awareness of the life that you are invited to live because of the love that God has for you, the light in you that is able to bring that love to other people, and then you know you’re living in the truth of this beautiful book called the Bible. God bless you.
Father, you are life. You are love. These are not things you do. This is who you are, and what I ask you to open our hearts to is the goodness that you have within you for us, the love you have for us, the desire you have that we grow and become exactly who you intended us to be. Give us conviction in this truth and patience as it slowly evolves, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.