From today’s collect:
Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your
incarnate Word.
In
the grand story of creation in Genesis 1, God’s first recorded words are “Let
there be light.” The separation of light and darkness, day and night, follows.
Even though we think of these words as opposites, each one is necessary to an
understanding of the other. Without light, how would we define darkness? Without darkness, how would we
appreciate light? In John 1, our
gospel lesson for today, we have a passage that contains the New Testament
complement to the creation 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 came
into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has
come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. There
was a man sent from God, whose name was John (the Baptizer). He came as a
witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He
himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light,
which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.”
John’s words speak
to the glory of the cosmic shift in our human relationship with almighty God, a
shift engendered by the birth of an infant in a lowly stable—the new light that
would come into the world. The God of Genesis, who simply by speaking the words
of creation brought all things into being, is a God whose power is truly
unfathomable to the human mind. Even so, as humans tend to do, we have striven
to understand and explain God to one another, often with conflicting and
disastrous results.
Since we have made
such a mess of comprehending God and translating that comprehension into
action, God chose to be born as one of us, to live among us as the exemplar of
all we are supposed to be. The infant Jesus became the light that dispelled the
darkness. As the apostle John speaks so eloquently in the gospel, “From his
fullness we have all received grace upon grace. The law indeed was given by
Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It
is God, the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him
known.” Jesus has shown us the
face of God—as well as the kind heart of God.
The last time I
led this Celtic service, I preached about the necessity, even the blessing, of
accepting darkness. That darkness,
a result of our feeling distant from God, was called “the cloud of unknowing”
by an anonymous early church father, who wrote about the need for letting go of
our presumptuous interpretations of God’s meaning, letting go of our need to
know exactly what God intends for us, and allowing ourselves to accept the
mystery of God. Both God’s power and his infinite love for us are vastly beyond
our ability to comprehend. By
letting go of our need to know, by welcoming the darkness of our
incomprehension, we can simply relax into God’s loving arms, trusting in God’s
great mercy. That trust in what we cannot see, cannot know, is the essence of
faith. Often children, as we observe and may remember ourselves, are the ones
who exemplify a trusting faith best of all, especially in the Christmas season.
Today’s lessons
are all about the light that shines forth once we accept and move beyond the
darkness. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul explains the simplicity of faith
as something revealed to us. He writes, “Now before faith came, we were
imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed… But now
that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in
Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith.” Doesn’t it sound as if
Paul is saying that humans needed to attribute a harsh and demanding nature to
God, needed to assign laws as the pretext for a relationship between God and God’s
people? The laws provided necessary limits for humans—yes indeed! But these
laws also placed imagined limits on God and God’s ability to respond to human
need. Through these laws, interpreted and written by humans, we have presumed
to understand God and express God’s will. We refuse to accept the darkness of
unknowing when we make God into OUR idea of a disciplinarian. We refuse the
lessons exemplified by the living Christ when we condemn ourselves and one
another. Paul tells us that it is with child-like faith that we are freed.
And
what is the source of our freedom?
Clearly, God did not wish us to remain imprisoned by our false notions
about God. Paul says, “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son,
born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under
the law so that we might receive adoption as children.” It is no wonder we
cherish the expression, “Love came down at Christmas.” In this way, the Old
Testament Word entered the world as the new light of grace. The light of
Christ’s message, the light signified by a star and offered to us through his
humble birth and through his teaching, is the most simple Word of all: “Love
one another as I have loved you.”
Love, fully
expressed and fully experienced, is grace upon grace. The star of Bethlehem is the bright light
of love. AMEN.
No comments:
Post a Comment