THE SUNDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS 2013
In the Name of the Incarnate One.
Amen.
For my Advent devotions this year, I
decided to reread the Early Church Fathers on the Incarnation. Now, before you
roll your eyes and utter word that aren’t supposed to be uttered in Church, let
me confirm that, yes, the old boys are as dry as the Sahara. And they’re not
the best writers in the world when it comes to syntax and the like. But within
that Sahara are little oases of profound beauty that can bring tears to the
eye.
They all seem to have different
perspectives on many things, but about one thing they are in accord: that
Divine Being, whom we call God, is ultimately transcendent; that Divine Being
cannot be known; God is immutable – unchanging, without passions nor emotions
because God is beyond such things and the Creator of such things. God is not
compassionate nor loving nor merciful nor just. God IS all compassion, the
fullness of all love, mercy itself and ultimate justice. God is so totally
other that no created entity can have access to Divine Being who is beyond time
and space and all human knowledge. Divine Being is all knowledge, all sight and
all power and in need of nothing, including us.But the Fathers are quite
certain about another facet of Ultimate Divine Being: that within the Being of
God is also Hagia Sophia, or Divine Wisdom, a feminine aspect of God, through
whom all things came into being, all creation was created, who was the Prime
Mover when the Big Bang went off billions of years ago. And it is this Divine
Wisdom that has permeated the Universe and brought all things to life.
Have I lost you yet? Thought not.
It is this Hagia Sophia that sprung
up in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.This Holy Wisdom filled with power and
love and compassion and mercy and justice became vulnerable to the living things on this
planet by being born, by taking flesh, by, as St. John says in the Greek of this
morning’s Gospel, “pitching a tent” among us, as one of us in the normal human way. It is this Holy Wisdom that pitched a
tent through the obedience of an unwed peasant girl
and her finance in a backwater region of a third rate
territory of the Roman Empire.
But the question remains: Why? Why
would Divine Being and Holy Wisdom pitch a tent among such beings as us? The
Fathers, in their dryness also address this question. It was not so that the
Word made Flesh could be offered up as a sacrifice for sin. That idea didn’t
surface until Saint Anselm in the 11th Century an Archbishop
Canterbury no less. Then the Protestant Reformers got hold of it and took it to
its absurd conclusions.
No, Divine Being and Holy Wisdom
became one of us God became human – so that humanity could understand its own
divinity, say the Fathers. Not that humans become the Godhead, but humanity
understands and claims the fact that inside each one of us, inside every human
being dwells the Holy and Divine One whom we cannot understand. And such
understanding changes everything.
Such understanding awakens in us the
emotions and passions of love and mercy and compassion and justice. Such
understanding creates within us the desire to take action. Such understanding
urges us on to love those who are unlovable, to embrace those who are oppressed
and outcast, to sit in solidarity with the poor, the lonely and the unloved, to
seek peace not only as the absence of conflict but peace deep within the human
soul. The Fathers are clear about one thing: that the Word became Flesh so that
God could touch us and that we could touch the Transcendent God. The Word, that
Holy Wisdom that John calls the Logos, pitched a tent among us so that the
divinity with us could be Holy Divinity through us to those who cannot touch or
see or experience it. God became human in Jesus of Nazareth so that humanity
could touch and see and feel the very face of God. God became human so that we
can recognize the divinity alive in each other and even within ourselves. And
when that recognition comes, we come to realize just how beloved we truly are; that
despite the transcendence of the Holy One, God comes to live among us to reveal
to us just how much, deep within the Mystery of God, that that Divine Love is
for us.
And so, since around the year 325, the
Faithful have gathered each year around the time of the old pagan feast of the
Unconquered Sun to remember who and what we are. And each year, we tell the
stories of the miraculous birth of the Christ Child and sing carols of praise the
words of which we all know by heart even though we only sing them once a year. And
we exchange gifts in memory of the gifts brought to that most Holy Child by the
Astrologers from the East and in thanksgiving to God for the gift of that Holy
Child.
But, most importantly, we gather to
remember that the Incarnation is not just a one time event. We gather to
remember that God continues to become flesh in us and through us: in a smile to
the homeless man selling Real Change in
the hours spent in silence with a grieving friend in our care for those for
whom no one else cares in our making the cranky check-out clerk laugh in our
rejoicing with the joyful in our love for our families and friends and
loved-ones in our feasting and in our laughter. And through all of it, the
Transcendent and Unknowable One comes and pitches a tent among us through that
most Holy Wisdom, through that Word made Flesh who was, and is, and ever shall
be, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
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