Waters of New Creation

Genesis 1: 1-5 & Mark 1: 4-11

Baptism of the Lord/ 11^th January 2009

If a non-Christian asked you to explain the meaning of baptism, what would you say? We often think of baptism as initiation into the membership of the church. No less authority than John Calvin (1509-1564) himself wrote in his Institutes, the foundational theological text for the Reformed –Presbyterian theological tradition, “Baptism is a sign of initiation, by which we are admitted into the society of the Church, in order that, being incorporated into Christ, we may be numbered among the children of God.”[1] This has come to be the conventional, even orthodox way of viewing baptism. It informs our understanding of infant baptism. I often say after a baptism, “Welcome to the life of the church.” Emphasis on church. It’s become a sign of membership perhaps more than anything else. We tend to see baptism as initiation into the community of God’s people.

Now, I don’t want to take on Calvin, especially on the start of what is being called the Calvin Jubilee. The Reformed tradition is celebrating in 2009 the 500^th anniversary of Calvin’s birth. (Princeton Seminary has set up an online Calvin devotional, with daily readings of the Institutes.[2]) And I don’t want the church heresy police banging on the door of my study or people questioning my theological orthodoxy, but there’s something partially wrong with such a one-sided view of baptism. The problem comes into full view when we take this initiation-view of baptism and read the accounts of Jesus’ baptism from this perspective. We’re faced with a glaring dilemma. How could baptism be a sign of initiation into the society of the Church, how could that have been true for Jesus who wasn’t baptized into a church? The church didn’t exist at that time. Jesus wasn’t baptized into the church or by the church. And John the Baptist certainly wasn’t a Christian by any stretch of the imagination. John wasn’t baptizing Jews into the church. Baptism was a ritual used by radical Jews who were fed up with the abuses of the religious authorities in Jerusalem, who wanted to be purified or cleansed of those abuses, in order to be more fully faithful to the ways of God. Those who went out to see John in the wilderness didn’t want to be identified with the Temple community in Jerusalem, they wanted to separate themselves from it, distance themselves from the Temple and their associations with the Roman Imperial authorities. They wanted to identify themselves with God.

When we read the baptism account with this in mind, setting aside our Church-ly view of initiation, we begin to see that for Jesus baptism was less about initiation, than identification. It had to do with identity – his identity as the son of God and being identified with God’s way in the world. In the act of going down under the water and coming up out of it we find a symbolic expression of Jesus coming to grips with who he is. He is identifying himself with John the Baptist’s mission of reform, of the need to focus more clearly upon God’s way for his life. When he came up out of the water, physically demonstrating the new life he was about to enter, about to embark on the mission of his life, the heavens ripped apart and he saw the Spirit of God descending upon him. And a voice from heaven was heard: “You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.” You are my Son – the Beloved. With you I am well-pleased. That is a statement of identity. Can you hear it? See it? Feel it? This is the confirmation of his identity.

Through this divine declaration we begin to see that being baptized has something to do with identity – who we really are at the core of our being. What we discover in our baptism, a baptism not into the church but into Christ, is something akin to what Jesus discovered about himself in the waters of his baptism. This means that baptism is not something that occurs once in our lives, whether as an infant or adult, but something, a truth that we need to live ourselves into day after day, year after year. During the stress and strain of the Reformation, attacked on all sides, Martin Luther (1483-1546) took great comfort in knowing he was baptized. He would repeat to himself, over and over again, “Remember you baptism. Remember your baptism. Remember who you are.” Luther said of baptism that is a once-in-a-lifetime experience that takes our entire lives to complete.[3] We’re not “done” and then we’re “in.” It’s an experience that yields saving, personal knowledge. And the knowledge we gain of ourselves in baptism, when we come to see who we really are, a knowledge that takes us a lifetime to fathom and acknowledge and really claim to be true in our heart of hearts is similar to what Jesus learned in the divine declaration, the truth that defined his mission – Jesus came to show us that we too are sons of God, daughters of God, children of God, beloved children of God, with whom God is well-pleased. This is who we are. This is who you are – son of God, daughter of God, Beloved child.

One of the greatest tragedies is that some spend their entire lives in the church and never come see themselves in this way. Others know it, but it’s so easy to forget. Instead of seeing ourselves as reflected through the gracious face of Christ we so often see ourselves mirrored through the distorted images of family, culture, tribe, and the ever-self-defeating, self-destroying, self-doubting, fearful images of our egos. Sometimes it feels like we go through our days in a hall of mirrors, where we are lost in the reflection of multiple mirrors distorting reality all the time, losing a sense of who we are. We are surrounded by mirrors in which we see reflections darkly, never whole, always incomplete. How do you we know who we are? Who tells you who you are? Who grounds your identity? Do we look to our families, our neighbors, our friends alone to tell us who we are? Is it our professions, our work? Is it the culture as a whole, with its distorted drives and wayward passions that we turn to guidance? There’s no way to exist apart from these reflections. But what we have to remember is that every mirror we look toward in order to see ourselves is imprecise and distorted. The image we receive back is always partial, never the complete picture.

The American novelist James Agee (1909-1955) begins his novel, A Death in the Family, through the eyes of a child, the same child who will later experience the death of his father. In the opening section called “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” we view the child’s world, a beautiful world, a community of neighborhoods, families dwelling together, sitting on quilts in the back yard, offering so much happiness and so many fond memories. It’s an idyllic scene. The child reflects upon his experience and Agee poignantly writes, “By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away. After a little, I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.”[4]

The pastor-theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1909-1945), knew the burden of seeing himself through so many external reflections. In one of his poems, written from the Tegel prison, Berlin, for his role in an assassination attempts against Hitler (1889-1945), Bonhoeffer wrote: “Who am I? They often tell me I would step from my cell’s confinement calmly, cheerfully, firmly, like a squire from his country-house. Who am I? They often tell me I would talk to my warders freely and friendly and clearly, as though it were mine to command.” He reflects upon how others view him, “Am I then really all that which other men tell of? Or am I only what I know of myself, restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath,…” Who am I? This or the other? Am I one person today, and tomorrow another? Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others, and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling? …Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.”[5] In the end, that’s all we can be sure about – and upon which we are called to build a life.

I was in New York City last weekend and finally saw The Lion King on Broadway. Amazing production; amazing show; amazing story, really. There’s one scene where Simba, the lion-son in exile of the great king of Pride Rock, a son who has lost his way without the courage to fulfill his life’s mission, receives a visitation by Rafiki, a priestess offering wise counsel (I don’t want to push this analogy too-far, but she served as a kind of Holy Spirit figure offering guidance. Rafiki is aSwahili word for “friend,” also related to an Arabic word for “companion.” She tells him to look at his reflection in the waters of creation, to see himself and to remember who he really is – the son of the king. Rafiki sings, “He watches over Everything we see/ Into the water/ Into the truth/ In your reflection/ He lives in you.”[6] He sees a vision of his father long dead who speaks words of assurance, of affirmation, of identification not all that dissimilar to what Jesus heard in the heavens: Remember who you are.

When we are in exile and far from home,

when we have lost our way in the world,

when the future looks scary,

when nothing seems to make any sense,

when the pressures and anxieties and pain and immense sorrow of the world overwhelm us, and we forget our place in the universe,

Jesus invites us to the waters,

the waters of new creation,

to remember who we are.

When we look at our reflection in the water of the font, we are invited to see who we really are, to remember who we really are, and then receive the grace to claim or reclaim that identity, to move toward that vision by the grace of God – again and again and again. That’s what it means to be baptized. Remember who you are.

But it’s so easy to forget. That’s why we need reminders. We need people who remind us who we are. That’s what a sacrament is meant to do, to help us remember. It’s what the church is for, to help us remember. You are my Son. You are my daughter, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased. That’s what we need to hear whispered in our ears whenever we approach a baptismal font, either this baptismal font or any other font anywhere in the world.

When the great St. Francis of Assisi (1181/1182-1226) felt called by Christ in a vision to enter a world of poverty and care for the poor, his father, Franceso, a leading public figure in the town of Assisi, Italy, his father was furious. His father publicly shamed him in the public square. He also shamed his father. Assisi lived in a small hut in the plains below the town of Assisi (you can still go there today). When he had to walk up the hill to town, he was deeply fearful of meeting his father in the streets, because he would often curse him and reject him again as his son. Francis carried a lot of guilt about this and the relationship with his father remained broken for the rest of his life. One day Francis had to go up into town and feeling fearful, invited a beggar from the streets to join him, to walk by his side and protect him. He instructed him, “When my father hurls curses and abuses at me, I will hear them painfully in one ear, but I ask you to walk on my other side, and whisper God’s favor into my other ear, ‘Francis, you are my beloved son. You are a son of heaven and a son of God.’ Just keep repeating it until I can believe it again.”[7]

When we come to this font we look to our baptism with the same hope. Against all the many competing voices telling us otherwise, we need to hear the voice of the truth, and hear it repeated in our ears again and again. At the font God’s Spirit whispers to us again and again, until we really believe it, feel it in our souls. “You are my beloved son, my beloved daughter. You are a son of heaven and a son of God. You are a daughter of heaven and daughter of God. You are my beloved. That’s who you are.”

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[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), Book IV, xv.1.

[2] Princeton Theological Seminary, Calvin 09: http://www2.ptsem.edu/ConEd/Calvin/

[3] Cited in Anthony Robinson, Transforming Congregational Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Press, 2003), 37. Cf. the quotation from the worship bulletin: “We hold…that although we are baptized only once, yet the gain that it symbolizes to us reaches over our whole lives and to our death, so that we have a lasting witness that Jesus Christ will always be our justification and sanctification.” French Confession (1559), written by Calvin.

[4] James Agee, A Death in the Family (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1987), 14.

[5] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1972), 347-348.

[6] The Lion King, Music and Lyrics by Elton John & Tim Rice.

[7] “Legend of the Three Companions, “#23, St. Francis of Assisi Writings and Early Biographies: English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St. Francis, cited in Richard Rohr, From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality (Cincinnati, OH: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2005), 78.

Seeing Salvation

Luke 2: 22-40

First Sunday After Christmas/ 28^th December 2008

“Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word: for my eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared in the presence of all people, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.” 

“.. For my eyes have seen your salvation…” My eyes, my heart are drawn to this portion of the text, to these words.  That’s what Simeon says when he sees the baby Jesus in the Temple.  He lifts him up in his arms and praises God for what he had seen.

It’s a curious turn of phrase ‘’seeing salvation.”  How does one see salvation?  Obviously he’s talking about Jesus, but what does he see in him which causes him to offer such extraordinary praise to a human being?

It’s worth noting that this exchange in the Temple is marvelously incarnational in that he is holding up the baby Jesus, holding him in his arms, touching him, feeling his weight in his arms, looking at his face.  There’s emotional affect in Simeon.  It’s a fleshly experience.  It’s a reminder to us that salvation is more than a concept or idea or the state of one’s soul; instead, it’s an experience, something real, phenomenal.  Simeon is not holding a religious idea or theological concept in his arms, but holding an embodied soul, a real person, that he not only feels, but can see.  It’s an experience of salvation that we have here – it’s real.  You can touch it, feel it, be moved by it.  It’s an experience encountered not in some after life, but in this life, here and now.  It’s an experience assuring the promise and presence of God.

Experience has come to mean a lot to me on my journey of late, specifically religious experience, encounters with the Holy.  Theologically-speaking, we Protestants (and all Christians in general) get nervous when we put too much emphasis upon experience.  We would rather try to sum up God in our creeds and confessions, assuming we have thus defined God; we would rather talk about God instead of experience God.  We would rather reduce God (along with everything else in Christianity) to an idea and concept, to argue and debate and fight over getting belief right, as if belief can be a substitute for an experience of God’s salvation.  We might have plenty who say they believe in God, but what about experiencing God?  We have plenty of Christians who think they are “saved” because they can affirm certain beliefs about Jesus and God, but what about an experience of encountering Jesus, of knowing what it feels like to be saved, of what salvation looks like?

Over and over again throughout scripture, what changes people’s lives is not intellectual assent to theological ideas, but encounters with the Living God, encounters with God in the flesh, of relating directly with the Personhood of God.  Believe me, I’m not being critical of rigorous theological thought.  With a doctorate in theology, trust, theology matters.  How we think informs our life.  But sometimes, I wonder if our penchant for theological arguments is a defense mechanism against having to encounter the One whom we try to talk about, only to discover the limit of our thought.  We can’t think our way toward salvation.  Salvation is an experience that comes upon us and our lives are changed as a result.

 Jesus is how we usually render the Hebrew word “Jeshua” or Joshua.  It means, “Yahweh saves” or “Yahweh is my salvation.” The word for salvation in Hebrew yasha means “to bring out into a wide open space.”  It doesn’t mean being saved from the burning fires of hell or escaping judgment, it doesn’t mean a state of life known after we die.  Salvation is an experience we have when we are brought out into a wide open space and allowed to stand there freely, safely.  It’s the feeling that comes being in a fortress on a hill and you can look out across a plain in every direction and see that there isn’t a threat in sight.  That’s salvation.  It’s the free space we’re given to live in.  Yasha, salvation, is not living in a cramped space, but in a wide-open space.  This means that yasha, salvation, is also the foundation of hope and a future.  Salvation means given a place to live, to breathe, to hope.  The motto of the Royal Burgh of St. Andrews, Scotland is Dum spiro spero.  “While I breathe I hope.” That’s what Simeon encountered in the face of this baby – a fuller reason to live with hope, with a promising future for Israel and for Gentiles, in seeing salvation he sees a wide-open space to live, to breathe – to be human. That’s what salvation looks like. 

Henrich Suso (c.1295-1366) once saw salvation.  It was an evening in 1328, the story goes, when German mystic and Dominican monk, Henrish Suso or Seuse had a vision.  An angel of the Lord approached him “brightly,” he wrote, “and said that God had sent him down to him, to bring him heavenly joys amid his sufferings; adding that he must casy off all his sorrows from his mind and bear them company, and that he must also dance with them in heavenly fashion.  Then they drew [Suso] by the hand into the dance, and the youth began a joyous song about the infant Jesus.”  When the vision ended, Suso wrote down the joyous song of the angels.  He called it In dulci jubilo, in sweetest jubilation; it’s the melody for “Good Christian Friends Rejoice.”[1]

As we bring the calendar year to an end this week, and as we emerge from Advent into a new liturgical year, what if we attuned our attention for experiences of God in our lives?  Periodically, I like to ask the Elders at a Session meeting, “Where have you seen God at work in this church over the last couple of months?”  “Where have you experienced God?”  “Where have you seen the spirit of Christ among us and within us?”  It’s a helpful spiritual discipline.

The more we ask this question in our lives, looking, anticipating an answer, the more our outlook and attitude and perspective will change.  There are experiences of God all around us, sightings of Jesus’ love and grace, holy moments when we know the Spirit is among us and within us.  Where have you seen salvation?

Just recently, I saw salvation at the Advent Service for Wholeness and Healing.  We had about eight people in attendance, but the energy and power in this space was amazing.   John Calvin (1509-1564) once said, “God is known where humanity is cared for.”  God’s Spirit was present as we cared for and provide a space for grief and hurt and sorrow and pain, and prayed together and provided hope.

Several weeks ago I was driving through Hampden and came upon the burned-out shell of a church, the Mt. Vernon United Methodist Church.  You could see the charred timbers in the steeple or tower.  It sits on the corner of 33^rd Street and Chestnut.  There’s a fence around the site.  But inside the fence, situated on the corner of the lot is a large plastic, illuminated nativity scene.  By the looks of it, it appeared that the church fire was a recent event, given the crèche on the corner.  I did a Google-search and discovered that the fire took place on August 2.   The church was built 160 years ago and the building is now condemned. This means that the church leaders intentionally set up the crèche as a deliberate choice to make a profound statement: God’s hope still shining brightly amid the rubble of our charred lives.  That’s the Christmas experience.   It’s a powerful statement.  Seeing salvation – hope, promise of a future, life.

Where have you seen salvation this Advent and Christmas?  Where have you seen signs of Christ’s love?  Where have you been given space to hope, to breath, to live?

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[1] Ian Bradley, The Penguin Book of Carols (London:  Penguin 1997), 150-153.

When a Stable Sufficed

Christmas Eve 2008

In surveys of least favorite Christmas songs, there’s one that makes every list: “The Little Drummer Boy.” Some might even call it annoying; along with “Do you Hear What I Hear.” Although, I kind of like both of them.

“The Little Drummer Boy” is imaginative fiction, there’s nothing biblical about it, of course. Essayist and novelist, David James Duncan, grew up loving this song. It was his brother’s favorite carol, a brother who died as a child, making it all the more meaningful. That is, until one day, he stopped and looked at the song. There’s something wrong, he writes, with the song’s basic premise. “Here is some uninvited urchin, standing right next to the cradle of a newborn baby, banging away on a drum. Have any vindictive relatives ever given a child in your home a drum? Pah rum pah pum pum is an extremely kind description of the result. Yet, out of reverence and love, this unidentified ‘poor boy’ marches up to the manger of the (probably sleeping) Christ child and bangs the hell out of his drum.” He says he can picture the infant Jesus’s eyes, “so innocent and new that they were unable to focus, startling wide O-pen at the sudden banging.” He could “picture God the Father wincing On High, wanting to cover His beloved son’s ears, make the donkey kick the Drummer Boy senseless, send in the wise men to stop the banging, only to sigh, swallow His anger, and think, ‘Nope. These are the mortals. [This is what they do.] This is Earth. This is my beloved son among the mortals on Earth. Let the drummer boy drum.”

Every December, Duncan says the first time he hears “The Little Drummer Boy” -- especially when it’s sung by kids – the chills run from my spine to my eyes, sometimes spilling over as the truth of the fiction hits home. “That it’s a “poor boy, too” – same as Jesus, or me, or you: the truth of our spiritual poverty gets me every time.”(1) Then he smiled at me pah rum pah pum pum. From a stable. That’s where God chooses to be born, among brutal ear-pounding human noise, as one of us. Pah rum pah pah pum. Hope is born in the most unlikely places, when a stable sufficed for the throne of a boy born to rule the world with the scepter of love.

It’s the same world that tirelessly tries to pound out a cacophony of sounds to muffle the cry of this baby. In 1914, the guns pounded the fields of France and Belgium with a ferocity and cruelty never before witnessed by humanity. On Christmas of that year, the war was about five months old; it was supposed to be finished by then. It took almost four more Christmases before it was finally over, “the war to end all wars.” This year marks the 90th anniversary of the Armistice. For almost 90 years, on Christmas Eve, Gordon McCrea pulled out an envelope brown with age and took out the letter inside (the paper was coming apart at the folds). It was written by his father to his mother and he turned to it every Christmas Eve.

It’s dated 29th December 1914, Ypres, Flanders, Belgium. The rains that fall seemed to be endless, filling the trenches along each side of No Man’s Land. Despite bailing and pumping, the bottom of the trenches were soup-like mud, knee-deep. “The misery and stench is beyond anything I could have imagined,” he wrote. Overwhelmed by the inhumanity he witnessed, he longed to be home for Christmas. But he tells what happened.

Starting on the 23rd December through the 25th, all along the front, from Verdun to Dunkirk, the British spotted lights at the tops of the German trenches. Then the Germans lifted up trees with candles on them and heard Fritz singing, “O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum…” The Brits thought it was a trap. But they just listened as the Germans celebrate Christmas. “When their singing stopped, several of us, accompanied by a harmonica, sang, ‘Away in a manger, no crib for a bed…” Cheers and applause came back from Fritz’s trenches.” On Christmas Eve at midnight, Gordon writes, “we heard Fritz singing ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, Alles schläft, sinsam wacht.” And the English joined back, “Silent Night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright.” “Then the miracle: men without their rifles climbed out of our hell-holes and we met each other in no-man’s land, singing the same Christmas song in two languages. Cigarettes, chocolates, meerschaum pipes, pictures were shared…” More men moved into No-Man’s Land. The Germans and English began to celebrate together. On Christmas Day they played soccer. It never happened again. The British High Command reprimanded the officers for allowing fraternizing with the enemy.

What a sight that must have been. For that first Christmas the Royal Family sent a gift to every soldier on the front. It was called the Princess Mary Tin – it contained a greeting card, some cigarettes, chocolate, pencil, and pad. I actually have one – on the lid it reads, Christmas 1914. This is like a holy relic for me; I like to imagine that whoever received this tin witnessed that Christmas truce.

Gordon wrote, “I don’t know how long this ‘Peace on Earth’ will last, but it as if the angels thronged the air over Flanders, and grim earth, hard as iron, sufficed to house God’s Christ once again. Not just in churches and warm homes where lighted trees and presents await good children, but God declared that Flanders muck and stench would suffice. And for four days the guns fells silent for 100 miles. All was calm, if not bright.” (2)

The good news of this night, my sisters and brothers in Christ, is that stable-places still suffice, whether the stench and much of a manger, the stench and muck of Flanders fields, even the muck of our lives, every place where the bleak midwinter tries to smother our joy, God’s Christ continues to be born there.(3)   

On this Christmas Eve, we gather on this corner of the kingdom, surrounded by a world filled with people hungry for good news, many are just plain hungry and worried and afraid and scared. With the economy tanking, unemployment rising, anxiety seems to be in the air, almost palpable. I can feel it and can see it. So many loved ones and friends are sufferings from so many illnesses this Christmas, mourning the loss of loved ones, of friends, of broken marriages, missing their children. Poet, Royce Scherf speaks for many this night, when he wrote:

The heart is tired at Bethlehem,
No human dream unbroken stands;
Yet here God comes to mortal hands,
And hope renewed cries out: - “Amen!” (4)

The world can be oh so dark and the bleakest places are never very far away. It’s said that the night is darkest just before the first light of dawn. We are here to claim that in the darkness a new light emerges. In the bleakest of places, a new hope is born. In a world of senseless violence, at the tip of Caesar’s spear, a different peace comes to us from Bethlehem. In every lonely, troubling place, in every absence and place of deepest ache, there is a presence who fills every empty place with a peace and comfort and even joy that the deepest pain cannot take away. For God will not be pushed out of life. God will not be silenced. God seeks to be born among us – with us – within us, no matter what or where. For in the bleakest places and times, the light of Christ continues to be born and born again and again; the light of Christ continues to shine and shines even in the darkness, and the darkness shall never, ever over come it – ever. Ever!

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(1)David James Duncan, God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right (Great Barrington, MA: The Triad Insitute, 2006), 12-15.

(2)Letter cited in a sermon by Terry Schoener, “A Stable-Place Sufficed,” in Stories for Christmas Eve Telling (2008), 54-57.

(3)"A stable-place sufficed," taken from Christina Rosetti's (1830-1894) text used in the carol, "In the Bleak Midwinter."

(4)Text and music of Royce J. Scherf, arranged by Robert Scholz in the piece, “The Hills Are Bare at Bethlehem.”  CD:  Christmas at Saint Olaf, Volume VI – What Wondrous Love, 1993.

God’s Glory – In the Flesh

Luke 1: 26-38
Fourth Sunday of Advent/ 21st December 2008

What kind of expression do you think Mary had on her face when Gabriel approached? Panic is one word that comes to mind. Shock, maybe. Enough to warrant Gabriel to say, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.” And then in the next breath she learns what God has in store for her, of what God will conceive through her. You have to wonder if she really felt favored by God, given the weight of responsibility now placed upon her, as well as the blessing and burden, hurt and pain his birth and life will cause her.

Every year during Advent, I stand shocked and amazed by this story. This story we think we know by heart, yet contains countless levels of meaning and depth. It’s inexhaustible. I’m shocked and amazed by what the gospel writers give witness to, of their firm belief – because they witnessed it firsthand – that God was indeed in this Jesus reconciling the world to Godself. “And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.” There’s really no precedence for such an act in the history of world religions. Sure, religions have deemed some births as miraculous or special, like Caesar Augustus (63 BC – 14 AD) . But here in this child the glory of the Living God – Yahweh – the Holy One of Israel who dwells in light inaccessible unknown, will begin to grow in Mary’s womb through the creative power of God. This child will be holy – meaning set apart for God. This child will be called Son of God. We need to remember it’s the same title given to Caesar Augustus, by the way, “Son of God.” But this child is holy, meaning different, conceived through the power of God, here is a true Son of God, unlike Caesar. And his name will be Jesus: Yeshua, meaning “Yahweh is my salvation.” Yahweh is the source of salvation, not Caesar.

Gabriel’s message points us to the profound theological claim of the New Testament, that in Jesus’ birth we are confronted with the mystery of the Incarnation. The glory of God, divinity, and the fullest, truest humanity meet in the person Jesus, the Christ.

Now, before we try to wrap our heads around this – don’t. Let me just say we can’t. And I’m not saying this as an excuse not to try. This isn’t a theological puzzle that needs to be solved, but an experience, an awareness of who God is. Think of it as an expression of doxology. The epistle lectionary reading from Romans, these few verses, is a doxology attached to the end of Paul’s epistle. Doxology, meaning, words of praise, is fitting at the summation of Paul’s profound letter. But it’s also fitting today. It’s the final lection reading of Advent, the last text read before the hearing of the birth narratives on Christmas Eve. It’s been said that all our knowledge ultimately leads toward doxology and true knowledge flows from doxology (1). It’s the rhythm of our life in God. Doxology – words of praise – are offered in response to the amazing work of God and from that doxology we gain new insight in the beauty and wonder of God’s creation.

The point here is that the lectionary intentionally links the Luke text of the Annunciation with the doxology at the end of Romans in the lectionary to lead us to this important insight: that in the coming and birth of Christ we are in over our heads in doxology and mystery. It overwhelms our senses, our expectations, and our reason. Praise is the appropriate posture as we await the coming of Christ. Doxology moves us toward God, away from ourselves. Doxology takes the focus way from ourselves and turns it toward God – toward the impossible thing God is about to do. Doxology moves us away from the present into the unfolding future God is about to give us.

This is the temptation: to make sense out of Jesus’ birth, to explain it all. What I hold out for us is a different way – let the mystery remain a mystery (don’t try to solve it), let God be God, let God’s glory do what God’s glory does, let doxology remain doxology instead of turning it into something else. For, if we don’t, doxology reduced to doctrine can be deadly. It’s deadly to our souls and to the soul of the church. When we do this, we suck the life and the joy and the glory out of this story, so much so that we’re not startled by it, surprised by it, shocked, even offended by Gabriel’s announcement.

The Brooklyn-based rock group, The Hold Steady’s wrote a piece called, “Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night;” in this song there is a line that gets at what I’m trying to say, “We dictate our doxologies and try to get sleeping kids to sit up and listen.” Doxologies can’t be dictated without them losing their power. No wonder our children fall asleep – and we with them, bored by God because we’ve lost the sense of awe, of the power and majesty and mystery and wonder and God’s glory revealed in the birth of Jesus. If we’re bored by God, then something is seriously – seriously – wrong.

What will it take for a changed perspective? Maybe it takes remembering that it’s not just about God’s glory and the power of the Most High along, but remembering that the glory and power of God were born within Mary’s womb. It’s impossible for any man to fully fathom the experience of carrying a baby to birth and to experience the birth of a child. It’s well-nigh impossible for men and woman to imagine what it must feel like to bear the birth of a God. We might have no problem imagining the divinity of God (we expect God to be divine), but to talk about God’s humanity or the humanity of God, that pushes us into new territory. It’s an imaginative reach. Yet, that’s what we have with his birth. This is the beginning of wonder, wonder, and shock.

Not only are we pushed to imagine God in a new light, we are also confronted with a new image of humanity, of what it means to be human. Jesus becomes the glory of humanity, the truest, most faithful person the world has ever known, fully alive, deeply grounded in God, therefore free to reach out to others, to give his life away for the sake of his relationship with God. Human beings were created to be in relationship with God. Jesus was fully, truly human in that his relationship with God was unblemished.

And the relationship with God is lived out through the fragility of human flesh. In the two thousand year history of Christianity, we have affirmed in our creeds that Jesus was fully God and fully human. Yet, in our practice and attitudes we have problems holding the two together. We either say he was really only a man (not divine) or we focus on the divine part and say he was a special kind of human, not human like the rest of us are human. We say he was a special case. But that’s not what the Gospel writers say to us – there is no doubt in their mind who Jesus is. In fact, they have no problem affirming that the Jesus they see in the flesh (even as they are in the flesh) is an embodiment of the Living God.

Yet, we have problems with this. Back in the 1940s, Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) wrote a play called, “The Man Born to be King,” which was transcribed for radio broadcast on the BBC during the Second World War. C. S. Lewis had a hand in getting the show produced. But what a ruckus it caused – who would play Christ? First, she writes, “The one kind of Christ I absolutely refuse to have at any price whatsoever, is a dull Christ; we have far too many of these in stained-glass windows.” And she said, it could be “Anybody other than a parson. …Well you, see,” she said, “they will sentimentalize it.” “There were no guidelines for the dramatist to follow or to prepare the audience and critics for the shock of hearing an everyday Christ.” Beyond this, there was actually a British law that “banned the representation on stage of any member of the Holy Trinity – God the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit.” This led to the view that such representations were intrinsically wicked – as if embodiment were somehow bad – see how we have problems with the flesh? Sayers said the law didn’t apply to radio; therefore the Lord Chamberlain of London had no jurisdiction (2). You see, we really don’t know what do do with a fully-human God in our midst.

Last week I was reminded of what his birth means. I was out on my porch sawing off some branches at the bottom of my Christmas before bringing it into the house and placing it in the stand. Somehow the saw ended up being too close to my index finger and I cut a gash in it. It hurt and it started to bleed – a lot. It took me a while to get the bleeding to stop. As I thought about it, it seemed odd getting blood, my red blood, on the green Christmas tree and then it seemed to make perfect sense, even seem profound. Because his birth was really in the flesh, God’s glory in the flesh, like mine – a flesh that bled like mine bled and yours bleeds. I came to have a sense of wonder and awe in that moment – couldn’t explain it, but accepted it, yielded to the experience, the insight, the truth.

What if a messenger of the Living God approached you and said that you would bear the hope of the world in your body? What would you say if you discovered that someone would be birthed through your DNA, through your blood-line who would embody the power of the Most High? And what if we answered to this news, not with “how can this be?” but with humility, allowing the experience of God’s glory, God’s holiness come upon us, come over us, and overshadow and move us? It seems to me that this is the posture required for such an experience, required for Advent. Instead of resisting the holiness of God, what if we accepted it and yielded to it, with the posture of praise and doxology? What if we said with Mary, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Imagine what could still be born of God through us.

For these weeks of Advent we’ve been preparing, getting ready for the birth of Christ. We prepare by getting out of the way and letting God do God’s new thing. We also prepare by yielding to the movement of God so that we can be swept up into the movement of God’s love poured out through Christ.

The great psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), used one word to describe how we should respond to every experience of the Holy – surrender. No easy task, as Mary knew and as all of us know, which is why we resist Holiness so much, because we know it will inevitably change our lives. How could it not? But we can’t live out the purpose of our lives, the goal of our calling as humans, unless we attend to that which summons us to life and place our lives at the disposal of God’s will. “Surrender to God,” Jung wrote, “is a formidable adventure….He who can risk himself wholly to it finds himself directly in the hands of God…Christian faith insists on the deadly danger of the adventure (3).” That’s what Jesus came to know in his life. It’s what we have come to know about life in him. That’s what Advent is, the adventure that invites us to take the risk and receive and embrace what the mystery of his birth really means, with all its life-changing implications. That’s the adventure of the Christian life.

So, who knows what might be birthed in you again or for the first time on Christmas Eve. My guess it that it will be found in those moments of doxology and praise and wonder, when our praises lead us to God, the God who took on flesh to redeem us all, who showed us what it means to be really human.

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Image: Fresco of The Annunciation attributed to Melozzo da Forli (c. 1438-1494),Church of Santa Maria ad Martyres (Pantheon), Rome (Photo: KEKovacs)

1The comment of pastoral theologian, James E. Loder (1931-2001).

2Cited in Justin Phillips, C. S. Lewis In A Time of War: The World War II Broadcasts That Riveted a Nation and Become the Classic Mere Christianity. Foreword by Douglas Hopper. (HarperSanFrancisco, 2002), pp. 204-206.

3C. G. Jung, “Letter to Pere Lachat,” in The Symbolic Life, vol. 18 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, para 178, cited in Ann Belford Ulanov and Alvin Dueck, The Living God and Our Living Psyche: What Christians Can Learn from Carl Jung (Grand Rapids: Eerdams, 2008), 50.