Tag: Christmas

Madonna & Child (John 1)

Dancing with the Word (John 1 sermon)

Kyle

A sermon for the First Sunday of Christmas (Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Psalm 147; Galatians 3:23-25 & 4:4-7; John 1 :1-18)

Our Christian Feast of the Incarnation is twelve days long. So no matter how things fall in the December calendar, we always have at least one Sunday in this short liturgical season.

And that means we will always hear those majestic verses from the prologue of John’s gospel. The lectionary asks us every year to make sense of John 1 as a kind of nativity story. 

It’s a funny pairing: On the first day of Christmas, “shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night … go with haste and find Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger.” And then on the first Sunday of Christmas, “the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us.” Same message, very different style.

Luke’s Christmas story is full of charming, down-to-earth details. There’s plenty that we can easily get our heads around in his account, even if we don’t keep livestock. The challenge is for us to remember that many of those details derive from the political context of empire and the disadvantaged social positioning of the Holy Family.

Still I’m usually up to that challenge much more enthusiastically. It’s strange to be celebrating the birth of a baby, a tiny human, with such mystic and even cosmic poetry and theology as we’ve heard this morning.

John 1 tells us the Word came to dwell in “the [very] world that had come into being through him.” God becomes part of God’s creation. And probably we need this sense of the cosmic stakes and connections, because by verse twelve the prelude is already telling us that this Word “who is close to the Father’s heart”  has come to make God known to us, and still more audaciously to “g[i]ve [us] power to become children of God.”

It’s worth accepting the challenge to reckon in some way with John’s prologue in the midst of our dazed holiday fatigue. John needs us to know that there is a connection between the baby in the manger and the creation of the universe, between a human infant’s frail vulnerability and our startling capacity to become God’s friends and co-creators.

Jesus was born to show us God. Or is it better to say “to show us God’s love”? Is there any difference in those two ways of putting it? And if the Word was with God and was God and is the one through whom all things come into being, how do we understand whatever or whoever else was there in the beginning?

We can derive plenty of intellectual benefit for our faith by putting this and other passages under the microscope, studying the Greek, studying the philosophy of the day, studying what sense the church has made of all this since. That would be a good response on any given Sunday.

But our celebration of God’s Incarnation at Christmas is an especially sensory feast, with a baby at the center, getting glamorous and pungent presents and probably crying a bit more than the hymns would have us believe. So let me make a different suggestion.

If we want to experience John’s prologue and its proclamation in a more accessible and embodied and maybe Christmasy way, we might consider the metaphor that means so much to us here at St. Gregory’s.

I’m sure someone had remarked from this seat that when one looks up at Jesus on the Cross, one also sees him directly behind as the leader of the dance of saints. What if we see him in similar fashion behind the manger as we read from John 1:

In the beginning was the Word: the Word danced with God and the Word and the Dance were God. God danced in the beginning. Through the Dance all things came into being, invited to join another circle, invited to get in formation.

The Dance brought form and movement to the world, showed creation how to participate and also how to resist. But no wallflower could bring the Dance to a halt.

You get the idea. In Christ, the Word stepped aside from the transcendent but exclusive choreography of eternity and into the studio or the club where we enthusiastic amateurs mostly pull hamstrings and embarrass ourselves. 

Jesus enters the created circle and teaches us, reminds us, of the beauty and simplicity of the Dance. 

He shows us it is no less sacred if we sometimes step behind the beat or on our partner’s toes or even unexpectedly in a pile of manure. Even a baby can join the circle strapped to mom or dad’s torso, which, by the way, is how I invite you to look at the next Madonna and Child icon you encounter.

So, if you’re feeling lost in the cosmos upon hearing today’s peculiar Christmas gospel, it might be that the most faithful words from and to the preacher are something like, “shut up and dance.”

Merry Christmas: The Word has been made flesh and dances among us.

Image: “Andes Virgin & Child” by Artemio Coanqui via Enchanted Booklet (CC BY SA 2.0)

Syrian refugees waiting for a train

Sermon: Imagination and empathy in the season of the Incarnation

Kyle

Second Sunday after Christmas

Jeremiah 31:7-14; Psalm 84; Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a; Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

Audio | Text:

Happy second Sunday after Christmas. The prayer book says we are in the season of the Incarnation, but I prefer to think of these days between Christmas and Epiphany as the season of imagination.

I believe our primary job as disciples is to claim the Christian story as our own, to learn to find our strength and our hope in the great saga of God’s loving relationship with the world. If that’s true, then there is no better time to practice than when we gather around the manger and marvel at the Christ child.

You see, I have a hard time imagining myself in the place of, say, Paul, making courageous and unpopular speeches before hostile crowds and rulers. I make a lousy imaginary Peter, afraid to drop everything and follow a teacher who challenges me to let go.

When I read the story of Jonah running away from God, that one immediately resonates. But my imagination has thus far not been dexterous enough to find a proper analogy to being swallowed and regurgitated by a giant fish.

But it’s Christmas time, and let me tell you I have played this role of a shepherd. I’m 32 years old and don’t have children. That means if you call me up and say you want me to come meet your new baby this weekend, even this evening? I am all in.

Even if we’re not that close, even if you send a messenger instead, the answer is “yes, I would love to stop by and meet your baby.” If it’s OK with you, it’s more than OK with me. Gloria in excelsis. Demos gracias a Dios.

I don’t really mean to be flippant here. When I held my godson at his baptism, I understood that he was not the savior of the world. But holding a baby, even just beholding, especially a newborn? I don’t think there’s any surer route to contemplating the mystery and the miracle of God at work in the world, or of the saving power of love.

I don’t know exactly what it would be like to look at a child in a manger and somehow to know he was God’s only begotten son. But I think I can imagine it, and I think this season is special because we’re invited to try.

Of course, as we all know, imagination is also dangerous, biblical imagination perhaps most of all. Not every story is shepherds keeping watch by night, or calling us each by name, or opening wide the gates of the sheepfold.

And in years when we have two Sundays before Epiphany, we’re forced to grapple with this sad fact faster than you can say “We Three Kings.”

As we heard just a minute ago, our story this morning actually fast forwards slightly: “After the wise men had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.”

So much for “all is calm, all is bright.” Too quickly, this becomes a story of violence in the streets, of fear and bereavement for too many.

Even our fortunate holy family does not get off easy. We can well imagine the impact of their secretive travel to a strange land. On the long road to Egypt, and in the difficult months that followed, I wonder what Mary and Joseph would have thought about. How they made sense of their plight. How those reflections would have shaped their future identity as a family.

We might imagine Joseph thinking about his namesake, the Joseph of the Book of Genesis, who was first left for dead and then sold into slavery before coming to prominence and power in Egypt.

That Joseph was quick to point out how his whole misadventure-turned-deliverance was intended by God for good. Those parallels could have been some comfort to a young refugee couple doing the best they could for their son.

Turning back to the text, we notice even the family’s return is plagued by uncertainty and displacement. Because of still another unjust leader taking power and best avoided, the family receives another dream, sets off on another journey, and settles not in Judea, as they seem to have planned, but in Galilee.

Luke tells this story differently, of course, and we’ll never know how things really went down for the holy family. But whether or not they spent time as refugees in Egypt, they seem, like many poor people, to have had some kind of itinerant existence, an existence these gospel authors are trying to get us thinking about.

And if we let our imaginations continue to doodle in between the lines of their narratives, it isn’t hard to picture these experiences as fundamental building blocks of Jesus’ later character and teachings.

I wonder, might the story of a family encounter on the dangerous road have served as a kind of experiential first draft for Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan?

I wonder, might growing up in a family with a refugee consciousness have opened Jesus to the kinds of socially transgressive exchanges he was always having—with foreigners, with single women, with children?

I wonder, might that same ethos have set Jesus on his own wandering, itinerant path? After all, he could have become a more place-bound guru like John the Baptist, or a refined city slicker like Paul. He seems to have preferred the road.

I wonder if distant memories of hunger on the road might have made Jesus the teacher of crowds all the more insistent on feeding them before their long journeys home.

Here’s what I’m getting at: Might we imagine today that Jesus’ family experience shaped his imagination, his ability to look with love and compassion on those he met? And might we use this occasion for committing ourselves to that same empathetic curiosity and caring?

The year we have just begun will be another year of grappling with how to welcome the stranger, how to offer safe refuge and generous hospitality to those who, like Mary and Joseph, fled terrifying violence and now seek a safe and humane place to raise their children.

We live in New York City, and this is an election year, and the violence in places like Syria, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala shows no signs of stopping. The question isn’t going away just because it resists easy answers.

What I do know is this: the power of imagination is essential to our flourishing together.

We might begin by imagining ourselves in Mary and Joseph’s shoes, or what passed for shoes in their time. With God’s help, we might continue by imagining ourselves in an overloaded ship on dangerous waters, or what will pass for a ship when the reality at home becomes sufficiently terrifying.

With God’s help, we might learn about the work of those already serving refugees here and abroad, like Episcopal Migration Ministries and the UN Refugee Agency. We might explore where we fit into this important work.

Most audaciously of all, we might imagine that a tiny baby in Bethlehem two thousand years ago has the power to inspire us to loving actions large and small, including actions that make life a little more bearable for families like his.

Image credit: Syrian Refugees in Vienna by Josh Zakary via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).