“Incarnation”
John 1:1-5, 10-14
Christmas Eve – 2015
In the course of nineteen-and-one-half years of ministry –
plus the prior three years of seminary – I have often said that Christmas has
no lasting meaning apart from Easter. Easter, I said, held the more sacred
space. While still recognizing the inseparability of the two, I feel my perspective
shifting. I am beginning to see Easter as a kind of lens through which
Christmas comes into clearer focus. More accurately, I am beginning to see Resurrection as a kind of lens through
which Incarnation comes into focus. Maybe
we can think of Resurrection as a prism, a three-sided optic which bends the bright
mystery of Incarnation into all of its stunning beauty, variety, and
possibility.
“In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…All
things came into being through him…what has come into being in him was life,
and the life was the light of all people.”
Ancient Celtic Christians drew heavily from the witness of
the Gospel of John. They felt that Johannine writings offered far more than
doctrine to believe. John invites humankind into the living and transforming
presence of God – a presence that is continually being born into the creation.
Indeed, the Celts affirmed that the Creator’s presence is the very essence of
the created order, so they entered into relationship with God by entering into
relationship with self, with neighbor, and with the earth itself.
How
freeing, how empowering, how resurrecting
to encounter Incarnation in ways so
much more real than some intellectual effort to think rightly about the One who
defies all thinking. And how appropriate, artful, and inspiring for Christians to
embrace the birth of a specific child, Jesus of Nazareth, as God’s unique self-disclosure.
Christmas is about the Word becoming flesh. It is about the
material quickening of Light into Life. We use so many metaphors that we forget
we are using them. In the confusion, we can become rigid when speaking of God. We
can allow our words to become
inflexible and absolute. But while Incarnation is earthy and corporeal as childbirth,
understanding it depends on suggestion, imagination, and interpretation. Incarnation
is most faithfully celebrated through story, poetry and song. That is why we
read again Luke’s familiar birth narrative with its shepherds and their gamey pits and crude jokes, with its drafty stable where unimpressed farm animals munch on sweet hay next to a young woman groaning and sweating her way through her first experience of childbirth. That is why we, along
with “heaven and nature,” sing and listen to so much music at this time of
year. That is why we celebrate the mystery of Holy Communion tonight.
It
is a gracious irony: All of our words fail to convey the fullness of the Word. The
Word always stands the best chance of being heard when articulated incarnationally
– through our being present with and for one another and the creation. And as
often as not, even silence expresses the Word better than words.
Nonetheless, words are gifts, too. Mary Oliver has a unique
gift for experiencing the Incarnate Word in the world and for sharing what she
sees through lovingly chosen and carefully crafted words. Tonight I share with
you one of her poems. It is entitled simply “Poem.” I take that as an artist’s
nod toward the humbling reality that what she creates cannot adequately express
the fullness, the gratitude, and the enlivening hope she feels when experiencing
God Incarnate in the creation.
So
on this Christmas Eve, may you hear, see, and feel in these words The Word. And may you sense that ancient
and ongoing Word being born, being Incarnated
anew in you. For all of us, like the Christ himself, bear in our lives the
Light, the Love, the very essence of God.
Poem
by Mary Oliver
The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,
shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning
in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather
plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,
lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinct
and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,
to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is –
so it enters us –
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;
and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.1
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,
shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning
in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather
plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,
lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinct
and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,
to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is –
so it enters us –
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;
and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.1
Merry
Christmas to all of you – you beautiful, gifted, imperfect custodians of
Incarnation.
