Incarnation (Christmas Eve Meditation)

“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

         Merry Christmas to all of you – you beautiful, gifted, imperfect custodians of Incarnation.

¹http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/mary_oliver/poems/15803