The First Sunday after Christmas, December 27th, 2009

The Rev. Dr. Katharine C. Black, preaching

Isaiah 61: 10-62-3;
Psalm 147: 13-21
Galatians 3: 23-25, 4: 4-7
John 1: 1-18

Hallelujah! How good it is to sing praises to our God! How pleasant it is to honor God with praise!  AMEN.

Many collects are general, but today's is well aligned with its opening phrase: Almighty God, you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word. The lessons all spin around that idea of the incarnate Word, as around an atom's nucleus. Think of the big atom at one entrance to the Science Museum. Today's lessons go around that core phrase like those particles spinning around the center, with the center, elusively hard to see, and more elusive to understand. In Orthodox liturgies this opening hymn in John is the Easter Vigil's Gospel, emerging from the dark of Holy Week.

Today's other readings exalt the idea of the incarnate Word, in its reality, but that doesn't help much on understanding or experiencing meaning "for reals" as some say.

What is clear from each of the three other readings, Isaiah, Psalm, and Galatians, is that the lectionary choosers think whatever the Gospel is about, it's good, joyful, and something for which to give exultant thanks. Neither the psalmist nor Isaiah understood the Incarnation as John identifies it, because they lived before Christ, but they surely knew and trusted their own experiences of the living God. The Psalmist revels in God's interactions in the natural order, the real world. The Lord counts the stars and calls them by name. The Lord prepares rain for the earth; makes grass grow on the mountains; scatters hail, and when the Lord blows with the wind, waters flow. More than this, the Lord heals the broken hearted, lifts up the lowly, establishes peace, and declares his word to Jacob and judgments to Israel. While the psalmist describes the Lord's persistent involvement with Israel, he rejoices and praises God for all of it. There are neither complaints about the Lord's limits-that there isn't enough rain, or there's too much hail, or that too many of the lowly don't get lifted up, or stay broken-hearted. The way it is, causes the psalmist to rejoice and urge all, to join in giving thanks and praise.

Similarly, Isaiah gives thanks for the gifts of salvation he has received. He credits the Lord with making the earth grow abundantly and heaping righteousness on people and giving Jerusalem a crown of beauty and more. Again Isaiah's tone is exuberant and combines the Lord's creating and saving work in the natural world and for all people.

The joy expressed in Galatians centers on the gift of faith after the birth of Jesus. No longer subject just to the law, with Jesus comes the invitation of faith and so the gift of adoption by the Lord. Here, as I've said before the translation is PC, but lessens the accuracy of the passage. It was not children who were heirs, but only sons under Roman law of the time. The text says that as we are all sons, so we would all be heirs. Saying we are all children weakens the reality of each and every one of our gracious adoption by the Lord. The excitement the letter to the Galatians shows that all are freed from law to be everlastingly adopted through the Son's birth.

This conviction, is clear but so unclear. It takes faith to comprehend this, because Galatians takes the hymn, which begins John's Gospel and continues to expand on the consequences to all of the incarnate word. We're so used to hearing these words and saying them that we rarely think much about the how, the why, the reality, the possibility, the ordinary of this: the Word made flesh.

Dylan Thomas writes "In the Beginning."

In the beginning was the three-pointed star
One smile of light across the empty face,
One bough of bone across the rooting air.

(The next stanzas begin this way.)

In the beginning was the pale signature,
Three-syllabled and starry as the smile,
And after came the imprints on the water...

The next verse begins, "In the beginning was the mounting fire...

Then,

"In the beginning was the word, the word
That from the solid bases of the light
Abstracted all the letters of the void,
And from the cloudy bases of the breath
The word flowed up, translating to the heart
First characters of birth and death

Finally,

"In the beginning was the secret brain
The brain was celled and soldered in the thought
Before the pitch was forking to a sun;
Before the veins were shaking in their sieve,
Blood shot and scattered to the winds of light
The ribbed original of love.

At least in this poetic imagery, the scope and mystery spread out.   If you're looking at a iPhone at a map or a paragraph of text, and it's too small to see, you just drag your fingers up and down, or out, out, and the center you're looking at spreads out. You can see more of what's around the point you're focusing on. It doesn't necessarily make it easier to find or see, but you can see much more clearly what's around the point of focus.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth." There is not one word in this eloquent hymn that eludes any of us. It sounds wonderful, and seems to be clear, except for the bigness inherent in the simplicity. What of God's could become flesh? Real flesh? How could God become both so particular a person, such that he becomes universal in all people at least in all time from the birth of Christ? Did God become the word in all-earlier people, and if not why not? Was their span date of life their responsibility, such that Isaiah's kids lost but Judas' kids did not? The idea has such clarity and such complexity. Explained in metaphor the sexpansiveness in particularity is on view, but it's in our minds and hearts, our science-y outlook or a practical way of looking at genetics, the world, God's involvement with the world and its peoples.

Here's another take by D. H. Lawrence, on " The Body of God."

God is the great urge that has not yet found a body
But urges towards incarnation with the great creative urge.
And becomes at last a clove carnation: lo! That is god!
And becomes at last Helen, on Ninon:
any lovely and generous
                        woman
at her best and her most beautiful, being god, made manifest,
any clear and fearless man being god, very god.

There is no god
apart from poppies and the flying fish,
men singing songs, and women brushing their hair in the sun.
The lovely things are god that has come to pass, like Jesus came.
The rest, the undiscoverable, is the demiurge.

"The ribbed original of love" from Thomas isn't all that much clearer to me than John's hymn. I like Lawrence's "There is no god apart from poppies and the flying fish-the lovely things are god that has come to pass, like Jesus came," just as Jesus came. God is always connected with the loveliness of reality, like Jesus.

"God that has come to pass" isn't just a historical male who walked around Galilee and up to Jerusalem, and taught and performed miracles, and died and rose from the dead.  God can't be without real body, without real tangible form and substance, but the Spirit infuses other life forces and realities. God is not as simple as nouns and objects, but is not outside of these, nor apart from them either.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." If we read it the other way, "In the beginning was God and God was with the Word, and God was the Word" it feels more understandable, because on some level most of us really do picture God as a person, maybe even a white-bearded man. For that God-Word to be made flesh isn't such a leap. Somehow, though, that reduces the whole sphere of God's being to too close to our sphere, bigger but about the same shape. Instead the understanding John is trying to describe is more amorphous, without shape or person.

The great creative urge, all the lovely things expressed into a ribbed original of love keep us from a specific picture, but permits us to feel towards a force of generative lively loveliness which found perfect expression in the life, death resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. Is a clear picture or a vague reaching towards something closer to God's mystery? I have no idea. Do you know how to work a cookie press? You fill the tube of the cookie press and press the top in a smooth repeated movement and out shoots perfect cookie after cookie. (I never have made this work, but I get the image and the culinary requirement, the work of it. I think we see God stuffing the cookie press and shooting out one perfect cookie- and I know that's too easy, simplistic, and concrete. The mystery of the incarnation is throughout these simple sentences. Why and how did the living force of eternity infuse a particular human to live as a person, but filled with God's own stuff, the right stuff. Then Jesus lived a regular, sweaty, life with friends and family, issues and causes, and praise to God. While and after he lived and died, people concluded that that's what God would live like, but no just-human person could really do that, so Jesus must have been, in fact, filled with God's spirit, so filled that he must have been sent from God, or at least could graduate to God. God is not outside anything, but lived particularly in Jesus.

Poetry helps a little. Explanations help a little. Saying together what we think this all means helps a little. There are only two really important thoughts about the incarnate Word, though. It is a mystery beyond our encapsulation or packaging, bigger than our imaginations, understandings, and experience. Second it isn't all that important for any of us to be able to parse the Incarnation into easy explanations. Anything that did satisfy our comprehending thinking would only last for a moment, and then it would either seem too fuzzy or too precise. God's mystery is God's size, not our finite individual human size. Poetry helps us find another picture to see a reflection, an image, and a glimpse of God. Thinking and studying help. Participating with a believing and practicing group of people and joining together into the Body of Christ helps some. However we chip away at the enormity of the mystery, we won't be content that we have revealed the perfect, accurate, real core, nub, seed of our focus. Our only recourse is the same as the psalmist's and Isaiah's and seekers before and since: to celebrate with thanks and praise. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us: Good News.

~ Katharine C. Black 27 December 2009