by CCW | 31 December 2023 10:00
Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span;
Summer in winter; day in night;
Heaven in earth, and God in man.
Great little one, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav’n to earth.
Love comes down at Christmas to enfold us in God’s eternal embrace. Christ, the babe of Bethlehem, is God’s “great little one,” in the poet Richard Crashaw’s lovely phrase, who speaks to us even as an unspeaking infant, one who is, literally, without speech. Such are the paradoxes of Christmas, “all wonders in one sight.” The wonder and mystery of Christmas is the mystery of God and the mystery of our humanity, a double mystery, the mystery of God and the mystery of God with us. Today we are meant to be like Joseph who “thought on these things.” What things? Mary being “found with child of the Holy Ghost.” Tomorrow, on the Octave Day of Christmas, we are meant to be like Mary who “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart;” all these things concerning this child. There is something profoundly meditative and reflective about Christmas; the counter and corrective to all our calculative thinking.
Christmas is not about things as objects that can be wrapped in tinsel and ribbon. They last but for a day or a season only to be tossed away on the rubbish heap of the New Year, like Christmas trees, bedraggled and forlorn, lying at the end of driveways before Christmastide has hardly begun. It is as if Christmas is over and done with, merely a passing moment in the endless rush of things that belong to human calculation and interest. This is not Christmas.
It is not simply that there are the proverbial twelve days of Christmas; it is the greater wonder of the meaning of Christmas itself that abides and embraces us in something eternal, something of everlasting truth. In a way, Christmas is the opening to the mystery that cannot be reduced to the parade of things, to objects, or to the thinking that turns ourselves into things, ourselves as objects to be used and manipulated by one another. The wonder of Christmastide is our abiding in the abiding mystery of God. Love is not something which can be wrapped in a box of transitory delights; the chocolates, after all, are already gone.
The readings of the Christmas season show us the wonder of divine love and place us within its embrace. “The birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise,” Matthew tells us in his account of the Christmas story; it signifies the unique and special nature of Mary’s holy child. She is “found with child of the Holy Ghost.” “When the fulness of the time was come,” Paul tells us in Galatians, “God sent forth his Son,” the Son who already was and always is God’s Son, but now “made of a woman, made under the law.” The imagery is rich and profound about what ultimately is professed in the Creed and which we heard on Christmas Eve and Christmas Morn. God’s great little one is “God of God; Light of Light; very God, of very God; Begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father,” and yet, as the Christmas Preface puts it, he was “made very man of the substance of the Virgin Mary his mother; and that without spot of sin.” The mystery of God and the mystery of our humanity are before us in one and at the same time. In Christ.
This points us to a new and deeper understanding of our humanity. We are not simply calculative beings like machines, as it were. Our Christmas celebrations are really about a kind of meditative thinking that redeems the empty endlessness of our calculative thinking. We have, I think, gotten the Incarnation all wrong in another way, too.. The Christmas mystery is not about the affirmation of our existential lives in all of their endless indeterminacy and self-assertion. It is about the redemption of our humanity by its being grounded in the very life of God. “God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons,” as Paul puts it, echoing in a way, the great Christmas Gospel about how in receiving him we “become the sons of God.”
God the Son “being of one substance with the Father” and “made very man of the substance of the Virgin Mary his mother, and that without spot of sin,” comes “to make us clean from all sin.” We are given a new understanding of what it means to be human and one which challenges our ordinary assumptions and thoughts that belong to our thinking like things. Christ is true God and true Man, totally God and totally Man; not half-God and half-man, for that is simply another thing, a composite being. That way of thinking is part and parcel of the endless mythology of things, literally of the making of monsters – and what are they? – merely the combinations of different things whether aspects of our humanity conjoined to aspects of animals, or, in our technocratic world, combinations of our humanity conjoined to the machines which we have made.
This, too, is not the Christmas mystery. Christ is man born of woman, to be sure, but not as conceived through the union of man and woman. This opens us to the greater mystery of God’s making and remaking of our humanity in creation and redemption. We are more though not less than our bodily being and the cultural, social and economic forms of our embodiment. The Word made flesh is the Word by which “all things were made” and “without him was not anything made that was made;” the Word which speaks the whole of creation into being and life. The Incarnation is not the reduction of God to our human processes but their redemption; in short, their being gathered to their truth in God.
To put it in the somewhat abstract language of theology, God’s transcendence does not mean for us a flight from the finite world that negates the givenness of being. Nor does God’s immanence with us mean the collapse of God into us, the reduction of God to what is less than himself. The “immensity cloistered in thy dear womb”, meaning Christ in the womb of Mary, is born into the world that we might “receive the adoption of sons, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.” “And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” The wonder of Christmas is the wonder of God with us in the wonder of our abiding in him. For such is the radical truth of the Incarnation and so of our humanity.
“The way up and the way down are one and the same,” Heraclitus famously remarks. Our coming to God and God’s coming to us really belong to one and the same motion of God’s eternal life in us. Crashaw captures this truth in terms of the mystery of Christmas. The birth of “God’s great little one” is “all-embracing” and “lifts earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth.” We are to be like Joseph who “thought on these things.” In thinking upon these things we are opened to “all wonders in one sight,” the unity of opposites in God in whom we find the truth of our humanity.
Fr. David Curry,
Sunday after Christmas 2023
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2023/12/31/sermon-for-the-sunday-after-christmas-day-2/
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