[Propertalk] 1 Christmas

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

Happy 1 Christmas - I'm still thinking on this....

Bob


THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY				            1 CHRISTMAS B
ISAIAH 61:10 – 62:3 						                       28th DECEMBER, 2014
GALATIANS 3:23 – 25; 4:4-7					  	                     PSALM 147
JOHN 1:1-18

	Some of you may remember the very first words spoken at the Service of 
Advent Lessons, Poetry and Hymns.

	We began in silence, as dark as it could be while still able to see our 
way to the pews without tripping. After all, we’re not God. Only God can 
work in darkness and do such a spectacular job.

	That’s what makes this Season so tremendous. It’s always at the time of 
longest, deepest darkness. It doesn’t even seem to be a noisy darkness. 
Just darkness – the feeling that we’re wrapped in something unknown yet 
all-knowing. Of course, some still fear darkness, as if seeing a threat 
or danger coming towards us makes it any less portentous. No doubt, at 
least some of the time, we’re still nervous in the dark. But it DOES 
seem to fine tune the senses, to make us wait with bated breath for 
whatever might be coming. Somehow, darkness encourages us to believe 
that it will not always be so, that SOMEthing will happen, and that 
we’ll be blessed by whatever it is.

	Those first words at the Advent Festival began:
		There was a time when there was no time,
		When darkness reigned as king,
		When a formless void was all that there was
		in the nothingness of eternity,
		When it was night.
		But over the void and over the night Love watched.
		There was a time when time began.
		It began when Love spoke.
		Time began for light and life, for splendor and grandeur.
		Time began for seas and mountains, for flowers and birds.
		Time began for the valleys to ring with the songs of life,
		and for the wilderness to echo with the wailing of wind
		and howling of animals.
		And over the earth, Love watched. 1

	Sometimes it’s the poetic imagination which enables us to start drawing 
closer to the things that seem to be hidden beyond our reach. Thus it 
was for the writer of the Fourth Gospel. Others had taken a stab at how 
they saw the Creator of the stars of night relating to everything. They 
talked of everyday folk who lived in a land that was troubled by 
darkness. Those others tried to express their belief that God cared 
intimately about all the details, the rush, the relationships, the 
pressures and frustrations.

	The Fourth Gospel’s author sought some sort of an intellectual 
understanding of what God’s continued work among us meant.

	It’s like looking for presents and deciding to peek under the bed or at 
the back of the deepest closet instead of what some might consider the 
logical place – under the tree. It’s like being willing to explore 
meanings and the thoughts behind the meanings, and being willing to be 
stumped, or surprised while trying to make sense of what has happened 
and may yet happen. So the Gospel writer, much like the scientific 
star-gazer today, strains to catch the tiniest hint of an echo that 
might go back before time began, to peek into God’s mind, as it were, to 
see what Love, and Light, and Joy are REALLY like.

	This struggle to make sense of what we see around us is what everything 
about Christmas invites us to engage. I don’t think there’s anyone who 
thinks that she or he will ever get all the answers this side of human 
death, but it doesn’t and shouldn’t stop any of us from asking 
questions. It’s only by asking questions, by peering further and further 
into God’s signs, that we find disclosure about how we’re supposed to 
live.

	The Love that watched over both void and night spoke, and the Word came 
among us and – as the language of the Gospel puts it – literally the 
Word pitched a tent among us, not erecting anything which cannot be 
moved or remodeled, but took up residence on earth in such a way that 
Love may transform us, reshape us in ways that bring us closer and 
closer to God in whose image we live.

	Somehow, darkness can’t quite get a handle on this, though. Darkness, 
for all the creative energy that’s present in it, darkness isn’t always 
comfortable with change, with transformation brought about by Light and 
Growth. The birth of God’s Son in our midst promises radical change. 
We’re invited to become aware of the practicality of Love, the radical 
hospitality of welcoming God and all God’s creatures into our lives.

	A friend of a good friend wrote this past week of just how much we have 
to be willing to rethink what God’s presence among us means.

	Linda wrote, “The Christian community has welcomed Gaza's Muslim 
families to worship and take refuge in their churches. Here's what one 
of my friends, a Palestinian Christian, had to say yesterday:

	‘Not that we ever felt that Palestinian Christians and Muslims were 
different, or felt any divide ever between us in Palestine. Today's call 
that the Greek Orthodox Church in Gaza and all other churches telling 
the Gaza people which is majority Muslims “you are welcome to stay and 
take refuge in our churches, and if the Israelis keep bombing your 
mosques, you are welcome to pray and lift the Azan, which is the Muslim 
call for prayer from inside our churches. They are all the houses of 
God.” So touching (concluded Linda). Let's always have our humanity 
prevail.” 2

	The Gospel writer struggled to express how God came to earth and how 
God’s arrival upset and confused people. Not everyone was happy, even to 
think about the possibility of seeing God, walking with God, rubbing 
shoulders with God in narrow streets and markets; not everyone was happy 
to think about that, never mind accepting that it happened and continues 
to happen. But we’re invited to enter into the realm of imagination, 
into the realm of hopes and wishes coming true, of lions lying peaceably 
with lambs; of shepherds and Wall Street bank executives eating at the 
same table; of people of all manner of ethnic and religious customs and 
backgrounds sharing space, sharing time, just as God now shares space 
and time with us.

	The Gospel writer talks about all of this, not as a neat package, but 
as something which continues to disturb precisely because of the 
Presence of Joy and Love and Hope. The world can never be the same again 
because it’s Creator has set foot in the dirt, has heard voices raised 
as much in argument as in pleasure. And that’s as it should be. We DON’T 
always think alike. We DON’T always agree. We’re NOT always comfortable 
with the thought of sharing, of being in the Light, of being willing to 
wrestle with the meaning of things.

	Frederick Buechner told a story of some of this discomfort as we 
wrestle with God in our lives. He talked about a cleric who, with his 
wife, had finished their own preparations for Christmas, then suddenly 
remember a promise to care for his neighbour’s sheep. “The sheep,” 
Buechner write, “huddle in a corner watching as he snaps the baling 
twine, shakes the squares of hay apart and starts scattering it.

  	“Then they come bumbling and shoving to get at it with their foolish, 
mild faces, the puffs of their breath showing in the air. He is reaching 
to turn off the bulb and leave when suddenly he realizes where he is. 
The winter darkness. The glimmer of light. The smell of the hay and the 
sound of the animals eating. Where he is, of course, is the manger.

	“He only just saw it. He whose business it is above everything else to 
have an eye for such things is all but blind in that eye. He who on his 
best days believes that everything that is most precious anywhere comes 
from that manger might easily have gone home to bed never knowing that 
he had himself just been in the manger. The world is the manger. It is 
only by grace that he happens to see this other part of the miracle.

	“Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own 
blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened 
otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace 
that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. 
We have roofed it in and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion 
we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at 
worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is 
indeed – as a matter of cold, hard fact (–) all it's cracked up to be, 
then even at best our efforts are misleading.

	“The Word become flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could 
crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not touching. It is 
not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness 
riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals 
of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the 
very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder 
before it, before this: ‘God of God, Light of Light, very God of very 
God . . . who for us and for our salvation,’ as the Nicene Creed puts 
it, ‘came down from heaven.’” 3

	As much as we wish it, Christmas is NOT neat, and tidy, and clear. 
We’ll be picking up bits and pieces of it for weeks, if not months, and 
be challenged by what that is, and how they fit into our lives. But its 
effect should become SUCH a part of us, that it never leaves us – even 
if that means disturbing our thinking and our acting. We’re to offer 
welcome to God this and every day, without reservation, as God bids us 
welcome.


Was
there sound?
Can any speak when the
unimaginable seeps into
our consciousness?
Was there naught but a quiet
shuffle of obeisance? Sheep,
cattle, surely mice, slipped
aside allowing the heav’n’s
rift to witness joy taking its
first breath while all else
watched wide-eyed, a muffled
cry aside.
Was there sound, or were
those few infused  with glory,
one with all creation, that
nothing more would suffice to
offer welcome but an open
heart, a cheerful mind, a
sigh of pleasure? And then, with
passing days, these words would
tumble out, around, through
darkest space and deepest
recesses, sound’s limitation’s breached,
as all finally begin to
comprehend the immeasurability of
Love on earth.

	

NOTES:

1 	“There Was A Time: An Advent Poem” by Fr. Joseph Breighner (The 
Catholic Review, 11-28-80) 
http://www.udayton.edu/mary/resources/poetry/advpoet.html

2	Linda McMillan on Facebook,  23rd December, 2014 
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1436495925&fref=ts

3	From “Whistling in the Dark”, and later in “Beyond Words” by Frederick 
Buechner December 19 at 1:32pm 
https://www.facebook.com/frederick.buechner.5/posts/10202779213952450?pnref=story


Robert P Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban
PO Box 1556
Albany OR  97321   541-921-1076 (cell)
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