Lectionary readings: Isaiah 9:2-7 / Psalm 96 / Titus 2:11-14 / Luke 2:1-20
Opening Prayer: May I speak to you in the name of the Living God. Amen.
"It's the most wonderful time of the year" (excerpted from a song by Andy Williams)
That’s generally one of the first songs that comes to my mind in the end of November, or beginning of December.
Christmas is both a magical season and a time for stress in equal measure. For tonight, I want to invite you to forget all the stress about holidays, the stress of shopping and cooking and noises of the week, and focus on one thing: your relationship with God.
Note that I’m not asking to close your eyes and think about a baby or perhaps a family in a messy stable. I’m asking you to reserve these two hours tonight to open your hearts to God’s presence. Often Christians think that the feasts of Christmas and Easter are spiritual feasts. That we will encounter God in prayer; that God may be walking among us as an invisible presence, or even through mystical experiences.
Don’t get me wrong. Those are important elements, but they are not the sole elements of religious feasts. And Christmas is approaching tonight to teach us that.
For those who know me well, I’m not a big fan of Saint Paul, and I ask for forgiveness from those here today who are followers of the Pauline theology.
St. Paul influenced the Early Church with lots of Hellenic understandings of religion. For him, it seems that Spirituality is really about the soul and the things of the soul. That the body and its needs do not matter. In fact, Paul says that the body is the soul’s prison.
But was Paul really right on his belief? Thank God for the other saints of the church. Because centuries of Christian tradition have given us many signs that church isn’t about spiritual events but about our relationship with God and our relationship with God’s Creation. It is about what is visible and palpable. It is about how we express our belief in this world, in our societies.
If we pay attention, we will notice that things we have learned in church are about restoring the place of our bodies in our religion, in our dialogue with the divine.
Look at the biblical stories. Most miracles of Jesus are about restoring bodies who were ill or excluded by the society. The experience of Easter is the miracle of bringing a dead body back to fullness of life and giving us a promise of life eternal, in our own bodies.
We say that the church is the body of Christ, and while we gather every week as the Body of Christ. We break bread and share the wine that is given to us as Body and Blood of Christ.
The theology of the church has much more to teach us about how to exalt and honor the body that God has given to us.
There is much of Early theology of the church that isn’t about spiritual practices disconnected from the body. The Early church for example, gathered as physical body to eat food, and serve the poor. Meaning, nurturing the frail bodies. And only then did their prayer became meaningful.
And finally, we observe the experience of Christmas. Christmas is about the Word of God becoming flesh. The invisible becoming visible. God becoming fully human.
I love the theology of the early and Celtic church.
In the early Celtic tradition to become a bishop, it was also necessary to be a poet. Theologian Michael Mitton in his book ‘Restoring the Woven Cord’ says that a person who can’t say a poem is not fit for love. As a consequence, it is not apt to love and shepherd a flock.
Jesus of Nazareth is the loving poem of God to us. (the 'Verbum Dei')
The Gospel of John, the writer, makes that very clear: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)
Christmas is the feast that reminds us that God itself wanted to renew the love for humanity and to make what is human to be glorious. In this exchange of favors, we creatures of God taught God something. We taught God about how to express love through the body.
From before the mystery of that night of Christmas, God had never experienced love through a kiss, through a hug, through dance, through laugh, through body warmth. A theologian of the church suggests that before the birth of Jesus, God looked to humanity with curiosity. God have never experienced all these feelings and then in God’s curiosity, God became flesh. To exalt our body and to fulfill his body with love.
For the first time God knows what hunger means. For the first time God understands what it is to be frail and the risk of dying for not having been nurtured or loved. God in the arms of a young woman. And God will cry hungry if it wasn’t for the love of his young mother who loves him so deeply for being her first baby.
Christmas is a feast for all of us; on earth but also in heaven.
Christmas is a reminder that God now knows what suffering means. God understands hunger, pain, laughter, cold, and fear. God understands separation.
Tonight, we celebrate the hope; the hope that people will have find shelter in safe places. People like the homeless, the immigrant, the refugees. They live in hope. All those who are rejected by our societies, will have hope because God knows them and their pain.
And talking about pain, God also enters the lives of those who are suffering with illness tonight. Because He knows in his flesh what pain means. He has experience on the cross. God feels the pain of our humanity and the anxiety we carry in our bodies.
And to those of us who have shelter, food, jobs, family, and health, God knows our needs before we ask because God know us profoundly. We will not find God in gifts, but in love. The love that God will pour in us is to be shared. To be shared at home, with family. To be shared with friends. To be shared with the stranger in the streets that you may meet on your way home from here.
Christmas is about exaltation of God’s Creation, our bodies and the love expressed to all Creation.
May you be transformed by the Good News that God is coming tonight to love you in the complexity of your life, and the beauty of your body. Amen.
Credits:
Created with an image by OmarMedinaFilms - "mother baby parent"