Sermon given by Rev. Frank Clarkson, December 16, 2018
Those words we just sang, “In the bleak midwinter, in this world of pain, where our hearts are open, love is born again,” they are new words, a new verse added to Christina Rossetti’s poem about the birth of Jesus. And they are true words, aren’t they? In this world of pain, this world we all live in, the way of more love, the way for love to come in and heal the hurt and brokenness, the only way I know for love to be born is to open you heart as wide as you can. To be open to the sorrow and the joy. As the kids say these days, to feel all the feels.
This Sunday I want to help you get ready for Christmas. People ask you that, right? “Are you ready for Christmas?” they say. What do you think that means? Probably something like, “Have you done all your shopping?” or “Have you done all your decorating?” Maybe it means, “Are your sufficiently stressed out, so that now Christmas can come and then you can collapse in exhaustion?” I hope that’s not your experience, because Christmas is this beautiful and rich season that invites us into a deeper experience of being alive, of being in touch with the Holy, of being reminded that if we meet God anywhere, it is right here—in this moment, in these bodies. And I need that, and I expect you do too.
Now do you think, when people ask, “Are you ready for Christmas?” does anyone ever mean, “Have you done the spiritual and theological work to prepare yourself?” Probably not, but they should—because this is what it’s all about: the incarnation, God with us. As one of my favorite carols puts it: “Good will henceforth from heaven to earth, begin and never cease.”
When the moment comes, maybe when you’re in church on Christmas Eve, and candlelight is moving slowly through the sanctuary, and we’re about to sing “Silent Night,” you want to be fully present to it, to have a deep and profound experience of the beauty and power and the mystery of the moment. You don’t to get want to find yourself asking, in that moment, “What does it all mean? And am I down with it, with the theology of Christmas, this idea of ‘God with us?’” Christmas Eve is not the best time to be trying to figure this out. It’s a time to be open to the wonder and the mystery and the spirit of it all.
Right now, this is a good time to reflect on these things. I’m pretty sure no one ever means this when they ask if you’re ready for Christmas. But I dare say this work of exploring the theology of Christmas is the best way to get ready for this beautifully complicated and layered celebration. And even this, I fear, sounds too heady and intellectual, this talk of incarnational theology. Because it’s not. What I love about Christmas is that it’s all about embodiment. It’s earthy and real: these stories of people in gritty, real life situations, where the Holy breaks in and they are surprised to discover that God is not out there somewhere, but here, in the midst and in the mess of our lives. Incarnation is not theory, it’s what we are invited to practice. As we heard from Rebecca Parker at Vespers this week,
You have to know your body
as the home of God
And this is the purpose of Christmas…
This is the key to the mystery,
The Word became flesh.
We are the dwelling place.
Do you hear how radical and empowering this is? You don’t need a minister or a priest, you don’t even need a church or a ritual or a book to access the Holy! You just need this body you have been given! You just need this heart, this soul, these senses, these companions, to help you apprehend these mysteries unfolding around us, if we will only notice.
It’s not that complicated. But church leaders must have realized early on, that this was no way to build up an institution. You need to create a structure and rules, and you need people to need you, in order for the institution to survive and grow! So you start saying, “This is the only way, we are the one true church,” in order to build up your brand. As my spiritual director likes to say, “Jesus gave us the mystery, and what we ended up with is the church.”
This time of year, people hear again the story of Christmas, of God coming to earth as a baby born in an out of the way place to everyday people, and they naturally wonder, “Is it true?”
My friend Gary Smith, for many years minister of the big UU church in Concord, says, “I believe the answers to (this question), and questions like it, are found more in poetry than in logic, more in the possible than in the actual, more in the right brain than in the left. The Christian orthodox, the fundamentalists, the Biblical literalists,” he says, “they hold on to the actual: there was a star, they would say, there was a stable, there was a birth, the mother was a virgin, there were angels. It is a package deal. Say yes to all of it, and you’re in. So no to any part, and you’re out.”
Gary knows we UUs aren’t like that—we can have more questions than answers, and he says this can lead to “one of your relatives asking you with a smirk, as they do every year, ‘Do UUs really celebrate Christmas?’” So on the last Christmas he preached before his retirement, Gary told those folks, “I want you to be ready this year. ‘Why yes,’ you will say. ‘Incarnation is at the center of our theology. It is who we are. It is the faith we practice….’ Tell your skeptical relatives that we embrace the poetry of Christmas, and that Christmas is part and parcel of the notion that God has become flesh, Jesus’ flesh for this holiday, but our flesh, too, and ‘our flesh’ is the important part, your flesh and my flesh, your body and my body, your heart and my heart, your hands and my hands, your loves and my loves, what we do in our humanity to take the part of a living God in this life we are given.”
Can you trust this? I hope so, because I know it to be true. I’ve seen it. One of the best things about being your pastor is that sometimes I get to see you embodying the holy. And I wonder, do you see it too? That you are bearers of light and love, God’s hands and feet in the world; that this is beautiful to behold. On this day when we remember the life of Lynn LaFerla and mourn her death, we are reminded that we are still alive, that we are still here, in the flesh. As Joan Chittister reminds us, the flesh “is all we have. It is our glory. It is our power. It is sweet. Is is beautiful. And it is the clay out of which we shape a better tomorrow.”
You know already that this being human is no walk in the park. It hurts, sometimes. It pushes us down to our knees, it knocks us flat, some days. This is what I love about Garry Wills’ words about the dark and risky nature of Christmas; the invitation to enter the story with our whole lives, to see the pain and the loss as holy too, to see our struggles and suffering not as something to be denied or prettied up, but to be owned, because we have earned these scars, they are signs of healing, of what has gotten us here.
“There is nothing in the Christmas narrative to make us turn the manger into a Disneyland scene,” Garry Wills writes. “The Gospels tell of a young couple driven out in hiding, of a king plotting murder. Which is why Bach wove themes of the Passion into his Advent cantatas. And Casals, in his oratorio, ‘The Manger,’ finds the baby crying and cold…
“Becoming human,” he says, “is itself a kind of high wire balancing act. Becoming better human beings always involves suffering. Those are the truths of Christmas, yet they are just the ones some defenders of Christmas would have us avoid.
“Why does Christmas lead so easily to despair? Because Christmas heightens our memory and yearnings, our wish to love and be loved. It stretches our human capacities, often to a breaking point. Christmas is a dark and risky business: like falling in love, or beginning an adventure; like birth, sex, or death; like becoming flesh and dwelling among humans.”
In these days, let us be opened up, let us be stretched, let us feel all the feels, because that risky place is where we will get below the surface and into the flesh, into the heart of things, into that holy place where we will meet and know God. In this season of incarnation, of God with us, let us look for the holy in one another, and in the stranger, and in our own flesh.
Are you ready for Christmas? Time is growing short, so here are the Cliff notes:
You have to know your body
as the home of God
And this is the purpose of Christmas…
This is the key to the mystery,
The Word became flesh.
We are the dwelling place.
Amen.