BILLTESKA

A Muslim friend once remarked that Christianity is an esoteric religion that shouts its mysteries from he rooftops. Things that are secret and hidden ~ like the Child in the manger ~ are proclaimed and paraded in public. My friend is a Sufi dervish, whose tradition is to keep a very low profile, so as to stay under the Mullahs’ radar, because their teaching ~ like ours ~ is so unsettling and threatening to a certain kind of religious temperament. He went on to observe that it doesn’t seem to matter much that we reveal the Mysteries to anyone who will listen, because it doesn’t mean much to anyone who is not ready to hear ~ people for whom the Good News is too good. Too good to be true.

That is the occasion of our celebration tonight: Reality is too good to be true. It is also too good to be imagined, much less spoken aloud. And the notion that such a too-good-to-be-true Reality is not only spoken of, but seen is just preposterous ~ pretty much meaningless to many. The Good News is that the fundamental structure of the universe is friendly. Not cold and hostile and indifferent to us, but benign. And more than benign: deliriously, passionately in love with us. Anyone who can imagine that, even as a remote possibility, is what the Gospel calls a believer: one who has faith in the sense of trust. The Gospel expresses the Mystery in three short words: God is Love. But it goes on to elaborate the extent of the Love of God in a series of proclamations, each more astounding and impossible than the last:

· The universe is ruled by Benign Intelligence
· The benign Intelligence moves the universe toward a Reign of pefrect harmony and Justice, which called Shalom, peace. This movement is called The Kingdom of God.
· And this Benign Ultimate Reality wants to talk to us.

How is this possible? How would a human being talk to an insect? The Beloved who wants to communicate with us is even further removed from us than we are from the insects. Well, it’s not possible. Our minds can’t contain it ~ can’t grasp it, can’t comprehend ~ the notion at all. But that is the Mystery we proclaim from the rooftops when we speak of the Word of God. As our catechism puts it, the Beloved speaks to us through many sages and saints, and chiefly through the prophets of Israel. Not uniquely through them; not exclusively through them, but chiefly through them. That a man had spoken intelligibly to an insect would be amazing enough, but there is more:

· The Word God spoke through the prophets of Israel pointed to a still more astounding Reality: the Love that undergirds the universe proposes to live with us, among us ~ Emmanuel, God-with-us.
· And when it happens, God is not only with us, but one of us.

This impossible proclamation is really way, way too good to be true. We can imagine it, if at all, only in ecstatic images: virgins giving birth, archangels singing to disreputable homeless people, kings groveling in the muck, offering precious gifts, and unprecedented Light shining in the darkness. We take these ecstatic images as literal fact, and preserve them as dogma. And so we must, because it is the only way to approach the Mystery that has been revealed to us.

Are these things literal fact? Did the fleshly eyes of the shepherds really see the Glory of God? Was the Son of God born of a Virgin? Really? Faith answers yes, but at the same time has an inkling that the question of literal facticity is trivial, compared to the Reality to which the dogma points, which is even more stupendous and wonderful and too good to be true. But if our spiritual imagination can’t handle the Virgin Birth, how would it ever approach the much greater Mystery? The Beloved has to communicate with us in metaphors, analogies, parables, and paradoxes. It is the only way One so far exalted above us could get through to us.

The Reality may indeed be very much greater than the Virgin Birth, but as James A. Pike, that late Bishop of California, champion of social justice and human rights, and late-modern spiritual adventurer once observed, the Virginity of Mary is not important in itself, but for what it signifies. But if you can’t believe in the Virgin Birth, how in the world could you ever believe in the Incarnation? Our dogma may be symbolic and metaphorical, but its literal sense is indispensable to us as the vessel of the Mystery. The Virgin Birth is like a clay jug, in which the rarest of late-harvest wines is carried. Without the jug, we could never taste the wine. Likewise, the supernatural incomprehensibility of the Incarnation is contained in the Dogma of the Virgin Birth, so that we might in some way adore it.

But wait! There’s more! (“Jesus!” you gasp, “isn’t that enough?”) Well, yes. Enough for us insects. More than enough. More than we can take in, more than we can digest. But not enough for the Beloved. The Father of Mary’s Son has even more stupendous Mysteries to reveal, even more impossibilities to enact, because of His awful, unrelenting, Love ~ love for the cosmos, love for humanity, love for each one of us as persons. In fact, it is through this ravishing Love that we will become persons. But for now, we are full of wonder at the Beginning of the story.

God is Love. In a way, that basic reality is contained in the Holy Name. You shall call His Name Jesus. Jesus means God saves. God means Ultimate Reality and saves means to make well or to make whole. Anyone who trusts the fundamental goodness of the universe believes in the Name of Jesus, believes that God saves, that God is Love.

Tonight, on this Holy Night, God gives us a picture of what that is like, in terms we can all feel and understand: the fundamental Reality of the universe is like the Love of a mother for her newborn baby. And we, insects, creatures of dust, the Creation conscious of itself, are Her Baby.

O Come, let us worship and fall down, and kneel before the Lord, our Maker.

God not only speaks to us, but God’s Word is now one of us, lying on a bed of straw in a manger, helpless and completely dependent upon us, who behold his glory; the glory as of the only Son of God, full of grace and truth.