Saturday, December 31, 2016

Nativity ~ December 24, 2016

Sermon for Chistmas Eve
Year A ~  December 24, 2016

Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

Those who love me will keep my word, and my  
Father will love them, and we will come to them
 and make our home with them.


+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity

That has always struck me as one of the most stupendous and mysterious phrases in all of Scripture. How can God move? God is everywhere — and nowhere. God is outside time and space. Motion means time. How can the infinite and eternal One move? It is beyond us, outside the capacity of rational consciousness. It remains a mystery. It is the mystery that we celebrate on this Most Holy Night. God’s moving: coming to make a home with us.
We must not restrict this mystery to the individual, inner, spiritual lives of “those who love.” This promise is, no doubt, true on that level, but it is also true on the interpersonal and cosmic level. Jesus promises that He and the Father will come to “make our home with them" in this world, in history, in this life. He does not promise to come and take us out of the world, but rather to “make our home with them” in this world.
After the decline of the Roman Empire, there was a lot less moving around. In the period we call the Middle Ages, everybody pretty much stayed put — geographically, but also socially and economically. Mobility was not particularly desirable. All that began to change in the High Middle Ages, when the paradigm shifted and many began to think that there was some spiritual benefit in moving — at least temporarily. (They may have got this idea — pilgrimage — from the Muslims, who in any case had the idea before we did.) So people went crazy over pilgrimages: Canterbury, Santiago de Compostela, Rome, and — of course — Jerusalem.
The notion that one ought to move if one could, got deep into our consciousness. The whole capitalist system is based on motion: trading over as wide an area as possible. Worldwide exploration to expand the scope of trade, and imperial domination for the same purpose.
Eventually, many Europeans decided to leave home permanently, and to move to new places, in search of a better life — freedom from old constraints, but mostly for economic improvement. Perhaps more than any other country, our own United States of America is based on the idea of moving. Let’s remember that it became conventional to refer to those original English settlers as pilgrims.  As though there were something holy about their moving.
This became part of our American ideology: anyone with any ability, anyone “worth their salt”, would naturally want to leave home and go somewhere else to make a fortune. This was called ambition, which comes from a Latin word meaning walking around. In the Middle Ages, ambition was regarded negatively, but modern capitalism turned it into a virtue. “Go west young man.” Was the maxim of American expansion, without regard to the effect on the natural world or the genocide on  indigenous peoples. These were what we now call “external costs.”
Here the underlying modern theme of motion reaches the extreme. Paul Ehrlich, an early ecologist, rephrased our national maxim: not “go west young man,” but “foul your nest and move west!” Only now we can’t do that anymore. Oh, we can still foul our nest, all right, but now there is no place else to move to. No more “West” in that archetypical, imaginary sense of the land of limitless opportunity. Still the paradigm of the virtue of motion – our idea that moving is good –  persists, and causes conflict.
I’ve sometimes wondered whether the super-rich really want to take everything, because they recognize that pretty soon there will be big problems, but with enough money they could insulate themselves from the negative consequences of capitalism. With enough money, one could, presumably live in a fortified island of prosperity in the sea of increasing misery. Now, one actually hears that some super-rich people seriously think about pooling their resources to build a spaceship to take them away, once the world becomes uninhabitable, as a result of their rapacity!
This is the ultimate end of the motion-paradigm, of moving to better one’s self, of motion over stability: a voluntary exit from the world into perpetual motion in outer space. But such a project would amount to voluntary damnation. After all, what would those super-billionaires find on their spaceship, but other people who were all used to being on top? What do you think would happen then? “The Lord of the Flies,” that’s what. The billionaires would start fighting and kill one another, probably before they even got out of the solar system.
Motion, in the sense of getting out, leaving  home in the name of finding something better — even in the name of finding salvation — is deep in our consciousness, but it is a dead end. It is a horrible counterfeit of the only motion that can save us: God’s motion, God’s coming to us to make a home with us. Coming into the world, not leaving the earth. That is what we celebrate tonight.
God comes into our darkening world, but things are not instantly changed. Only a few recognize what is happening: the extremely poor, and the extremely wise, who are at the same time humble. But their recognition occurs in private. The immediate public effect of God’s Coming is disaster: atrocity, infanticide, the slaughter of the innocents. The Holy Family has to flee into Egypt as refugees. The darkness is not dispelled. Not right away. And yet the world is re-created. Silently, incognito, out of sight, hidden from the view of the powers of this dying world, unnoticed by the bemused and avaricious who would defile and then escape the world, God sets to work to save the world. That doesn’t mean that things are going to get better right away or any time soon. In fact, things may get a great deal worse, as we are about to find out in our own land. More injustice, more inequality, more misery and heartache, more “Rachel weeping for her children, because they are not.”
But tonight we celebrate hope: Hope that the increasing darkness will not be the end of the story. Hope that the raging tyrant will not have the last word. Not because we imagine that things are going to get better in our time, but because we believe that God is with us. This is the difference between optimism and hope. In our own present moment, when insane avarice seems to have taken over, the words of Karl Barth seem especially pertinent:

Between the rich and the poor heaven does not adopt a posture of neutrality. The rich can take care of their own future. God is on the side of the poor.

Emmanuel. Yes. God is with us. God is with the poor, who cannot afford to dream of escaping on a spaceship. God is also with the rich who are sufficiently wise to humble themselves and identify with the poor and move to where they are:  the rich who indeed get up and leave their own country, their own comfortable home of insulated peace, and journey far into the dangerous world, to find the Holy One, Who has come into the World, in order to deliver their riches to Him, so that He and His human Family may have the mans,  in turn, to get up and flee into Egypt, where they can find refuge until it is safe to return.
In the end, we can’t lose if we love the One born as on this night, for we have His promise:

Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.

ALLELUIA!
CHRIST IS BORN!
COME, LET US ADORE HIM!

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