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!
+
