Born to Set Us Free! A Sermon for Christmas Day
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Christmas Day by the Rev. Holly Huff, Deacon.
I remember one evening when I was in college trudging through the mid-December slush over to a good friend’s house for dinner. Three of my dear friends lived together in a basement student apartment a few blocks away. It was painted in shockingly bright colors and stuffed full with slightly-broken IKEA couches. Coming through the door on this night, this strange little home was cozy and warm and smelled like tomato sauce. Finals were almost over and we were playing board games in the cramped living room, trying not to fall into the couch, listening to Sufjan Stevens—reportedly an Episcopalian, by the way—as he sang hipster versions of Christmas classics. (We thought we were very cool.) My friend Victoria was cooking, weaving around the black-and-white checkerboard vinyl kitchen floor, and gesturing with a wooden spoon as she talked. She’d gone through a pretty thorough and radical deconstruction of the faith she grew up with, we all had, really. She considered herself agnostic and still does. And every year leading up to Christmas I think about her in the kitchen on this night explaining that despite herself, despite her distrust of religious ideas in general and Christianity in particular, despite this, at Christmas time and especially listening to Christmas music, she was filled with an irrational joy and excitement that “Jesus is coming to set us free!” She raised her arms up to lean on the door frame leading into the kitchen as she said this, or shouted it really, wooden spoon flicking tomato sauce as she did. “Jesus is coming to set us free!” And she expressed with I think admirable wonder the dissonance of that joy and anticipation with the thoughts in her head, and with her rational assessment of the state of the world.
My friend’s irrational joy reminds me of Tennyson’s remark that “There lives more faith in honest doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds.” She was expressing not an assent to belief or systematic theological understanding, but just a genuinely felt sense of Wonder, that burbled up despite herself, at how Wonderful it would be for God to come to be with us, choosing smallness, littleness, and humanness, joining us in our human experience to set us free.
***
Last night we heard the narrative of the Nativity from Luke 2: the tax and the journey, no room in the inn, the unlikely stable, Mary and the baby, the angel, the shepherds, the sheep and the star. At the 5pm family service the children brought up each piece of the creche as we told the story. These figures, these improbable and somewhat smelly characters help us make sense of the fully human side of Incarnation: Jesus was born in a specific time and place in humble and discrete material conditions, to poor parents on the outs under the thumb of empire. And in our Gospel today we get the other side of Incarnation, in John’s high-soaring voice, reminding us exactly who it was in these humble scenes, fully divine in the dirt and the straw:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it…. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory.”
In this tiny baby outside Bethlehem, the creator of all things enters the creation and comes to be with us in it. The one who was in the Beginning steps into time, becoming as fragile as the rest of us. Why would God make Godself so utterly vulnerable? God takes on human flesh, becomes meat, you could say! Writing about the Incarnation of God Annie Dillard puts it this way: God “bound himself to time and its hazards and haps as a man would lash himself to a tree for love,” and in Jesus “God is helpless, our baby to bear, self-abandoned on the doorstep of time, wondered at by cattle and oxen” (Holy the Firm).
***
Why should God come to dwell among us in vulnerable human flesh? It’s not that God was once distant and now is near; no, by nature of our being created God is near to us, “more intimate to me than my own self.” God holds us in being in each moment, “sustaining all things by his powerful word.” And that’s been true from the very beginning. But the Creator enters the creation, comes to be with us in it and lives among us for our sake, so that we might actually know the God who is so close to us. As Johnny Cash says, “Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood.” God comes to us in Jesus to reveals God’s nature to us, and to restore our human nature. To reveal God’s nature to us, and to restore our human nature.
Jesus reveals God’s nature as love and tenderness. He is the face of God to us, disclosed in a way human beings can understand—through a person. As the letter to the Hebrews says, “God has spoken to us now by a Son…who is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being.” Jesus makes God visible: we know what God is like by what we see in Jesus. “Self-abandoned on the doorstep of time”, Jesus shows us the face of God, a God who does not cling to power but empties himself for others. In his teaching and his treatment of the outcasts, the lepers and prostitutes and tax collectors and beggars, the unseen and the unclean, Jesus shows us the face of God, unafraid to touch the untouchable and love the unlovable. And of course on the cross, Jesus shows us the face of God, as the willing victim of human fear and violence, who doesn’t resist but dives into the heart of the evil and shame and death in order to undo them and set us free. What have you done to yourselves? In Jesus God is revealed to be Someone who knows us and loves us, not just loves us in the abstract but really likes us, and wants to be with us, and desires our full flourishing and happiness in the particulars of our lives just as they have been given to us. The very imprint of God’s being is tenderness and compassion, and fearless generosity.
So Jesus comes to show us the face of God. And Jesus comes to restore our human nature, to free us to live from the love that is always on offer. Jesus shows us what a human life looks like lived in constant communion with the Father. His life is an unbroken fountain flowing up to eternal life, and Jesus takes up our human nature so that we might live from the same place, so our souls might spring fresh too.
“What has been assumed is being saved!” says St. Gregory of Nazianzus’s distillation of the link between incarnation and salvation, Christmas and Easter, the manger, the cross and the empty tomb. What has been assumed is being saved. We’re being saved by the baby in his mother’s arms: even before he’s “done anything”, he’s saving his people, simply by being with us. By coming to be with us, joining us in the muck and mire, taking up our human life, God in Christ is fitting our life to his divinity and transforming it, making it possible to live and love.
As St. Cyril of Alexandria says, “He Who Is, The One Who Exists, [how’s that for a title for God!] is necessarily born of the flesh, taking all that is ours into himself so that all that is born of the flesh [that is, fragile human nature] … might rest in him. In short, he took what was ours to be his very own so that we might have all that was his. “He was rich but became poor for our sake, so that we might be enriched by his poverty” (2 Cor 8:9)” (On the Unity of Christ). Dwelling fully within our human experience, he heals and restores it from the inside out, starting with this infant who is the embodiment of love, God’s very being given for us.
***
God wants to be known. And so God reveals Godself in human flesh, in a way we can actually understand, not just with our minds but with our hearts, our whole being. And in knowing God we come to learn who we are, too. The imprint of God’s very being is revealed to be our very being, too. We discover ourselves loved and held, swaddled up and cherished, just as we are. God’s love is always given to us ahead of time, from before the beginning. Forgiveness is literally given be-fore—not forgiveness as pardons meted out for specific misdeeds but forgiveness as the essential nature of God, love overflowing. God wants to be with us, no matter how we squirm under that love that is so unconditioned, so free, so generous we find it difficult to bear. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ in Jesus. Remember, he made us: “All things came into being through him…and what has come into being in him was life!” God, He Who Is, or She Who Is, the One Who Exists, desires for us to exist too! To be alive, fully, vitally, not prim proper or perfect but free to love and be loved, flung out into the world, with all of the risk that entails, know that we will always be forgiven. So all that’s left to us today is to celebrate: “Sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things!” I can see the tomato sauce flying now. “Jesus has come to set us free!” Amen.