Love Come Down - Christmas Day 2022
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Christmas Day, December 25, 2022 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.
A few short hours ago, we celebrated the Feast of the Incarnation in image and story and song with the help of St. Luke. We got the jarring contrast between the two decrees: Emperor Augustus’ “that all should be registered”--counted, owned, taxed, kept under the thumb of imperial power; and the angel of Lord’s shining decree of good news and great joy–that to us is born this day a Savior. A Savior who, taking our human nature upon Himself, opens for us the very gate of heaven–daily drawing us home, here, to the Father in the Spirit.
Two decrees. Two songs. Augustus’ song: the grinding mechanical chatter of the cash register, of profit and exploitation, of racial violence, of lakes drained to water lawns, hillsides stripped, and forests razed to build McMansions. The Angel’s song: the new song God is singing in Christ in and as the ground of our very being–a hymn of the dignity of all of God’s creatures, each one precious in God’s sight. The declared reign not of some ersatz Augustus, but of river-clapping, feet beautiful, hill-ringing peace. Peace not as something achieved in the absence of conflict, but original peace, primordial peaceableness that is our true common ground as a boundary-less community reconciled to God, each other, and the good earth.
This morning, love comes down, comes to his people and sets them free. Risky, vulnerable, helplessly undefended in a feed trough packed with mud and straw, God meets us wriggling and squawking and cooing in swaddling bands just as we are. God assumes and redeems it all–that He might be in us and we in Him as members of one boundless body, a community of love with no one left behind, stepped over, or shoved aside. Just love serving love in love. Come closer, friend. Sit and eat.
It was Meister Eckhardt who 700 years ago in a pulpit in Cologne, reminded the faithful, gathered that day as we are gathered this day:
Here in time we celebrate the eternal birth that God the Father bore and still bears constantly in eternity, and which is also now born in time, in human nature. St. Augustine says that this birth is happening continually. We should ask ourselves: If it doesn’t happen in me, what good is that birth after all? What ultimately matters is that God’s birth should happen in me.
St. John tells us that the peace for which we yearn, for which our hearts are restless, that is our birthright and our fulfillment in this life and the next, the peace that is found in intimacy with Christ, is radically original– “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” You are the happiness you seek. Nothing can separate us from this singing, dancing, effervescent life that is the light of all people from every tribe, language, nation, every color, gender, sexual orientation.
Nothing can extinguish this light. No shaming bushel can cover it. No depotic darkness can quench it. Earnest wick-trimming doesn’t make it bigger or smaller. Unbeknownst to foolish virgins it shines forth unfazed by any apparent oil shortages. In its steady, benevolent gaze death loses its sting, fear runs scared, and you can no more hate your enemy than you can despise your own pinky finger.
And yet, and yet… bombs rain down in the Ukraine. Bullets fly in Uvalde and Club Q. Foxes have their dens, birds have their nests, and yet the unsheltered have nowhere to lay their head. The “common good” seems but a quaint notion gone the way of the dodo along with wearing tie-and-blazer to the hockey game. Far more real, it seems, this world of haves and have nots, fractured by tribal enmity where all we can think to do is buy more stuff and amuse ourselves to death. Augustus’ registering decree still goes out as, “Buy, buy, buy! Then, then, then that quiet desperation, that gnawing sense of lack, that restless far country pig pod seeking will be stilled.” Except it never is. That free and easy peace eludes us, but only because it’s too close, too ordinary for us to notice.
“He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” He opened the Red Sea for us and we opened a wound in his side. He gave us a sceptre, we gave him a crown of thorns. He lifted us to heaven. We lifted him on a cross. Can we hear the urgent neccessity, the longing, the passionate yearning of Eckhart on that Christmas Day seven centuries ago: “If it doesn’t happen in me, what good is that birth after all?” Can we feel love leap and kick in our womb, waiting to be recognized, waiting to be born?
How easy it is, this day and every day, to quietly dismiss as the dream-led Joseph did not. How easily second nature, this day and every day, comes the grubby, grinding nub of our no as compared to Blessed Mary’s yes. How easy it is–in this world of getting and spending, in a culture of distraction, fear, scarcity, and lack–to think the light that shines in the darkness shines always around the next bend, over the next hill, in some other manger, rather than in the very ground of our being, as the very light of our seeing. How easy it is to think that God is another some-thing to acquire rather than an already-given gift to receive, unwrap, realize, and manifest. In your light, we see light. “That which we are looking for is doing the very looking,” as Francis tells us. All that the Father has is ours–inviolable bliss, unshakeable peace, unceasing joy, waters rising up to eternal life—when we are born again, renewed daily by the visitation of the Holy Spirit. Veni sancte spiritus.
Sounds pretty good. At least better than what I hear on the news and see on the streets of our fair city. So what is Eckhart’s prescription for giving birth to Christ in the manger of heart? How can we, with Mary, become God-bearers, theotokos, mothers of God? What must we do? What must we change? What must we tidy up and correct? What technique must we apply? We want to make the A-list, to be nice and not naughty. What must do, Lord? Tell us what we should do!
“Nothing,” comes the Lord’s bemused reply. “Nothing, you say? That’s preposterous.” “Only to a people so busy doing, so estranged from ever-present healing grace, that they’ve forgotten how to be. Preposterous only to a people who came into being through him but do not know him.” We willingly become weak and know the Lord strong to save by simply being. We stop talking to ourselves and believing the stories in our heads. We take off our too tight shoes of planning, worrying, and figuring it all out and let it all be. For once we consent to be still and know and be gathered in the great I AM. For once, hushed, keeping quiet, not bothering ourselves we become little, poor, pliant and reliant and rest quietly and trustingly in the God of our salvation.
Once guarded, we now open. Once rich and full, we now release and receive. Once strong and holding fast, we now allow, and let be. “I must decrease, he must increase.” We come home and know ourselves held, just as we are–warts and foibles and weaknesses–in the unconditional love of God. We make a little space for love to come down, touch, and transfigure that He may do in us for others what we cannot do ourselves. Sheer folly in the eyes of the world. Useless and unprofitable on the bean-counter’s abacus. Like a messiah hanging on a tree on a garbage dump outside the city walls. Like a mewling infant in a backwater stable.
But the bean counter’s abacus, Augustus’ decree–the disposable world, my disposable neighbor, each existing for my pleasure and profit and use–is what got us to this place in the first place. Jesus, our Savior, shows us a different way to be. Make no mistake, this born from above, blowing we know not where love come down wants to be born in us. God wants to love us each into loving others that beloved community might be born through these very hands and feet–our yearning for God, this holy longing is already God’s longing to make a home in us–right here in muck and straw, amidst the chances and changes of this groaning in labor pains world waiting to be born.
Not my will but thy will be done. Not this present darkness, but your light, O Lord. Your kingdom, not the kingdoms of this world, come. Not Augustus’ decree, or bullets or bombs, but love come down gentle as a dove to sing its new song and set the world to rights. Christ born in one mangered heart at a time. Herod and Augustus toppled one welcomed stranger, one forgiven enemy at a time. Yes, Lord. Let it be with each of us according to your word. Prepare him room.