Christmas Eve 2014
Category: Christmas
Speaker: The Rev. Shearon Sykes Wiliams
The Very Reverend Shearon Sykes Williams Saint George’s Episcopal Church, Arlington, Virginia Christmas Eve 2014, 10:00 p.m.
“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…And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” John 1: 1-14
We gather on this most holy night in darkness illumined by the birth of a new creation. We celebrate the coming of God to be with us as a tender baby, born to a young mother whose life was forever changed when the angel Gabriel announced to her that she would bear God into the world. A new creation began that day when she said yes to that gloriously impossible proclamation.
“You shall conceive a son, and you will name him Jesus…the child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son of God.”
So tonight is the beginning of a new creation begun at the Annunciation and bought to fruition as a child lying in a manger. But the truth is that that new beginning began thousands, even millions of years before the angel’s revelation to Mary and the birth of Christ. It began at creation, as the prologue to John reminds us tonight.
“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.”
The baby lying in the manger is also the eternal Word, present and active with God in the creation of the universe and before. John wants us to understand that Christ has always been with God and with us since the beginning of time and space and for all eternity. And tonight we see the image of mother and child emerging from that ongoing creative process, taking on form and substance, God coming to us in fullness in the Holy Child.
God comes to us in the fullness of the world, the world as it really is, full of God’s original intent for us to live in perfect harmony and also distorted by pain, brokenness and strife. God comes to us in the midst of families torn apart, people walking the streets destitute, ecological disaster, wars raging, grief and loss, violence and destruction. And still God’s original intent for us abides and pervades everything, tenderness and compassion, justice and peace, hope and joy. The eternal light illuminating our way.
The prologue to John, written about 100 years after Jesus astounding life with us, is a theological reflection, an attempt to make meaning out of that life and the implications for humanity. And that reflective process continues for people of faith in every age. Our focus tonight is the significance of what it means to say that God came to us as a human being, to share in all that we experience, the joy and the struggles. Christian faith is absolutely unique in that claim. God all knowing, all powerful, beyond time and space, deciding to enter time and space, to live in intimacy with us, to willingly become vulnerable and needy in order to express God’s solidarity with us, God’s yearning to be with us completely.
That divine yearning was poignantly expressed in the prelude to tonight’s service, as two voices sang to one another expressing that mutual longing between the eternal Word, longing to be spoken and the human soul, longing to receive it. Just as John’s Gospel is a highly developed theological reflection on God becoming flesh and dwelling among us, Bach’s Cantata was a theological reflection on the meaning of Christian faith in his day and the timeless truth of mutual desire, God for us, and us for God.
An the beauty of that work still resonates with us deeply. Bach sets to music the truth and grace that the Gospel writer is trying to convey. Voices and instruments creating notes that convey the creation of the universe out of nothing and the power of the Word animating that process and coming to fullness in the Incarnation. Bach’s astounding gift for creating beauty to the glory of God, a sermon in song.
Beauty is immensely important to the cultivation of the human spirit and the cultivation of Christian faith. And music can often convey grace and truth in a way that resonates with us more deeply than the spoken word.
Phyllis Tickle is a writer and speaker on 21st Christianity. She tells the story of speaking to a large audience in a very liberal congregation, and after her talk about the emergence of a new manifestation of Christianity that is less doctrinally-driven and more experientially-driven, the questions inevitably went to the Virgin Birth. And she noticed during the lively back and forth between audience members about historical inaccuracy and scientific impossibility, that there was a young man who was about 16 or 17 sitting in the back who had been listening to her talk very intently. He came up to her after the questions and debate had ended, and said, “I believe in the Virgin Birth, Ms. Tickle. It’s just so beautiful, it has to be true- whether it happened or not.”
Sometimes we can put up obstacles to faith where there really aren’t any obstacles. Thinking that we have to have everything nailed down and empirically proven before we can give ourselves over to faith. Perhaps the way forward in our day and time is to rediscover the ancient understanding that beauty conveys truth as powerfully as historical facts, and that beautiful experiences can lead us into the creative core of life where we find God. Giving ourselves over to the wonder of the Incarnation and to the belief that as important as reason is, our minds reach their highest aim, union with God, when we allow our minds to be perfected by sacred beauty, truth revealed. The 17 year old had a profound revelation. “It’s so beautiful, it has to be true.” God coming to us full of grace and truth, vulnerability and tenderness as a baby. And growing to his fullness as a young man, healing the sick, proclaiming good news to the captives and letting the oppressed go free. God’s limitless creativity being expressed within the limits of human life.
“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things came into being through him and without him not one thing came into being…And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory…full of grace and truth.”