+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
You may have noticed that we began this evening’s liturgy with a peculiar para-liturgical element, “The Proclamation of the Birth of Christ.” It is taken from the Roman Martyrology, a sixteenth century catalogue of saints published as Europe transitioned from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar. I used it both because I think it’s a beautiful text and also, more importantly, because it places the events which we celebrate tonight in the context of both human and sacred history.
Perhaps it seems obvious to you that the God has a role in history, but it is not necessarily self-evident. What in theological terms we call “Divine Providence”—the idea that God is sovereign over time and history, that God oversees the long arc of the progress of the created order (general providence) and miraculously breaks into that order from time-to-time (special providence)—is, I would argue, a non-negotiable tenet of the Faith. This creates some issues regarding human agency, but you’ve come to celebrate the Birth of Christ, not to hear me give a theological disquisition on free will, so for now (one night only!) I’ll spare you and simply say that I think this theological problem is soluble.
Anyway, the proposition is that God is sovereign over history, that he is Alpha and Omega, the Lord of all that was and is and is to come. This may seem obvious to the one who believes, yet it is not so obvious to the world at large. Since Lyotard coined the term metanarrative (actually, métarécit, since he was French and all), there has been a skepticism in intellectual circles about such grand, unifying theories about the progress of history. This is for good reason. Marx believed that history was the story of class struggle, that the proletariat would revolt and seize the means of production, that they would establish a humane society based on common ownership, and that this would signal the end of history. He was wrong. Francis Fukuyama believed that the end of the Cold War signaled the end of the development of history, in which Western liberal democracy and free-market capitalism would be adopted as the final achievement of human civilization’s evolution. He was also wrong.
What these views and so many other grand, universal stories of the human experience (so many other metanarratives) lack, though, is imagination. They are materialistic in the proper sense, not in the sense that they are concerned with human control over things (though both Marx and Fukuyama fall victim to that problem), but in the sense that the material world is the only thing that exists. We are basically bags of meat that, in the aggregate, behave in predictable ways and organize ourselves along lines that a smart enough socialist could see a mile or a millennium away, and whether we end up blowing ourselves up, baking ourselves to death, or solving everything through our inherent genius and adaptability, we are, nevertheless, all there is.
What’s the alternative? With apologies to any postmodern hipsters in the congregation tonight, I do not believe that the answer is the one given by Lyotard & al.: to reject metanarrative in favor of a million different “little stories”, playing whatever language game contextually suits us. This seems to me just as unmoored from anything eternal as a materialistic “grand story.” This seems just as unimaginative, just as dull, just as stifling.
Rather, I believe with all that I am that the only answer is the reassert “The Story.” I believe the answer is to posit, contra mundum, perhaps, that history does have a purpose, that it comes from someplace and that it is going somewhere in particular, and that the only way to make sense of that long process is to look back to the hinge point of human history, to the divine vertical line in the long horizontal line of human striving through time, which gives our whole story its cruciform shape.
We look back to twenty-one centuries from the time of Abraham and Sarah, thirteen centuries from Moses, eleven hundred years from the time of Ruth and the Judges, one thousand years after the anointing of David as King. We look back to the year of the one hundred ninety-fourth Olympiad, the seven hundred fifty second year from the foundation of Rome, the forty-second year of the reign of Octavian. We look back to that very specific moment when human and divine history intersect to see the one, true God taking flesh in Jesus Christ.
This, my sisters and brothers, is the turn of the tide. This is the moment when the world rejoices, for in the first breath of an infant in Bethlehem of Judea, the world has been given its own first breath, faint and fearful at first, but growing in timbre and temerity until all the world can hear the angels’ song: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”
My sisters and brothers, tonight we have been shown that we are highly favored. We have been shown that the God who made the world loved it enough to enter it, that in a moment of time all of time has been redeemed, that at the turning point of history God gave us the promise that at the end of all things, he will be there and all races and peoples and nations will stream to his light, as it were the Star of Bethlehem, and will kneel before him as did the wise men of old.
My sisters and brothers, this is not just “our story.” It is “The Story.” The savior of the nations has come among us and will come again. This night we travel even unto Bethlehem to see this thing that has taken place; we kneel at the crib; we worship the Christ child; we feed on God’s mercy in the most precious Sacrament. But then, upon the Lord of Love being born anew in our hearts, we heed his call to spread that love, because it is not ours to keep. The Trinitarian Mission, the pouring forth of divinity from the Godhead into this messy world, is, by its nature, not solipsistic, nor is it a treasure shared by a few enlightened. It is perfect love unleashed on all humanity, that our mortal race, from the beginning of time through the last day, may be saved from sin and death, from systems that oppress and forces that frustrate the will of God for the human family. Now we treasure these words and ponder them in our hearts, as Our Lady did, but soon we most, like the shepherd, return to our fields, praising and glorifying God, and sharing this Good News with all the world.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.