Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In a recent volume of systematic theology focused on the Incarnation, the two authors, John Clark and Marcus Peter Johnson, wrote the following:

To dichotomize either God from Christ or Christ from us is to rip God’s saving acts and benefits from their ontological mooring in the humanity of our Savior, stripping the Incarnation of its tremendous soteriological, mediatorial significance.

Did you get all that? That’s okay. I’ll translate.

If the baby in the manger is not both fully God and fully human, then we are in quite a pickle. I always explain it to my confirmation class students this way— If Jesus were merely human, then the crucifixion was the act of a capricious and vengeful God. If Jesus were inhumanly divine, then it was no sacrifice at all. Either way the cross is emptied of its saving power. I would contend that the proposition “Christ, eternally begotten of the Father, took on flesh two thousand some odd years ago” is the Primordial Truth. By this I mean that not only the whole of Christian Theology but the question of whether or not there is any meaning whatsoever to material, human existence hinges on our accepting or rejecting the proposition. The former requires of us an act of faith… Perhaps the greatest act of faith, which is the humble recognition that neither I alone nor we as a human species can untangle and fully explicate the mystery at the heart of life. I am convinced that making this leap (which requires a degree of humility both of intellect and of heart) is worth it, because I’ve seen the fruits of joy and peace and even virtue in those who’ve truly made it.

But did you come here tonight because you wanted to hear me give a theological treatise? I should think not! Shall I proceed to explicate the definition of the Council of Chalcedon line by line, so you can see fully appreciate the nature of the doctrine to which I’ve imputed such significance? Perhaps not, as jolly as that exercise would be!

No, tonight we are like the shepherds who rejoice merely from hearing the news, not interrogating the delicate logic that expresses the finer points of a worldview, but simply affirming that God must be here, for we’ve seen and known and tasted that truth.

Or perhaps more aptly we are like the angels, already enlightened through wisdom mystically bestowed, not by merit of inhabiting the realms of glory but through the the miraculous laver of water poured on our foreheads and the invocation of that most holy, triune name so that, like this Blessed Infant, born today, we might also be sons and daughters of the Most High.

No, we are higher than those angels, because without the benefit of the beatific vision, we have nonetheless tasted of the heavenly banquet and received by faith the grace the Christ Child has come to give us. And though we have neither a lamb nor gold nor frankincense nor myrrh to offer the Newborn King, we can, as that sweet, old carol has it, offer our hearts. This is a better gift anyway, an offering more acceptable than that of Abel. And in so offering our hearts they are united to his Most Sacred Heart, our humanity (once broken) is united to his humanity (now perfected), and we are thus united to his divinity, too, that when he comes again in glory we may be with him, body and soul, unto eternity.

Tonight God himself has taken on our nature and bestowed on all creation the radiance forfeited at Eden. Tonight the new Adam is brought forth from the eternal habitations, and he will not fall. Tonight the New Eve crushes the ancient serpent under her feet. Tonight heaven rejoices and hell quakes with fear, knowing its end is now only a matter of time. Tonight our brokenness is mended, our wounds are healed, our tears are dried, our very nature is lifted up to that blessed state it possessed in our infancy. No, it is raised higher, for we are no longer only children. We are brothers and sisters of the very God who made us. Glory be to him now, this night, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Translation is always interpretation, and with regard to the bible this can be applied to choices for punctuation and capitalization, since the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts have neither. So the fact that the name of Jesus appears here twice in all capital letters (as well as twice in Luke and once in John—I did consult my concordance), was a choice by the committee that translated the Authorized Version, probably to draw our attention to the sacredness of the Holy Name in Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of the birth of Christ. (In John, it’s from the crucifixion, and presumably reflects the fact that the sign Pilate placed on the Cross would have been in capital letters.)

I find this interesting, but I have to admit that it always reminds me of a sign I see every year this time of year in front of a house in Findlay. It reads “It’s a boy, and his name is JESUS.” Just like the all caps in our translation, I think it’s meant to be emphatic in a good way, but it always strikes me as if the tone were confrontational. “It’s a boy, and his name is JESUS.” I’m sure that’s not the point, but I have thought what it would be like to ring the doorbell, congratulate the person who answers on yet another baby, and ask why they name all their children “Jesus.” Must get confusing.

On a more serious note, notice how Joseph is given the honor of giving the Christ child his name. We often forget about Joseph, consider him a figure of secondary importance. He’s a bit like Amal Clooney, working tirelessly for human rights and prosecuting the perpetrators of genocide and all the rest and then having the bad luck of being married to a movie star. I’ve heard it said before—and I whole-heartedly agree—that St. Joseph should be the patron of clergy spouses. While Mary brings Christ into the world physically and the priest does so sacramentally, sometimes there needs to be somebody there to orchestrate a flight to Egypt, or at least to hang in there through all the craziness attending a peculiar vocation.

We focus so much on how Joseph is not Jesus’ “real dad” in the biological sense, but Our Lady, while engendering in Christ his humanity, is also his mother by something-other-than-natural (which is to say supernatural) means, so perhaps we shouldn’t get too caught up in Joseph being “marginalized” or something like that. They are both parents to our Lord in a true and profound manner. I’m grateful that the lectionary has us considering Our Lord’s earthly father this year, as much as the more familiar Annunciation story from Luke’s Gospel may provide us a more romantic picture. Joseph matters, too. He provides Christ his royal lineage; notice the angel addresses him “thou son of David.” He protects the Holy Family from Herod’s wrath. He takes his part in raising the child who would become the man who would save us all. Whether he imparts his carpentry skills to Jesus as some apocryphal texts would have it or not, he raises a master builder of another sort–one who would build a kingdom.

And most importantly of all, Joseph sticks around. He doesn’t dip out to the store

for a pack of smokes and disappear. He is called a just man, but this is used in a sense which implies more than fairness. He is upstanding and long-suffering and merciful and loving. None of us is Jesus. Few of us (I’d contend none of us, but I have a high view of the Mother of God, to say the least) are like Mary, the maiden from a Middle Eastern backwater who went on to tread the ancient serpent under her feet. But we can all be a bit more like St. Joseph, following the call of God down uncertain and sometimes dangerous paths, relying on the Lord’s guidance, confident in his providential hand, and being led to love in ways we never imagined. And maybe, when his family or his fellow carpenter’s pointed at his intended, clearly by now “in the family way”, whispering amongst themselves, Joseph went up to them, not confrontationally but confidently, lovingly but firmly, and said “it’s a boy. And his name is Jesus.”

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

A friend of mine recently shared an experience he’d had which renewed his faith in Providence. He’d been trying to help a Pakistani refugee family in his parish whom he said had run up against bad break after bad break, and he (my friend) felt he was at the end of his ability to assist them very effectively. He knew vaguely of a new priest in his diocese who was also Pakistani and thought that maybe his experience meant he’d know better how to help them navigate through all the nonsense they were running up against. So he gathered them all together, and after about five minutes the priest and the father of the household realized that they new each other from working together in Campus Crusade for Christ back in Pakistan. My friend reported that the family was immediately put at ease. And I for one have no doubt that if anybody can figure out how to handle a difficult situation, it would be two people working together who had been part of an evangelistic organization in a country where “blasphemy against Islam” carries the death penalty. My colleague’s response was “doesn’t God just do it” and I say “amen!”

I think something like this providential reacquaintance might be happening in today’s Gospel. We might be confused at first, as indeed I was, that John the Baptist seems to be asking whether Jesus was who he (John) already seemed to say he was several chapters and probably only months earlier at the Jordan River. But note (and this was a point that had not occurred to me until I read a blog post from another colleague—Andy McGowan, dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale—a few days ago) that John doesn’t dispatch his two disciples to Jesus but to the one claiming to be Christ, the Messiah. Of course, that one was Jesus, but presumably John didn’t know that.

We don’t return to John’s prison cell in Matthew’s narrative, but we might imagine the scene. The two disciples return, and they tell him:

We saw and heard exactly what the Prophet Isaiah foretold. This should be familiar, master, since he was your favorite person to quote in your sermons. “The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.”

That fits the bill, So who is it.

A man named Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary, from Nazareth in Galilee.

That guy! I knew it!

Doesn’t God just do it!

This must have given John strength to face the martyrdom he was to receive at the hand of that wind-shaken reed Herod in his soft raiment in his palace– to know that the Messiah had come, that he had played the part God assigned to him in the great work of salvation, that his reward was to be not merely an ignoble death but a crown of victory.

I mentioned Providence a moment ago, which is basically a fancy theological term for the proposition that God controls things. All Christians believe in this to some extent, and this is what distinguishes us from Deists, who believe God wound up the universe like a clock and then stepped away. There is, however, a worrying trend among some to reject the possibility of certain kinds of divine Providential acts. At least the trend worries me, and I’m the one in the pulpit so you have to hear me worry out loud, I guess.

So, there are two sorts of Providence: General Providence and Special Providence. To affirm General Providence is to say that you believe God is sovereign over the cosmos, that natural and human endeavors are a part of his plan, and this includes the plan of salvation. Naturally, we have free will and we’re sinners, so we can try to frustrate these designs, but good luck with that. So this is God’s will for the universe seen, as it were, from ten thousand feet. As far as I know, no bona fide Christian is seriously disputing this sort of Providence.

Special Providence, on the other hand, is what God does for us on the micro-level. It’s how he breaks into our lives as individuals and communities- how he makes himself felt and known and heard among us. There are some who would dispute that God acts in this way. I clearly think they’re mistaken, but one can understand why. One might see a tragic situation in which God has not intervened (or at least has not done so apparently) and get upset at the ostensible unfairness of human affairs and conclude that “God just doesn’t work that way.”

Now, I think that conclusion is wrong, but it’s understandable. I always go back to the climax of the book of Job. Job wasn’t there when God laid the foundations of the earth and shut up the see with doors when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy. So it was a bit arrogant for Job to get snippy and think he’d do a better job than the creator of the universe, but it was understandable, and God wasn’t going to cast Job into outer darkness just for being petulant.

That said, we shouldn’t welcome the questioning of Providence because it leads us where I assure you we don’t want to go. I’ve seen it happen. First you change your prayers of the people in church on Sunday and your own personal prayers. You say something arrogant that’s meant to sound humble: “we can’t presume to change God’s mind (as if that’s what we think we’re doing in intercessory prayer) so prayer is only about changing us.” Then whatever good works and social action and self-improving meditation we do neither makes the world nor ourselves perfect. We’re left each of us needing to be crucified, because we think Christ’s one sacrifice didn’t take. So when I say that this line of reasoning leads us to a bad place, I mean it.

The upshot here is I believe God can do a miracle if he wants to. There’s no reason in the world we shouldn’t pray for one, and if we pray for the eyes to see God’s hand at work in and among us, we will see it. I bet John the Baptist knew that (at least he did in my made up story about his two disciples’ return). I suppose he could have said, “oh that guy claiming to be the Messiah is the same one I saw at the river that day? Weird coincidence, but that must be all it is.” No. That seems as unlikely to me as eleven men cooking up a conspiracy theory about a dead friend and deciding they might as well die for it “just for the lols.” It’s not scientific proof (you’ve still got to have faith) but I contend that the preponderance of evidence is leaning more-and-more in our direction here.

So I believe that we can, along with my colleague and his Pakistani refugee parishioners, along with John the Baptist, along with so many of our own number who’ve experienced the blessings of our Lord’s providential appearing, say with confidence “doesn’t God just do it!.”

+Amen.