Steve
Going
home by a different way 4th January 2004 John 1:
1-18
Back
Sermons,
for me, at the end of an enjoyable holiday almost always comprise a
patchwork of things read and seen during that time, and as I was
discussing with a clergy friend a few days ago, I struggle with the
idea, a little, that I'm probably more interested in what all of you
have have read and seen during that time (if anyone can think of a
mechanism for everyone sharing their experience in about fifteen
minutes then let me know.....). So here goes...
If I were to describe the famous 'prologue' to John's Gospel as 'cosmic', it wouldn't just be the old hippy in me speaking. Here in a concise few verses of greatness, is the cosmology of the Christian faith the principle ideas of Christ, the Word of God, beyond time and space, who has become flesh and spilled the light of God's love into a dark world. Allow me to quote a Christmas song by Bruce Cockburn:
...that
same bright angel warns the parents in a dream
and
they head out for the border and get away clean.
Like
a stone on the surface of a still river,
driving
the ripples on forever,
redemption
rips through the surface of time
in
the cry of a tiny babe.
At this, which is for us, literally the darkest time of year, we mark and celebrate this mind-bending cosmology of The Incarnation, in our Christmas feasting and in the coming season of Epiphany. The Feast of the Epiphany is on 6th January originally celebrated in the Eastern church (the early church centred on Constantinople, rather than on Rome) as the Nativity of Christ that is, God's manifestation to humankind. Epiphany comes from the Greek word for manifestation, and in the biblical tradition, God manifests himself/herself in the paradoxical act of veiling himself/herself supremely, of course in the Incarnation. The feast was introduced to the West in the fourth century when it quickly became a feast of the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles the Gentiles being embodied in the figures of the Magi the three wise men the star gazers - who were assumed to be the first gentile/non-Jewish believers (although we don't know who they may have been or where they came from). And warned in a dream to avoid Herod, having paid homage to the Christ child, they go home by a different way.
Like many of us, I suspect, I had cause to consider this cosmology of the Incarnation earlier this week as I gazed up into a staggering panoply of stars, on a few perfectly clear and ice-sharpened nights. We have a routine on such evenings when we're down in Dumfriesshire, of wrapping up warm and going a few hundred yards up the farm track, up onto the hill, with a big sheet of flooring underlay, and laying down on our backs for some uninterrupted star-gazing. The wonder of this is always accompanied by the inevitable questions about how one's own life can possibly matter in the cosmological context.... how can the creator of distant galaxies (of which this particular panoply is but a fraction) have conceivably reached out to me?
From
an untitled poem by RS Thomas
Night
after night I point my hands
at
the sky, a launching pad
for
my prayers to take off for their orbiting
in
immense space. What listener
is
this, who is always awake
and says nothing? His breathing
is the rising and falling of oceans on remote
stars.
Now, (if I may suddenly lurch into cookery-speak, also very present at this time of year...) we must take all these ingredients (the cosmos, timelessness, creation, Incarnation) and mix them well with a good dash of the sense of time passing, of mortality (there's always plenty of that sloshing around in one's mind at New Year), and one is left grasping a bit for some help in how (egg-like) to bind it all together.
The fear and wonder of this life the cosmos and our place in it, is the stuff of spirituality. The spinning plates of our personal experience of the divine touch on our lives, in what we have seen and felt, have somehow to be kept spinning in a world where 40,000 people in Iran die horribly, at a stroke, in one momentary earthquake, and where the touch of humanity across the world is so progressively destructive.
RS Thomas's poem continues...
The
forbidden tree flourishes
in
his garden and he waters it
with his own blood. Is there a leakage
from
his mind into the minds
of
our inventors? From earliest
childhood their fingers have been busy
tinkering with the lock on the door
into a dark room. The combination
is yielding. What will come forth
to
wreak its vengeance on us
for
the disturbance? I lift my face
to a face, its features dissolving
in the radiation out of a black hole.
Our dilemma is real, yet we lift our face to the voice we hear calling us. The 20th century, French, Jesuit Scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was good as saying lastingly deep things, once said,
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience
Like Christ, in every moment we must choose whether we live fearfully or wonderfully. Our purpose in life is, on one hand, simply to be be in the presence of God's lovingkindness wherever we are, as Christ was. All of us have been damaged in some way by what the world throws at us, and that creates fear. This is the challenge of journeying with Christ towards seeing as God sees. Because only then will we be able to see through the terrors of embodiment, and see the sacred movement of God's self through human experience. This is the way we grow up into the head, the source, the cosmic Christ, the light that enlightens everyone who is born into the world, as John's prologue has it. This is the way we learn to live, like Christ, right at the intersection of timelessness and time.
Here, each week, we gather around the Word. We take bread in our hands, and it becomes broken pieces the body of Christ. We share it and it becomes our flesh. We offer up our hurts and pray over broken places. We share the peace of the Christ child with one another. This is Epiphany. Jesus is born, lives, dies and is resurrected. And we gather each week so that, like those three wise star-gazers long ago, we might go home by a different way.