Christmas
Eve, we gather to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Christ-child, God the Son
become human. It’s a fairly nostalgic
moment that we share – a time to appreciate beauty in song and seasonal
aesthetics, a time of warmth in reunion with family friends, a time of giving
and a realization that we need to do more for those in need, a time to receive. We come to worship in an effort to let God
know we haven’t forgotten the reason for the season – somehow this Baby Jesus
changes us; saves us; saves everything; changes everything.
To
say why God has done what God has done for us in, through, and as Jesus is
fairly easy. God is love. God loves.
God loves his good creation. God
loves us. God loves each of us. Yet, something has gone terribly wrong in God’s
good creation, in us, in each of us.
There is good and there is evil.
There is futility and there is death.
The root of it is a disease called sin.
We all have it.
Our
disease is not a naive either/or problem where we simply know the difference between
what is good and what is evil and at times do good and at times do evil. When we speak of the Tree of the Knowledge of
Good and Evil in the Book of Genesis from which Adam and Eve eat, it is not the
Tree of the Knowledge of Good or Evil, but rather Good and Evil. Good and Evil are juxtaposed but mixed. So often we do Good and it winds being Evil
or have to do what we know is Evil to bring about Good, war being an
example.
Good
and Evil are confused and entwined within us.
We cannot just do one without doing the other because we are both at the same time. It makes me think of the state of quantum
superposition that gives rise to the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat – an evil
thought. If you put a cat in a steel box
with a poisonous gas distribution mechanism in which the triggering device
relies on the nuclear decay of an atom in which the probability/possibility of
it decaying and releasing the gas is 50% (either the atom will decay or not),
from the point of the observer the cat in the box is in a state of both being
dead and/or alive. You don’t know which
until you open the box. When it comes to
Good and Evil, it isn’t that we have the capacity/possibility/probability of
doing either Good or Evil and we wont know which we are until we are observed
in action observe us in action. We exist
in a state of being both Good and Evil and when we observe each other in action
everything we do, even right done to how we interpret our observations of each
other’s actions, is both Good and Evil to varying degrees on a spectrum. This illustration is my case in in
point. It’s a really Good explanation,
but virtually impossible to understand and I am Evil
to have inflicted it upon you just to observe the confusion on your faces and ruin
your Christmas.
We
are sick with a disease that is killing us, killing the Creation. We are as good as dead; dead though we live. We
really are in the box in the state of being both dead and alive. The only cure for our disease is that God
infuse us with God’s very self and so we talk about God becoming human. God the Son became human as the man Jesus of
Nazareth. God took upon himself our sin
diseased state of existence and as one of us he lived a life in communion with God
and us in which he did no evil. This
infusion began the healing. Jesus death
once and for all removes the disease of sin from humanity like a tea bag
drawing the infection from an infected wound. Jesus’ resurrection set in motion the rubrics
of a new humanity, a new creation in which Sin and Death will be no more. In the fullness of time, whenever that will
be, whenever God decides to open the box, we will either simply be changed if
we’re still around or resurrected from the dead to live anew in a bodily
existence that neither sins nor dies but is rather filled with the living,
glorious presence of God right down to every subatomic particle from which we
are made. Until then, God has poured his
Spirit upon those whom has called to follow Jesus as proof of what is to come.
The
Son of God became human and in so doing God has set in motion the healing of
his Creation, of humanity, and of us each. St. Gregory of Nazianzus, an
important leader in the church back in the 300’s wrote: “The unassumed is the
unhealed”. God took upon his very self
our very selves and it heals us. St.
Athanasius of Alexandria who lived at the same time said, “He became what we
are that we might become what he is” meaning a new humanity, human beings
filled with the very life of God. In
Christ we exist at the same time as dead but healed and alive.
This
all sounds like metaphysics until you realize that it is love we are talking
about. Not that warm, fuzzy, nostalgic,
feel-good stuff; but rather the kind of love in which we put ourselves aside
and moved with compassion we act for justice, for economic equity, for human
rights. The kind of love that says we’re
going to stop waiting for trickle-down, supply-side economics to work (which it
likely won’t because it’s diseased with greed), and make sure the people who
live on our street, in our town, in our county, in our province, in our nation,
in our world have enough to eat and if they don’t we’re going to take food from
our tables to feed them, and then we’re going to find out why, and then we’re
going to talk to our local politicians and to our provincial ministers and to
our members of parliament and in the name of Jesus tell them quit politicking,
quit back-benching, solve the problem. If
they say it’s too big a problem and they are too insignificant to do anything
about, then we say next election we’ll vote for the candidate who will. You see, it’s time we stopped voting party
allegiance or for the candidate we think will make us more economically secure and
start voting according to the mandate of food for the hungry, clean water for
the thirsty, homes for the stranger, clothes for ill-clothed, health-care for
the sick, hospitality and proper care for even those who have broken the law
and our trust. When we start thinking
about costly love in action then the vulnerable baby in the manger makes
sense. Amen.
