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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. Sin isn’t like COVID where some get it and its contagious so ye saints avoid them sinners. We all have this disease called sin and we are dying because of 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. Let me give you a good example from the world of physics to explain this to you but by the time I’m finished you will think me evil. It makes me think of the state of quantum superposition where something can exist in two or more states at the same time. For example, light (photons) is at the same time both a particle and a wave and it depends on how you observe it as to which state you will find it in. This is complicated I know. To try to explain this a physicist by the name of Erwin Schrödinger came up with a fictitious experiment involving a cat.
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 (an atom dissolving into nothing) in which the probability/possibility of it decaying and triggering the release of 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 being both 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. 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 for a quantum physicist, but virtually impossible for everybody else to understand and I am Evil to have inflicted it upon you and I wish I could see the confusion on your faces right now so that I could have the satisfaction of knowing I ruined your Christmas – wah hah hah hahaah.
We are sick with a disease that is killing us, killing the whole Creation. We are as good as dead; dead though we live, doing things that lead to death. We really are in the box in the state of being both dead and alive. The only cure for our disease is for God to 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, for now, 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. We are the ones who are supposed to look like we’ve been cured of the disease of sin. The COVID vaccination process has begun, but the thing with a vaccination is that it really doesn’t change the person who has been vaccinated in any noticeable way. You can just carry on with whatever kind of life you want to live and you won’t get COVID. God’s infusing humanity with himself in Christ Jesus and applying this to us by coming as the Holy Spirit to dwell in us the followers of Jesus changes who we are and compels us to live according to way of humanity cured. People who live in such a way as to awaken hope in others, as to bring about peace to our communities, as to give others a reason to leap in grateful joy – to live the way of unconditional, trusting, vulnerable love. Amen.
