Healing By Infusion

 Luke 1:26-38

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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.   

Pregnant with Impossibility

Luke 1:26-38

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Probably the two most impactful words a woman and a man will ever hear are, “You’re Pregnant!”  The reactions to these words range from ecstatic joy to absolute dread.  Once confronted with these words inevitably we will find ourselves overwhelmed with the weight of imagining all the responsibilities that come along with raising a child.  And soon, once the initial shock wears off, we begin to dream.  We begin to wonder who the child will look like, be like; what to name the child.  Will the child grow up to be somebody important?  Inevitably we begin to question ourselves.  Will we be good parents?  Will the child know how much we love it?    

With all these questions we become fixated on the future, obsessed with a dreadful kind of hope, and preoccupied with our ability to nurture what we love…and here, this morning thinking about Mary and God and all that I’m thinking maybe it was for reasons such as these that God chose to enter the world by the way of an infant born to Mary and Joseph.  Maybe these future oriented feelings and preoccupations are how we are to be “postured” within ourselves with respect to God.  Maybe God wants us fixated on what he’s going to do in the future.  Maybe when it comes to our relationship with God he wants us to have this kind of dreadful, obsessive hope.  Maybe God wants us taking seriously our responsibility to nurture the future here in the present.  The best way to take care of the future world is to take care of this one right now as a pregnant woman cares for herself to care for the baby within her.

Anyway, enough of my rambling.  This is the Mary Sunday in Advent.  This is Mary’s day to shine.  So let’s ponder Mary for a moment.  I think it reasonable to imagine Mary had all those parent-type questions too, but things had to be more than a little different for her.  She got some of her maternal questions answered…by an angel.  That had to be freaky.  From the mouth of an angel she heard those scary, overwhelming words, “You’re going to be pregnant”.  There’s some Twilight Zone in that.  

Maybe we can say that Mary was lucky to have a few of her parental questions answered.  She knew it was going to be a boy.  She didn’t have to worry about what to name him.  The angel said his name would be Jesus.  She did not have to worry about who her son would become.  He would be the Son of the Most High whatever that would be.  Mary got to know what her son would be when he grew up…a king.  But not just any king; “The King”, the expected One, the Messiah. 

Mary’s son, Jesus, was going to be the king who would turn the world upside-down with God’s Kingdom.  As Mary sings in her song, through her son God was going to bring the powerful down from their thrones and lift up the lowly.  Through her son God would fill the hungry and turn the rich away empty.  Her son would be the fulfillment of a promise made long ago to Abraham, that his seed, his offspring, would be a blessing to all nations. 

We cannot be sure Mary wanted to hear all that.  It is overwhelming enough just to wonder who and what your child will become.  I can’t imagine actually knowing what my children will grow up and be.  I really don’t want to know.  But, that is just what the angel told Mary and to put it oddly, Mary had to endure knowing that for all her life.

            Mary’s first response to all this Good News being dumped on her was to deny even the possibility that she could be pregnant.  She asked, “How can this be since I am a virgin?”  Certain necessary things had to happen before she could become pregnant and none of that had as of yet.  The angel’s response to this seemed even more impossible.  The Holy Spirit of God would cause this pregnancy.  Her child would literally be the Son of God.  Imagine how that’s going to be whispered around town.  Mary is suddenly somehow pregnant and she’s saying God’s the father.  No wonder she went off to live with Cousin Elizabeth for a while.

            Speaking of Elizabeth, the angel allowed Mary a sign to know that God inspired pregnancy was indeed going to happen.  She just had to go on down to her cousin Elizabeth’s house and she would see her proof.  Elizabeth, the barren one, Elizabeth, the one too old to give birth, was pregnant too.  God was in a baby mood.

            So there stood Mary, pregnant with impossibility, filled with a dreadful hope.  How would she raise this child, the Holy One, the Son of God?  I think it was probably too much for Mary to comprehend.  How could she realize that in her womb God would be undertaking a new creation?  And not just the creation of a new life, in her womb God was creating new life for all humanity.  How could she know?  Mary knew that in her womb she would carry a king, but did she realize that he would be God’s appointed one, the unique agent of God’s rule, and how that would pan out throughout history?  Through her son God himself would rule.  Her son would set in place the Kingdom of God in which there would be justice for all.  His rule would/will eventually overturn all the powers that oppress humans, even the powers of sin and death.  How could Mary realize that?

            Well, we cannot say whether Mary was aware of the full weight of her responsibility.  What parent is?  But we do know that Mary responded in faith.  She bravely accepted her call with the words, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; Let it be with me according to your word.”  Mary accepted her call and she became the mother of new life and the one through whom God’s rule would come into the world.  When the response is faith, the impossibilities of God become possible.

            So here we sit on the fourth Sunday of Advent.  By tradition we retell the story of Mary the Mother of Jesus and honor her faith.  But this is also a day upon which we ponder our similarities with Mary.  Like Mary, we too are God’s favored ones.  For some unknown reason God has chosen us to be recipients of his great love through adoption as his children.  Moreover, the Holy Spirit is also with us, overshadowing us, in us.  God’s presence is in our midst acting through us.  God is with us always acting for us in our best interest.  In fact, we are the proof of God’s amazing love for his creation and especially for those who love him.  These are perplexing thoughts, and as Mary pondered them so should we.

            Another similarity we have is that we, God’s favoured ones gathered together, we like Mary are pregnant with the reality that the impossible is possible.  The Spirit of God has come upon us; the power of God overshadows us.  Within us is the Son of God.  Within us is God’s rule.  Within us is the agency by which God overturns the proud and the powerful and lifts up the humble and poor.  Do we realize this?  Do we realize that we are pregnant with God’s spirit, that through us God is bringing new life and his kingdom into this world?  We have a great responsibility, a great calling, to let God’s new life come forth from us.  How shall we respond?  

            Shall we respond with denial saying, “How can this be? Not us.  We’re not worthy.  We’re tired.  We’re too old.  We don’t have the time. Isn’t there somebody else?”  But you know how it is.  We just like making excuses and that just doesn’t fly.  Surely, we can have only one response, Faith…Faith to believe the impossible possible.  Faith to believe we have a calling, a calling to God’s great purpose in history.  Faith to love this new child that we are pregnant with in our old age.  It may seem impossible, but God is and will bring forth new life and his kingdom through us.  With God nothing is impossible.  All we have to do is listen to this voice of compassion that God has placed in us, kicking us in the gut from the inside out and join in as God makes things unfold.  So, this the Sunday before Christmas Day let us each say, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your word.”

Jesus and Schrodinger's Cat

Matthew 1:26-38
Click Here For Sermon Audio

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.