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Saved from Superstition Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 12, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 60:1-6; 10-17
"And I have seen and born witness that this is the Son of God" Now that the trees are down, the presents exchanged or returned, the relatives safely back where they belong and only the bills remain as reminders of the season just past, I want to ask a simple question of Christmas: so what? So what, in the words of John's gospel, that the Word became flesh? So what, in the phrases of the Nicene Creed, that "the only begotten Son of God…for us and for our salvation…was made man." So what that the child born in Bethlehem's manger was born for you? So what? It is the question implied by all the people who filled these pews on Christmas Eve-especially those with children whose faces we likely will not see again until Easter. (We are alone again, so we can talk among ourselves!) Christmas meant what? It is the question voiced by those who never darkened the doors of a church last month, but who celebrated the occasion just the same. Christmas meant what? Parties, presents, family around the fire, carols in the CD player, a vacation day or two. Yet it is also our question, we who have returned to these pews for the new year and who try the hardest to believe what is reasonably impossible to believe: that God somehow has come to us in a child born in Bethlehem. Another year has passed and, once again, our mind has not quite grasped the import of the incarnation. So what? John's gospel is an answer to that question, an answer directed especially to those who must attempt to do their believing in a world both indifferent and hostile to the Christian claim. As to the world's indifference, John tells us from the start that, "He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not." For John, world refers to that part of God's creation capable of responding to its creator: to human beings. Apart from a few shepherds, according to Luke, who responded to the angels' song (could it be that the angels announced the news to all the inhabitants of Bethlehem's hills and only a handful of shepherds heard?); and apart from an unspecified number of wise men from the east, according to Matthew, who followed a star (surely the star was in the sky for all to see, so why did only a few wise men follow?), no one knew the only begotten Son of God had even been born. A child born in a stable in Bethlehem, you say? So what? Theologically speaking, the world of John's prologue anticipates the world in which we live and the world that lives in us. The world knows him not, responds not at all to the claim that in him God is near and made known. Oh, the world may take notice of the values vaguely associated with a Judeo-Christian heritage. The world may acknowledge that our ethical standards have something to do with Jesus' teachings, and that our literary allusions would be impoverished were the cadences of King James lost to our collective memory. The civil world may even accommodate, for tax purposes, the religion begun in his name. But to the claim that in him we have to do with the Living God, the world still shrugs in darkness. So what? Furthermore, John records that Jesus came to his own home and his own people received him not. We think concretely of kaffiyeh-covered heads filling the narrow streets of Nazareth, while John likely meant to tell us that Jesus came to the people of Israel, and his own people were indifferent. That is to say the people, who thought they alone knew who God was and what God wanted them to do, heard nothing of God's Word and saw nothing of God's face in Mary's son. At the beginning, they were indifferent, says John, though John would have us believe, at the end, the religious leaders of the day were downright hostile to this one who for us and for our salvation was made man. No doubt, this is still the case in his home, with his church today. When you think of what preoccupies religious communities in our time-the division over sex, money, property, authority, power, orthodoxy--you can imagine him coming to his own home and watching us fight so intensely among ourselves that we never even notice his presence! Or to put it another way, we miss him because we have made him into a revelation of the God who would bless our side of all that divides those who confess his name. Or to put it even another way, like the world, we use his household and partake of the social and cultural trappings of community life, but have little interest in what it means to know him and believe in him who for us and for our salvation was made man. So what, so what and so what? Let me tell you what, says the fourth gospel's Baptist, says the man who--in his mother's womb according to Luke--leapt at the nearness of Jesus in gestation. John was born as a witness to testify to the light that all, including those of us some two millennia later, might believe, through him, that the only-begotten Son of God, for us and for our salvation, became human. Though John begins his testimony by admitting he did not even know the Messiah when he saw him…tells us, with his own eye, he saw nothing other than a human being when he saw Jesus. "But," he goes on, "the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, 'He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.' And I myself have seen," John finally testifies, "that this is the Son of God." Our problem, we think, is that God has not spoken to a one of us, has not said anything to anyone in this sanctuary. The Baptist may have heard a voice, the kings may have seen a star, the shepherds may have heard the angel, but we have only a lame preacher trying too hard to make sense of an old story. It is all we have to go on, this revisiting of the testimony of one who says he was told to watch for a descending Spirit and then actually sees one over the head of him who appeared to be just another human being. "Oh really?" we say. So what? Yet what John is telling us, and what we have received not, is that in Jesus Christ, God has spoken to us as directly as God will ever speak. In him, God's Word became flesh, became a life we can understand, at least in part, and died the death we must face too and was raised…oh, but that is for another holiday! In him who was born for us, we hear and see the God who has chosen to join us as light to our darkness, as living water to our thirst, as the bread of life to our hunger, as a shepherd to our lost condition. We hear, instead, only an outrageous claim because, for the most part, we count our selves in the number of postmodern shepherds and kings more at home in the camp of those who trust only what we can prove scientifically…or in the crowd of those who are happily secular…or in the academy where disbelief coincides with wisdom. However, G.K. Chesterton's Reverend Father Brown saw something other overtaking the world wherein God's incarnation had become unbelievable. "It's drowning all your…rationalism and skepticism," he says to his young, modern friend, "it's coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition…. It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can't see things as they are. [So] a dog is an omen, and a cat is a mystery." The world will be haunted by "all the menagerie of polytheism; dog Anubis and great green-eyed Pasht and all the holy howling bulls of Bashan, reeling back to the bestial gods of the beginning, …all because you are frightened of four words, 'He was made man.'" As you and I join the world that can no longer believe those four words, then we are left to wonder, with no basis for belief or doubt, for truth or lie, whether there was a message in the fact that the light was red and so kept us from an appointment or that the telephone we failed to answer was never meant to be or if the numbers 108 and 3049 are really lucky or if the stranger who caught our eye was sent by a Spirit we can sort of see in the aura now that you mention it. By the way, had the Baptist been like most spiritual gurus today, then to the crowd's question, "Who are you," John would have answered, I am the way, the truth, the life, taking us on our next adventure in spirituality, leaving us without Word of him who is the way and truth and life. "To see that Father Brown was right in his prediction," writes Robert Jenson, "you need only browse any bookstore or note what Amason.com thinks you might be interested in because you once ordered a book of theology. We late moderns and postmoderns," he goes on, "do not inhabit a secularized world; quite the contrary. The West now lays open before the church's mission in much the same condition as in the days when the missionaries had to cut down its sacred oaks and prove their case by combat with demons. The chief mode of damnation from which the mission has now to rescue our sisters and brothers is superstition, the fear of nameless and named powers that are neither Creator nor creature, that project our wants on infinity without ever quite getting them there, and from which middle position they haunt us dreadfully." Only one Word has ever been spoken, says John, that "on the one hand, presents us with God as no sort of extension or projection of ourselves or other creatures, that offers no handle for 'great green-eyed Pasht' or the male or female divinities projected by our fears, but yet on the other hand does not abandon us in finitude." That Word is Jesus Christ. So what? I will tell you what. Without God's Word made flesh, you and I are left to wonder whether the red stoplight is a sign or the missed telephone call is an omen. We are abandoned to the lonely questions of a mind with no ultimate meaning to embrace but only penultimate speculations to entertain. We are lost on a planet visited simply by chance and set in motion for no reason. We are marooned in flesh that will die, and then decay and be forgotten. But mostly, after the tree is down, the presents are returned, and the relatives have gone back to where they belong, we are alone. Christmas is the proclamation that we are not, because Christmas is not a "what" but a "who," born to save us from life without word of God's love. Listen again: the angels are singing still, the star remains to guide, and the four words I proclaim to you that you might fear not, might hear and for once believe, is this: he was really born. Thanks be to God! |