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The Whence, the Where and the Whither of Christmas
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis December 18, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Micah 5:2-5a John 1:1-18
The question with which we begin the morning is, on one hand, the question every child asks before an impending birth: “Mommy, where do babies come from?” But on this Sunday before Christmas, the same question becomes scandalously specific as we ask after the origin of one singular child, God’s only begotten child who is about to be born. “Where did Jesus come from?” we ask, being God’s grown children who are longing to understand and believe. As if in response to our question on these Sundays running toward Bethlehem, Matthew has told us the story that begins with Abraham. Luke has told us the story that begins with Mary. Mark will soon tell us, when things settle down, the story that begins with the waters of baptism. But now John is telling us a story that begins with the Word. Poetic, we say. A little abstract, we think, especially for any who have come seeking the sentiment of the season. Matthew and Luke are, after all, the recommended readings. In fact the church’s lectionary usually relegates these verses from John to Christmas morning, when a faithful remnant will bound out of bed to bow down together before his birth. For all others, angels and shepherds, kings and a star are enough to crowd the manger in our minds. These earthy characters and ancient details are, if not particularly reasonable, then at least recognizable after all these years. But what are we to make of John? You could say that John is like that parent who, to a child’s simple question of origins, offers a quick course in advanced physiology. As to the whence, John speaks of a Word that was with God and was God from the beginning. As to the where, he tells of the God who, for us and for our salvation, came down from heaven and pitched a tent with us. As to the whither, he points like the Baptist to the One who is, even now, close to the Father’s bosom, who has made God known. But we are getting ahead of ourselves! First there is the whence of Christmas: In the beginning, John begins, was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Where did Jesus come from? From God’s speech, says John. The speech that spoke light and life against chaos into being; the speech that promised to Abraham heirs and a land; the speech that ran through the prophets of old as God’s shout against the darkness: God’s speech, which was from the beginning and was God from the beginning, became light and life for the world God so loved now in the fullness of time and in the flesh of Jesus Christ. Paul says as much in a letter to the Colossians: that he was the firstborn of all creation; that all things were created through him. So too the author of Hebrews writes that long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these latter days God as spoken to us by a Son. Our minds have attempted to comprehend this Mystery before. In a time before time and a space before space, we have tried to imagine the whence of this “preexistent” Word and, for the most part, have failed. “Before the Virgin conceived,” we reason (already, to our way of thinking, throwing reason out the window), “there was a not-yet incarnate divine Son who was, at that point, located in heaven and not earth.” Says one of the finest theological minds of our times Robert Jenson, this “is unthinkable. This story of an eternal Son who at first is not man, and then later on is,” is not only impossible for our minds to think but is impossible to reconcile with the biblical faith. “When theology has started with the notion of an entity on the creator’s side of the Bible’s great divide,” he says, “and of an entity on the creature side…, the identity of the two has proven impossible to think, and not in the sense in which the mystery of the incarnation ought to be impossible to think, just in the ordinary sense that all attempts to state the fact of the matter lead to incoherent positions.” So we ask again, “Where did Jesus come from?” and turn this time, for tangible help, to the church’s creed that has taken its cues, in large part, from John. Wrestling with the complexity of Christmas and the Incarnation amid a 4th century controversy that tempted the church to claim too little for the whence of this child, the early church fathers confessed--in sum and in sight of John’s prologue--that the One who was Light of Light and Very God of Very God…came down from heaven. Where did Jesus come from? From heaven! Right, we say. Got it! Like the child who returns to play when, in response to his question about where babies come from, a parent says, “From the hospital!” we may be content to leave the whence of Christmas at that. But there are other five-year-olds now grown (one of whom unfortunately inhabits this pulpit) who are not content, even and especially on the Sunday before Christmas Sunday, but instead are driven to the next question, “If where Jesus came from is heaven, where is heaven?” Apparently heaven must be up if it is a place from which you come down. This cosmology made sense, of course, before Copernicus and Newton proved space to be “homogeneous. That is to say, no matter how far up you go—which now just means away from wherever you happen to be—space [is space and one space is] no more suited for God’s dwelling [than another]. There simply is no place out there that is candidate to be heaven.” [Jenson] Within the story Scripture tells as well as within our sophisticated minds, this turns out to be true! In the beginning God’s speech created the heavens and the earth, heaven therefore being God’s “pied-a-terre within creation…God’s own place [God’s dwelling, in other words] is just God himself….” [Jenson] Heaven simply designates “any starting point in creation from which God moves through creation toward us; it is,” to paraphrase Karl Barth, “wherever in creation God has taken up residence in order to come to us within creation.” Where did Jesus come from? Jesus came from the God who is moving toward us and who has chosen to take up residence with us in flesh and blood so that he may come to us within creation. Another name for this God and this movement, I think John would say, is love. Not, we must caution again, love as sentiment; but love as self-giving, self-emptying, a kenotic freefall of grace into gravity because God has chosen not to be God without us. Suddenly we have arrived at the where of Christmas! The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, writes John as to the where. “And because of His visitation,” says the poet (W.H. Auden), “we may no longer desire God as if He were lacking: our redemption is no longer a question of pursuit but of surrender to Him who is always and everywhere present.” Present completely, says John, in the God who has pitched a tent among the livestock, who has “tabernacled” with the poor and lowly, who has chosen earth as his cradle and broken heaven in upon our drear captivity to sin. The Word--that was in the beginning and was with God and was God--is the Word which is now become flesh—present tense. That is to say, God determined from the beginning, to redeem us, in love to turn us toward home and him, in the face of Jesus Christ. Therefore none presently are beyond earshot of God’s address nor in life or in death will any be beyond the grasp of God’s grace. Ironically the where of Christmas, the scandalous particularity of the incarnation, signals that it is only a matter of time before we will find ourselves longing for the abstractions that were ours to spin without him. Or to put it negatively, “If God had not become a man…then everything we could conceive and say to ourselves about…God with [us] would hang in the air as arbitrarily, as mistakenly, as misleadingly as…cosmic speculation,” said Barth. Therefore there was and is no “where”, no space on earth that wants him. According to Luke there was no room for him in the inn to be born; and according to Matthew he received only the murderous welcome of Herod from whom the holy family fled as the prophet had foretold; and John is telling us also that He came to his own and his own received him not. The where of Christmas is a presence that takes up a scandalous space—takes up the space that is always a stumbling block to those who think they own God or have deserved God’s grace or have alone been given salvation: the landed, the powerful, the religious, the rich, the morally certain, to name a few. “The incarnation,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, involves “a claim to a space of its own on earth…[whereas a] truth, a doctrine, or a religion…are disembodied entities. They are heard, learnt and apprehended and that is all. But the incarnate Son of God needs not only ears or hearts, but living men [and women] who will follow him.” The scandal, I say again, is precisely in the where of Christmas. Follow precisely him? Follow him precisely where? Well, on earth there was no where for him to lay his head save in a manger and on a cross. So it is that we come to the whither of Christmas and curiously double back from earth to heaven. Of the whither, the destination, the destiny of God’s Word, John writes that No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, he says, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. His destination is God’s heart, says John, and because this is his destination, he has made it ours too. The heaven that in him has broken in to our every where is, simply put, God-with-us and we-with-God eternally. It is a foretaste of God’s future tense. The Word that became flesh incarnated, as well, the life that is to come. Hence eternity entered time to reveal the water whereby we will never thirst; the bread that will not leave us hungry; the light that the darkness cannot overcome; the way we were not made to walk without him; the truth we cannot dare apart from him; the life that is life abundant only in him. “I am” he says and is the Word that poses God’s future; the Word that makes one unconditional promise. The promise, in a word, is that nothing will separate us from God’s love. We may therefore with the poet conclude
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