Becoming Human
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
December 17, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Zechariah 2:10-13
John 1:1-18

“But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.”

    Are we always creating you, as Rilke said,
    Trying, on our best days,
    To make possible your coming-into-existence?
    (asks poet Robert Cording in his Advent Stanzas)
    Or are you merely a story told in the dark,
    A child’s drawing of barn and star?
    Each year you are born again. It is no remedy
    For what we go on doing to each other,
    For history’s blind repetitions of hate and reprisal.
    Here I am again, huddled in hope. For what
    Do I wait? – I know you only as something missing,
    And loved beyond reason.
    As a word in my mouth I cannot embody.

The Word, wrote John, became flesh—became human-and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. But of our humanity and of grace or truth we know so much less this Sunday than we thought we knew last. Huddled in hope even as our children were huddled in fear on the floor of their classrooms, we wait for evidence of the One we have known as something missing and yet have loved beyond reason. The Word that was God from the beginning, we read, became flesh; but today this sounds as a word in the mouth we cannot embody. We are still waiting: waiting, it seems, for God to become human; waiting for those we love beyond reason to become human; waiting for our own poor flesh to become more than this body of death. But when…and where…and how?

With Genesis as his text, John’s prologue presupposes you and I have have come into being with the lily and the willow, with the tortoise and the mongoose, with Mars and the Milky Way through the Word that said “Let there be…!” But then John makes an astounding distinction concerning what we yet are not. To paraphrase theologian Robert Jenson, you and I come to ‘exist in and out of the world of animals and plants and galaxies precisely when we recognize that we do not yet exist; we are those of God’s creatures who have our own true selves not as a possession but as a challenge.’ “I am sorry but I am not myself today” we say and the admission is likely the most honest word any of us ever will say about ourselves, except that we mean it mostly to excuse ourselves from the persons we were born to become when the truth of our lives, no matter our years, is that we are not yet who we will be.

We are becoming human and John’s Prologue announces that this is inescapably a joint enterprise with the God whose Word is descending into mortal flesh, whose love has become incarnate, whose firstborn Son was born and so became human. Therefore we tell each other this story in the dark, though it may be no remedy for what we go on doing to each other, in order to quiet our fears and hold our hopes on high. We tell the story each year of his being born again because maybe its telling this year will make possible our coming-into-existence; maybe this year we will receive him and be given the power to become human. Maybe on the night we have given to his birth, we will trust at last what we cannot prove: that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

“What has come into being in him” says John “is life.” Life is the first word John uses to name what darkness and death have not overcome. We think of the life we know between birth and death and are not convinced! But by life John means eternal life has come into being through him. He is speaking not of a time of unimaginable duration but of the love that knows no end addressed to a world that knows no love. It is our only hope of becoming human! We know such love, God’s love is revealed, John will later say, in the act of a Father who is not left merely to say after the cruel fact of suffering and death, “If I could only have taken the place of my child.” Rather this is the Father who has sent his Son into the world to take upon himself our suffering and death because that is love! Without word of the love that will love us to the end, the poet’s words remind us, our lives and our deaths would be unbearable:

    Last week a lifelong friend told me,
    There’s no such thing as happiness. It’s ten years
    Since he found his son, then a nineteen-year-old
    Of extraordinary grace and goodness, curled up
    In his dormitory room, unable to rise, to free
    Himself of a division that made him manic and
    Depressed, and still his son struggles from day to day….
    My friend hopes these days for very little—a stretch of
    Hours, a string of a few days when nothing in his son’s life
    Goes terribly wrong. This is the season of sad stories….

The eternal life that is God’s self-giving love, says John nevertheless, has not been overcome by the darkness. This is the season of waiting to believe.

Light is the second word John uses to name the reality of the love the darkness has not overcome. “The light” he says “shines in the darkness,” darkness being, among other things, “the brute inevitability and despotism” of the present moment. You and I who take our humanity to be a possession rather than a challenge also presume that what we are is nothing much more than the sum of our present experience: we are alternately the good or poor student, the stumbling or stellar athlete; we are the unappreciated manager, the overwhelmed parent, the incorrigible addict, the anxiously aging, the unjustly accused. Living within the confines of the facts forward, we walk in darkness.

Or perhaps it is that we have preferred to take up the gauntlet of becoming human alone and in the dark. Having eschewed, according to Genesis and John from the beginning in the garden, the tree of life—of eternal life--we live our one precious life by the light of reason. Therefore we have preferred the narrow and short-sighted certitude that comes from knowing good and evil instead of knowing God, have preferred our own darkness even though the light has come into the world. Out of necessity, says the poet,
    We’ve strung colored lights on our houses and trees,
    And lit candles in the windows to hold back the dark.
    For what do we hope?—That our candles will lead you
    To our needs? That your gift of light will light
    These darkest nights of the year? That our belief
    In our own righteousness will be vindicated?...

But even our righteousness is darkness except the light that illumines the love for which we were destined should shine in our hearts, unless the word we cannot speak to ourselves be spoken to us by one outside of ourselves who is even now on the way to our side. “That I am not yet myself and must become it is,” says Jenson, “something I cannot very well say to myself. Where would I get the location from which to say it? If I am to discover this peculiar sort of fact, if I am to discover that my selfhood is an opportunity and not a given, somebody else will have to tell me. The challenge to find what I am by becoming other than I am can only come from someone other than me, by some person who is new and strange to me and communicates that strangeness.”

This person, according to John, is not the Baptist who himself was strange. Rather the Baptist has been sent by God to testify, lest we miss the truth, to the exceeding strangeness of God’s light and life in flesh appearing. Even so and in spite of all the words given in the Scriptures to alert us, we will not know him when we see him. Moreover like those who have gone before us, we will not accept Him whose own we are, for the “enterprise of becoming human is a fearsome enterprise.” Our humanity depends on his, says Jenson in so many words, and that is a risky bet.

Ironically it seems to be riskiest for those who have been most readied to receive him in every age and so apparently has been a bet not worth taking. “He came to his own home,” said John of his age, “and his own people received him not.” As for us, we are more likely to choose again this year the narrow certainties of our righteous-selves-justified or to decide we can tolerate the darkness held back by the lights we have strung up on our own. For there is not only risk here, but there is also “the fearsomeness of mystery [in which] we are called to live for a future that is not merely not in our own hands but is in unknown hands.” There is the disconcerting promise that if we believe in his name we may live as those who were born not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. So the poet dares to ask of mystery what we cannot imagine:

    And will you intercede with sighs too deep for words
    Because you love us in our weakness, because
    You love always, suddenly and completely, what is
    In front of you….
    Because you come again and again to destroy the God
    We keep making in our own image. Will we learn
    To pray: May our hearts be broken open. Will we learn
    To prepare a space in which you might come forth,
    In which, like a bolt of winter solstice light,
    You might enter the opening in the stones, lighting
    Our dark tumulus from beginning to end?

There is no other way to receive him than to die to what self we have become without him until our hearts be broken open by the strange mystery of God becoming human for us and with us. Then by “the word of love to which our humanity is the response and for which we vainly have waited”, by the Word from the beginning finally being said in Jesus Christ, we will be his.

“The Word became flesh,” John dares like a poet to claim, “and dwelt among us, full of truth and grace, and we have beheld his glory, glory as of the Father’s only Son” even as we have also beheld his humanity: beheld the human being we are, by his grace, destined to become because he was born in the night. So the poet concludes:
    This is the night we have given for your birth.
    After the cherished hymns, the prayers, the story…
    We light small candles and stand in the dark
    Of the church, hoping for the peace
    A child knows, hoping to forget career, mortgage,
    Money, hoping even to turn quietly away
    From the blind, reductive selves inside us.
    We are a picture a child might draw
    As we sing Silent night, holy night.
    Yet while each of us tries to inhabit the moment
    That is passing, you seem to live in between
    The words we fill with our longing.
    The time has come
    To admit I believe in the simple astonishment
    And also to say plainly, as Pascal knew, that you will live
    In agony even to the end of the world.
    Your will failing to be done on earth
    As it is in heaven.
    Come, o come Emmanuel,
    I am a ghost waiting to be made flesh by love
    I am too imperfect to bear.

From his fullness, John assures us, we have all received grace upon grace. Thanks be to God!

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