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The Real Presence
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis December 24, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 9:2-9 Luke 2:1-20
We have come to tell each other a story, a story we may know by heart and yet a story our mind has yet to comprehend. On one hand, this is a story of the powerful playing the poor like pawns: Caesar Augustus decrees (during the time when Quirinius was governor of Syria) that each head must be counted in order that more may be taken from those who have the least. Details locate the beginning of Luke’s story in human history—an emperor, a governor, a census. This, we reason, is a story about real people and places and events. Prompted by Caesar’s decree, Mary and Joseph travel under orders with painful steps and slow. Therefore to this day, the meek and lowly recognize in these verses the reality of the world they still inhabit. On the other hand and almost in a mirror image of the first scene, Luke tells the story of almighty power surrendered so that the least of these may behold, over and against Caesar, the human being they are destined to become: an angel decrees good news to poor shepherds who go with haste to be counted first in the kingdom of God. Here the details suggest a story located in what seems to us a surreal setting, a landscape whose bizarre details—a virgin, an angel, a miraculous birth--appear like a dream. This is, to our way of knowing, a story of impenetrable mystery which simple shepherds were destined to apprehend. Prompted by the angel’s decree, they set out with haste for Bethlehem. Therefore to this day, those who bend beneath life’s crushing load have been convinced that grace has entered gravity; that God’s light has been made substantial once for all in the darkness of the night and of the grave. After a season of somewhat irrelevant preparations, we have only now to wait and listen and ponder the summons that invites our return to the babe lying in a manger. God knows at this night’s end what you and I will hear and believe as we read again Luke’s account of Christ’s birth; moreover God knows in the morning light that we still may prefer the darkness because we can. “I warn all Inquirers into this hard point to wait,” wrote Coleridge in echoes of Augustine concerning the grammar of the overwhelming Luke employs to unfold the story of our salvation, “not only not to plunge forward before the Word is given…, but not even to paw the ground with impatience. For in a deep stillness only can this truth be apprehended.” We wait, then, before these words of Luke for a Word to be spoken against what appears to be the inexorable fate of all who must die. “Fate” writes philosopher Glenn Tinder “is all that threatens and befalls us. It comes upon us from without, often strange and uninvited, always at enmity with personal being”: a decree from Caesar Augustus; a tax under whose load we bend low; a uniformed soldier knocking at the door; test results spoken by a doctor who begins, “I am sorry…”; people across the sea perishing for want of drugs a free market refuses to bear; children near at hand caught in the crossfire; fine minds randomly abandoned to madness; disparate tribes tottering between chaos and despotism; a nation lost between lies and fear. These whom the powerful move like pawns inhabit the fated first world Luke dares to name. But presumed in Luke’s silence is also the less obvious fate that befalls the powerful and the privileged: a hearth and home secured; barns full; money mistaken for treasure; lives insured against the ravages of age; power wielded within the hollow rhetoric of moral rectitude; distance bought from violence, from hunger, from fear. Privilege is fateful in that the distance the privileged keep from the least of these (that is to say the distance kept from this child born in a manger) is at enmity with human destiny. No wonder these who in life have benefited most from the decree that “all the world shall be taxed”, turn up—more often than not--missing at the manger. Yet the fateful tragedies of poverty and of privilege, says Cambridge don George Steiner, are nevertheless “God-haunted”. This is why, year after year, whether we reside in places of need or advantage, of power or abject poverty, we tell ourselves the story which “posits [us] unhoused at those crossroads where the mystery of [our] condition is made naked to the ambiguous intercessions of menace and of grace” [Steiner]; where the name of the only crossroad worth our lives turns out to be Bethlehem. Caesar in all of his iterations constitutes the menace while the intercession of grace, according to Luke, must rather be traced over the route the shepherds were destined to run. Now shepherds would seem to be, of all characters, the most fated: certainly at the mercy of power and privilege, alternately exposed to the scorched wilderness and to the bleak mid-winter. Yet in Luke’s narrative, the shepherds are destined for the manger. Destiny in contrast to fate, says Tinder, “entails living at once freely and as one must.” Paradoxically, a destiny cannot be chosen but can only be conferred; then again, a destiny conferred must also be a destiny we are free to refuse. Mary comes to mind most often in this regard. Though I think the angel’s decree to the shepherds reveals what Mary cannot of herself make known to us: that human destiny—the life given us by God to lead—is conferred only where two or three are gathered. “Fate,” says Tinder, “is collective, destiny is communal [and] community is entered into [not through some required conformity] but through a very different kind of act: communication.” Communicare…being changed into each other… God become human…the human made holy…the communion of Christ’s Real Presence made manifest among us in the manger, the feeding trough that foreshadowed the meal: communication. Still through the cloven skies they come, we sing, through air split wide open by God’s address, the angel of God singles out the lowest of human creatures for God’s high and holy communication come down to manger-size. Perhaps it was because the distance was least between the humanity God assumed and the shepherd’s humble estate. (The same could be said of the women at Christ’s empty tomb.) Abiding in the field keeping watch over their flocks, they had neither plunged forward before the Word was given nor pawed the ground with impatience to hear. Rather in the stillness they were both sore afraid and assured by God’s Word invading their waiting silence: To you is born this day in the City of David a Savior which is Christ the Lord. The “you”, of course, is plural and so confers a destiny that cannot unfold short of all, all, all of them running to Bethlehem. We, on the other hand, survey the silent landscape of our common lives and await word of the fate that will befall us or the destiny that has yet to claim us. Some of us are pawing the ground impatiently while others simply abide and keep watch. Caesar’s menace has become commonplace; more and more our privilege presents even us with a problem; and of the ambiguous intercession of grace we say we are agnostic. But before this silent night is over, Scripture means to cast us together, and contrary to our initial expectation, neither as the privileged nor as the powerful (roles we have endeavored to win), but finally as simple shepherds ready to receive God’s Word and so our destiny. These words on the page are as close as we will come, my friends, to hearing the angel’s decree. That said, our part, though not fated, is not in our control. Rather the life of faith is a destiny that can only be conferred, a destiny that has been conferred upon us all in Him who was born to end the tragedy of our every God-haunted distance. Yet in the morning light it will again be a destiny we are free to refuse given the unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought of Lent and Good Friday not far off. “Life,” wrote W. H. Auden in his Christmas Oratorio, “is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die…./The inevitable is what will seem to happen to you purely by chance;/The Real is what will strike you as really absurd;/Unless you are certain you are dreaming, it is certainly a dream of your own….” Quit, then, Caesar’s absurd decrees and wait in the stillness of this dream for the angels. Then certain that you are dreaming, even unto Bethlehem. For unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a savior who is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you: you shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. Thanks be to God! |