 |
Christmas
2006 |
|
Christmas
2006 |
Last evening Ali, an
active Muslim in the
At Christmas we hear the
scriptures from Isaiah that look forward to a coming Prince of Peace – the
coming one we welcome at Christmas. Jesus
is a peacemaker. Peace, the saying
goes, is not just the absence of war. Jesus’
birth is a sign of God’s idea of peace. God
brings peace to a world bent on war by placing God’s very self in our midst
– in our midst where if we harm and devour each other, God too is hurt and
crushed. God brings peace not by
standing aloof and shaming us for our struggles to live at peace.
God brings peace by entering into the challenge with us.
Jesus took on human
flesh. He came to visit us.
As Bishop Hanson also says in his LWF 2006 Christmas letter, “we live
in a visited world.” By that
Bishop Hanson does not mean, that we are visited for a short while – as by a
relative who comes once in a while for a week during which we hope our family
will be on their best behavior and we can give them the best of time.
Not like our visit to
relatives in Sweden where we flew over and stayed for two glorious weeks and
were treated like royalty in Stockholm by friends and then were given a whole
flat to use by cousins in Gothenburg, and then an amazing tour of the old family
farm and cemeteries by more cousins in Vinslav and Kyrkhult where we also peeked
into the train station where my great-grandmother Magdalena Hanson first met her
husband, my great-grandfather Jon Jonsson.
But that’s not the kind
of visiting God does. When God
visits us in Jesus it is not just for a brief vacation.
God visits and it is for a life time – Jesus’ life-time, and ours.
God visits and never packs the bags and goes away again. Jesus comes,
becomes flesh and dwells, makes a tent literally, with us.
This thing of becoming
flesh is an amazing kind of thought. Becoming
is a deep thing. And that’s what
John 1 tells us Jesus does, he becomes flesh.
Now, we might ask, why in a million years would a wise and free God do
that? Flesh is vulnerable.
Flesh withers and dies. Flesh
is susceptible to cold and hot; to limitations and flaws.
Flesh is never perfect. Why
would God want to enter into that kind of reality? But
that is what John’s Gospel tells us. In
the Prologue to John we are told that “all things came into being through this
Word that was with God in the beginning.”
“All things came into being. And what came into being, through this
Word, was life, and this life was the light of all people.”
God visits humanity –
not as an outsider like a sports team coming as visitors to another team’s
home turf. God becomes one of the
local home team players. And that
seems so odd: God, Creator of heaven and earth, becoming flesh.
But God knows something we often forget.
God knows that “in the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
All things came into being through him, and without him, not one thing
came into being.” John’s Gospel
knows this wonder, that from the beginning flesh was given life in God, and in
Jesus this life is the light of all people.
Jesus becomes flesh,
reminding us that it’s not really so very bad being flesh after all.
All things came into being through God in the first place.
All things! Even flesh things
– even us imperfect, warring human beings.
But the truth is, we were not made for war, but rather for peace, for we
come from – did not come into being except through – God.
Jesus comes, and does not
forget what we so easily forget, that we too come from God.
If God were to try to remind us of that from a distance, we would never
grasp it. So God, who is
wise and free, takes on flesh to show us that reconciliation and peace are
possible because we come from God, just as Jesus comes from God.
Jesus’ birth shows us God’s
desire for peace, but also our potential for it because all things
come from God. If we can learn to
trust where we have come from we can see that peace is possible, not just by our
creating power structures to make peace possible, but by returning to the power
that was from the beginning.
“In the beginning was
the Word and the Word was with God. All
things came into being through him.” All
things – which includes us! We
came into being from the heart of God. There
is nothing more we need do to become peace makers in our world than to become
what we already are by God’s gift.
And when God realized we
had forgotten who we are – when we like sheep had gone astray, God chose to do
something about it. “To all who
received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of
God.” Hope for our world, this
Christmas Day, is not found in our running away from our humanness; our
vulnerabilities and limitations; our imperfections.
It is found instead in remembering that to be human is to be what Jesus
became and is among us.
That is why it is so
beautiful that we have been entrusted to serve dinner at the Torres Shelter on
this Christmas Day and that members among us have served them breakfast and will
be serving dinner as well. It is
such a human thing to do.
That is why it is so
beautiful to be companions with the Lutheran Synod of Rwanda – a country that
has so deeply suffered, but that is learning that there really is no other
hopeful way forward than the way of reconciliation and peace.
And why it is especially beautiful to be companioned with the very in the
flesh people of the Kagitumba parish where we can get to know the people, not
just visit them one week in July.
Because hope is found not
in running from our human condition, but in learning from Jesus how lovely the
human condition can be, it is also beautiful to be gathered here on this day
around the word and sacrament gifts of the church.
To be peacemakers in the world does not require us to become superhuman,
or other than human, but to become the human, humane ones God created and
redeemed us to be – ones who can learn from Jesus to care for the neighbor, to
forgive those who hurt us, to reach out to the stranger, to advocate for the
powerless and make their needs our own.
What Jesus did, we can do
– not on our own, but by God’s power and guidance.
God promises to guide our feet into the way of peace.
If God promises, the only questions left are: will we be human and not
try to be God? Will we accept that
we need guidance and that it is promised for all who will receive?
The New Year before us
offers opportunity to answer these questions.
But we don’t have to wait for the New Year to take the first step.
Always the first step is: “we love because God first loves us.”
Love comes down at Christmas. God loved so much that God gave us Jesus. How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is giv’n! So God imparts
to human hearts the blessings of his heav’n.
May our human hearts be open to this gift, this Christmas Day and
always!
Amen.
+Pastor Peg Schultz-Akerson,
to the glory of God
Faith