Crazy Little Thing Called Love (1st Corinthians 13:1 - 13)

A lot of people think that Paul’s writing is convoluted and hard to understand.  That it’s kind of baroque, and when it’s not baroque, it’s cranky.  I’ve even heard some folks say he’s not very pastoral, and apparently they mean by that that he isn’t always sugary or even particularly sympathetic.  And at times, all of that is true: his writing can be hard to understand, and he certainly seems to get a little bit cranky at times, although what seems that way to us is usually just a rhetorical device.  But he also wrote some of the most beautiful prose in the New Testament . . . “I consider,” he wrote “that the sufferings of this present time not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us,” and he pictured the “whole creation, waiting with eager longing for the revealing of God’s children.”  And don’t forget it was Paul who assured us that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,  nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

But arguably, the most popular of his writings is today’s passage, especially at weddings, where it’s doubtless being recited somewhere at any given hour of the day.  Here he describes one of the core marks or attributes of the Christian life, or one of the supposed attributes, at any rate.   He argues that not one other of our other traits is as important, that this one mark overshadows them all: if we have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and knowledge, and all if we have faith enough to move mountains, but have no love, we are empty, we are nothing, we are pure noise.  Bonging gongs and clanging symbols. Ringo Starr on drums.  Love washes everything else away, it drowns them right out, it overshadows them in it’s importance.  All those other characteristics—prophecy, faith, knowledge and all that jazz—don’t amount to a hill of beans without love.

But just what is this love stuff? Paul talks about it as if it is a thing, something you can have, he says: “if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” And if it is a thing that one can have—and presumably not have—what’s it made of?  Of what does it consist?  And more to the point, how do we get some?  Are we born with it, or do we acquire it somehow, does someone come along and give it to us?

Well.  When we were children, our parents loved us—another way to put it is gave us their love—and we loved them back.  And we hear all the time of people incapable of love, and the story-line is it's because their mama or daddy didn't love them, so is that where we get love?  From parents, or others who love us?  Is there some kind of age limit, some kind of developmental stage, beyond which us getting love from somebody else doesn't work?  We’ve all heard stories about sociopaths who are incapable of returning love . . .

And that returning business  brings up another thing: love requires two parties, an “I” and a “thou,” as Martin Buber puts it.  It takes two to tango, a love-er and a lov-ee, but only the lov-er has to actually have love.  A staple of television drama is unrequited love, and we’ve all loved an inanimate object—I just love my iPad—which more than likely can't love us back.

All in all, this love is a very complicated business, but culturally, we tend to dumb it down to an emotion, as something that makes our hearts go pity-pat.  Although we say love is a many-splendored thing, when we say the word, what we’re really talking about is feelings, nothing more than feelings.

Modern science, of course, views this kind of love as nothing but chemical reactions, and they’ve shown that a class of opioids called endorphins, produced by the central nervous system, produces these feelings of euphoria, and that in a romantic relationship, they tend to not be produced after a certain number of years. leading to the infamous seven-year itch of Hollywood fame and Marilyn Monroe’s dress.

The Greeks, of course, were well aware of this all of this, much more so than we seem to be, and had three words for that little thing we just call love.  Eros is the word they used for erotic love, or what we might call romantic love, whispered by two people one to another for thousands of years.  Philos is their word for familial, sisterly or brotherly love, that between members of a family, mother to son, father to daughter.  Agape is what they called a “higher” form of love, an appreciation that arises based on conscious evaluation and choice.  Agape love is not something one “falls into,” it's something one chooses and, contrary to what you may have been taught in Sunday school, it’s applied to humans as well as the divine.  And that’s the kind of love Paul is talking about here.  Agape.

So.  Let’s recap.  Paul is talking about love as a thing here, as something we can have, if not hold.  Further, he’s using the word agape here, which the ancient Greeks considered the “highest” species of love, note the quotes around “highest.”  Finally, we’ve seen that agape is an appreciation that results from conscious evaluation and choice.  Thus, in a way, we’ve answered the question of how do we get some love: by evaluating the person or object and choosing to love him, her or it.

And it makes a certain amount of sense, doesn't it?  This is how we just might be able to live out Jesus’ commandment to love our enemies: we evaluate, we gain knowledge about a person or a peoples and thereby gain an appreciation, a love of them through understanding  and perhaps even empathy.  Jesus doesn't say we have to feel an emotion for them, we don't have to go all mushy inside of us at the thought of them, but that we should open ourselves up to them through knowledge, and learning and understanding.  In other words, we are to appreciate them, how they came to be who they are, or—as euphemism would have it—where they’re coming from.

That's the point Paul is making here, and he puts it very graphically: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”  If I do not have love, I may speak with the most silver tongue, sing the most beautiful tune, but what comes out will just be noise, nothing to it but sound.  If I know everything, if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and knowledge, but have no love, well . . . I am nothing.  Without a relationship with my fellow human beings, entered into with empathy and compassion, without an appreciation of the other, without being able to put ourselves in their place, walk a mile in their shoes, then it is all worthless.  Our beautiful speech, our tremendous knowledge, all our fine deeds of charity will come to naught.

In the last line of our passage, Paul speaks of three attributes: faith, hope and love; says that they “abide.”  And it's important to note that Paul uses the Greek word we translate as “abide” in a permanent sense, in an indwelling sense.  They are virtues in the ancient Greco-Roman sense: eternal, changeless and true.  “Faith, hope, and love abide, these three,,” he says, “and the greatest of these is love,” and it's not hard to see why.  Faith and hope are qualities of individuals, but love is relational, it involves two parties, it involves Buber’s I and Thou.  It has the potential to glue societies together, to bring peace between peoples.

The love Paul speaks of is a conscious love, brought about by studying and learning about the “other.”  And this appreciation breeds compassion and understanding, it engenders a desire to help, to work together, instead of simply condemning them when we get crosswise.

There’s a saying “hate the sin and love the sinner” that is too often used in a trite, almost smug way by people who, if they don't hate the sinner as well as the sin, do a pretty good imitation of it.  But if we think about agape,  the love Paul writes about, you can almost see how that might be.  Paul isn't asking that we condone what others do, that we love what we consider “sin.”  Neither Paul—or Christ—expect us to condone or accept the beheading of journalists, to feel all warm and fuzzy about murders or rapists or jihadi terrorists.  But we are expected to love them.  We're expected to acknowledge their humanity, that they are created by the same loving, forgiving God as we. Before we condemn them, we are asked to understand them, because that’s our vocation: to be the active presence of God’s love in the World.  After all, as the song goes, they will know that we are Christians by our love.   Amen.

 

Campaign Stop (Luke 4:14 - 21)

You ever notice how politicians return to their home towns to announce their candidacies?  It makes for great photo-ops, there against the backdrop of their childhood … with spouse and kiddies and mama and daddy there, smiling adoringly up at their loved one, little suspecting what a chore it’s going to be in just a few short months: smiling adoringly, smiling adoringly, smiling adoringly . . .  and they never quite see it coming, when the unending pressure of press scrutiny scrapes up something embarrassing from the past.  We’ve got a very bad habit of lynching our politicians and other luminaries for having feet of clay, for being human beings which, last time I checked, most of them are.

But at the start of their campaigns, there on their own home turf, where the press will throw them softballs, where there are loving crowds of friends and family looking on, wanting a President or a Senator or Congressman from their own town, maybe thinking of all the pork that’s gonna come their way, all the public works projects or no-bid contracts at the local defense plant . . . I remember Bill and Hillary and Chelsea, beaming for the cameras in Hope, Arkansas—he was the man from Hope!  But that was before Monica and Gennifer and the disillusion of millions . . . I remember W and Laura and the girls there in Crawford, all optimism and confidence, looking young and fresh and ready.  Of course, that was before the press savaged the girls for sowing some wild oats, and before some airplanes hit some towers in New York.

But there on that day, in that place, it was a sweetheart deal for each of the future first families, and it must have felt good to them . . . That’s not exactly how it was for Jesus . . .though it’s outside our reading, it’s important to remember that not too long after his reading in the synagogue, they run him out of town on a rail, or more accurately, try to throw him off a cliff.  So much for the hometown crowd.

He quotes from Isaiah, from one of the “messianic passages,” then very deliberately rolls up the scroll, hands it to the attendant, and sits down.  And Luke says all eyes were upon him, and then he begins to say to them “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  And most of the time, we read that and say: “There.  He’s announced who he is, revealed his messianic-ness,” and maybe—though he says some other things too—maybe that has something to do with why they get mad. I know I’ve preached something like that in the past.  But scholar Gil Bailie points out that a careful reading shows differently:  Luke tells us he begins to say “Today this scripture has been fulfilled . . .” not that he says it.   He sees that all eyes are upon him, all are attentive—after all, he is well-spoken and gracious, and a local boy to boot—and he starts to tell them who he is, but he doesn’t.

And it begs the question: why?  Why didn’t he tell them he was the fulfillment of the scripture he’d just read from Isaiah?  All eyes were upon him, it was the perfect time, there couldn’t have been any better to announce his ministry . . . it would have been as if Clinton or Bush had gotten this big ol’ crowd together, talked about their presidential heritage, maybe evoking the ghost of Lincoln like they all do, but instead of going ahead and announcing their candidacies, they wave at the crowd, get into their limos and drive off.  All eyes are on Jesus, and he starts to take advantage of it, starts to announce his candidacy for Messiah, but he doesn’t.

 And to understand why not, we need to invoke the “C-word.”  That’s the context-word, in case you were wondering.. Stories like this were never meant to be read in isolation, by themselves.  On the contrary, they always relate to what comes before and after.  And in this case, the relevant passage is the one right before, when the Holy Spirit drives him into the wilderness, and Ol’ Scratch presents him with three temptations.  And without going into detail—we’ll likely do that in a few weeks—all three in some way tempt him to grasp for power, to take authority over the world and all that’s in it, to exercise his power as Son of God to become rich and famous and drink Latte’s all the time.  And here, in the very next passage, is yet another temptation: messianic fever is vibrating throughout the land, he’s just read from one of passages responsible, and all eyes are glued on him.  There will never be a better time to tell them who he is, to declare his Messiah-hood, but he doesn’t.

At the end of the wilderness story, Luke says that the devil left him until an opportune moment, and I always assumed it’s meant to be at the end, when they crucify him, but maybe not.  Maybe the reason Luke puts this story where he does, right after the wilderness episode, is that he wants to subtly remind us that temptation lurks everywhere.  In the synagogue that day, all eyes were upon him, they were his homies, his people, and they would have followed him anywhere.  He could have led them off, to a glorious revolution or the beginning of a new movement, but no.  He begins to tell them who he is, that he has come to do all of that, but he doesn’t.

And at first, he gets away with it, at first his fellow Nazarenes say “Wow, he speaks very well for a carpenter’s son,” but as he continues to teach—and it’s only after pointing out that God sent two of their most famous prophets, Elijah and Elisha, to their enemies from Sidon and Syria, do they get mad and try to throw him off a cliff.

But if they had listened carefully—and maybe it sat there in the back of their minds and they didn’t notice until he got more specific—they could have inferred it from what he read in Isaiah.  Or rather: what he didn’t read.   Here’s the passage that he was reading, from Isaiah’s 61^st chapter:

The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor,

And what I just read was Isaiah chapter 61, the entirety of verse 1 and the first part of verse 2, verse 2a as we would list it in a bible lesson.  What Jesus didn’t read was 2b, the part that comes right after.  If he’d continued, he’d have read “the Spirit has anointed me . . . to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.”

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he leaves that off, do you?  Isaiah—like many other ancient prophets and theologians—thought that right along with doing good for God’s people, God would wreak vengeance upon their enemies.  Revenge.   Retaliation.  But Jesus—whom we believe is the incarnation of the divine—spent his entire life embodying just the opposite.  His whole life as the Son of Man was spent forgiving and even healing those who were the enemies of his people.  He spent his whole time on earth demonstrating—through his example as Son of the most high—that there was nothing of vengeance in God.

And so in a sense, the Good News that he talks about is not just freeing the oppressed, not just recovery of sight to the blind—though it surely includes all these things—but what he leaves unsaid as well, and what he demonstrates just a few lines later by refusing to give in to the temptation of declaring his Messiah-hood and becoming a tool of human vengeance.  God, whom Jesus called his Abba, is not a God of vengeance, not a deity of retaliation, not a God of revenge.  The year of God’s favor is a year of favor to everyone, Jews and gentiles alike, friends of Israel and those who oppose it as well.

When Katrina hit New Orleans, some of our more, how shall we say it,  fundamental  brothers and sisters said that God was punishing the city for its tolerance of gays.  Overlooking, apparently, the fact that God must’ve had a bad aim, because God spared the French Quarter where they all hang out. Three years and change after that, an earthquake that killed upwards of 100,000 people in Haiti brought ‘em all back out of the woodwork, the most famous being Pat Robertson, God bless him, who opined that the earthquake was, and I quote, “God’s vengeance upon the Haitians for making a deal with the devil to rid themselves of the French.”  He was apparently referring to a folk tale—that even most of Haiti’s Christians considered mythological—that the country’s founders did a deal with the Devil, Robert-Johnson style, to get the French off their backs.  And although I think it’s an insult to Isaiah to compare him to Robertson, there is definitely some of the old vengeance-thinking to these remarks by founder of The 700 Club.  Rather than their poverty being due to a sinful and corrupt government, and the ‘quake to shifting tectonic plates, God is actually bringing God’s vengeful wrath upon those poor people.

But here’s the problem: we’re on the other side of the Old Testament.  The whole point of the incarnation is that God becomes one of us, and showed us what it means to live as the perfect human, as one perfectly in tune with the spirit of God who dwells within.  Jesus is like a filter: he filters out all the human-borne ideas of the divine, all the historically-conditioned notions that God is like us in desiring vengeance, in wreaking bloody retribution.   Jesus showed—in this passage and in his whole life—that God is not a God of vengeance, not  a God of revenge.  The Lord God Almighty is a God of forgiveness, of compassion.

And it’s a good thing for Robertson, saying that crazy stuff that God can’t have been too fond, of and it’s a good thing for us.  The God of forgiveness, the God who is love, forgives Robertson for saying those stupid things, just as he forgives us for all the dumb things we do, for all those times when through our acts of rebellion and contrariness we have impeded the work of God.  God forgives us for all the hateful things we might have said, all the things that hurt our fellow Christians, all the times we have not treated our neighbor as ourselves.  The God we worship, the one true God, does not seek vengeance, does not seek retribution, but forgives us just as we are.  Hallelujah!  Amen. 

Ritual Matters (Luke 3:15 - 22; Baptism of the Lord)

Anybody know the difference between a ceremony and a ritual?  Neither did I, until one of the faculty at the Living School explained it to me.  He said that ceremony is when you do stuff and say stuff that are entirely predictable, entirely choreographed, it's like Kabuki theater.  In a ceremony, you always know what's coming next, what's going to happen on the stage.  A lot of civic functions are ceremonies, like presenting the key to a city to a visiting dignitary, maybe a famous hometown actor or something.  You know exactly what’s going to happen, almost down to the second: the mayor will introduce the dignitary, she’ll say what a wonderful person they are, how honored the city to have this person be a part of it. Then the visitor will say a few words, saying how honored he is to have grown up there, how it instilled in him a strong work ethic, the drive to succeed, et cetera, et cetera. Then the mayor hands this big giant key to the actor, they pause with it in between so a photographer can get a picture, and after the ceremony, the actor gives the big giant key back to await the next honored visitor, ‘cause it doesn't really open anything, anyway.

And that’s the thing about a ceremony: it doesn't really open anything, there’s very little real meaning or feeling to it.  But what if the mayor had followed up her glowing comments with a recollection about how the last time the actor was in town, he got drunk, took off all his clothes and swam with a model half his age in the fountain at the downtown Hyatt?  And what if the visitor followed up his remarks by saying that he hopes he doesn’t get shot, crime having gotten so bad downtown since he was a boy? At the very least, it would provide some amusing news coverage, and maybe, just maybe, some thought as well about the price of fame and what to do about downtown crime.

And that's the difference between ceremony and ritual: ceremony is always pro-forma, always positive; ritual includes the dark side.  It's like the Fourth of July, where we shoot off a lot of fireworks, listen to a lot of patriotic speeches, but not once do we ever mention that our country was founded by killing many  of its former owners and putting the rest on land we didn’t want.  What we do on the fourth is by and large ceremony: it doesn't acknowledge the dark side, and is empty of anything but the most banal, self-congratulatory meaning.

Now, you’re probably asking: what put a bee up your bonnet all of a sudden?  What does this have to do with the Baptism of Our Lord, who surely didn't even have a dark side?  Well, I’m glad you asked: what prompted me was noticing that the Lectionary, that three-year cycle of readings that many of us preacher-types follow, leaves out the dark side of Luke’s version of the baptism story.  So, as a public service, I have put it back in, but it's not what you might expect, it's not the winnowing and burning part—that was just pro-forma messiah talk in those days.  If you think carefully about the metaphor, you'll notice that it isn't Jesus who does the separation of wheat from chaff: it's the wind, aka the spirit . . .  but that’s another sermon.

No, the part the Lectionary leaves out is the bit about John the Baptist getting beheaded because he gets crossways with the Herods.  They cut out the middle of the passage, and when that happens, it always makes me suspicious.  Check it out: the lectionary moves from winnowing the chaff and burning it, thus perpetuating the notion of the fires of hell, moves straight into Jesus getting baptized, and then ends when God tells him he’s beloved. And though the implication may be true—you’re gonna get winnowed unless you're baptized and called beloved—it leaves out the dark side: you can get beheaded, or at least persecuted, as well.

There's a reason Luke puts that little aside in there; it's not because like me he follows rabbit runs.  We’re being warned that things won’t be all sweetness and light, all milk and honey if you just join the church.  Following Jesus comes at a cost, in the New Testament it always does that—just ask Paul—and it makes you wonder why it doesn't seem to be that way these days.   Maybe it's because Christians, at least in this country and the rest of the West, are so assimilated, so tamed that they’re no longer a threat to the powers that be . . .

Well.  Back to baptism . . . I told you I like rabbit runs . . . Luke tells us about Jesus’ baptism in one line: “when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying” and it's interesting to note that he doesn't even show it to us, he just indicates that it was done to him along with everyone else, like it’s no big deal, like it’s to be expected . . . when Jesus was baptized like everybody else . . . There’s none of this agonized complaining from John, no “I need to be baptized by you, and you come to me?” like over in Matthew.  Nor is there a cryptic answer from Jesus “it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness,” whatever that means.  For Luke, baptism is just expected: everybody gets baptized . . .

And then there’s the little matter of the coming of the Holy Spirit . . . Matthew follows the source—we think both he and Luke used Mark’s text—saying “just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending on him like a dove” but Luke modifies it so that the Spirit comes when he is praying: “when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.”  The Spirit comes upon Jesus when he is praying to God, when he is in relationship with the ground of all being, AKA the one who birthed him (remember the Word was begotten, not made).

Perhaps this is why Luke and the other gospel writers emphasize that Jesus prayed to God, whom the ancients called “Father.”  And note that he’s not praying to himself, he’s praying to that person of the Trinity we call “creator,” but my point is that it’s the relationship between father and son, between creator and redeemer, between eternal Ground and eternal Word, it's in that relationship that the Spirit gushes forth.

Remember in our discussion of the Trinity that the relationship between its members can be seen as perichoresis, that is, an eternal emptying of the being of one member into the next and into to the next, and so on . . . Thus, the relationship is one of a continual flow around and around and around . . . Fourteenth century theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart describes it this way: the Ultimate source, who the ancients called “Father” but could just as easily be called “Morher,” is eternally giving birth of the Word, who we call “Son.” And in this eternal birthing, the Father empties himself into the Son, and the Son, in turn, contemplates, or “prays to” the Father, and out of that mutual relationship, the Holy Spirit flows into the world; among the many names for this Spirit is love.

So I think that’s what's pictured here, the Son praying to the Creator, and the Spirit flowing out of the relationship, and in that moment, the Creator defines the relationship and declares that it is good: “you are my son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  Or as Clarence Jordan put it in The Cotton Patch Gospels, “I’m proud of you!”

And for us, Baptism is a sacrament, it’s a means of grace, to put it in theological terms.  In plain old English, it's something God does for us, rather than vice versa.  We believe that God the Creator establishes a relationship with us at Baptism, a relationship as of a mother to a son, a father to a daughter, a parent to a child. We believe that the Ground of all being tells each of us “You are my child, my beloved; I’m proud of you!  No matter what you’ve done, no matter how you fumble around in your human fragility, in you I am well pleased!”

And in that relationship, the Holy Spirit dwells within us, and it is through prayer and—especially—contemplation that we can become aware of it and increasingly able to access that indwelling.  Not in a childish, trivial way, as in we get the Spirit to give us whatever we want, to provide special dispensation against the vicissitudes of life.  Bad stuff is still going to happen to us, some of it because we follow Christ, there will always be a dark side to corporate existence.

That is why, in our baptismal litanies, we speak of that dark side, which in Scripture is sometimes called “sin.” Without it, baptism is just an empty, meaningless ceremony that, like candy, is sweet at the time, but provides no lasting value.  But by acknowledging that dark side, and by deepening our relationship with the divine through contemplation and prayer, the Spirit “teaches us to pray,” as Paul put it.  And increasingly, we see through Spirit eyes, and learn to embrace and accept our own stumbling path toward the divine.  In other words we begin to know—as has the one who Creates, Redeems and Comforts since before the beginning of time—we begin to know that we are beloved, and that in us, God is indeed well pleased.  Amen.

Creation is Incarnation (John 1:1 - 14)

It's kind of unusual for me to preach on the same passage two weeks in a row, but then again, John's first chapter is not just any passage.  It spans the whole of creation, up until the time of its writing, at least, and really: you could argue that it does the whole thing, cause what has changed since Jesus’ day?  Just more wars and rumors of wars, conducted with ever-increasing sophistication and whole-sale slaughter . . . More peoples oppressing other peoples, not so different from the Romans of the day . . . this passage covers it all, not explicitly, of course, but it begins with the beginning, in the beginning, quoting Genesis quite handily, and letting us know what that pesky first-person plural might have been . . . Remember?  When it comes to making human beings, God says “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness . . .”  And though killjoy biblical scholars have proposed that this “our” is a remnant of the more “primitive,” multi-god origins of the tale, but I like to think that John gives us one answer, at least, as to  who “they” might be “in the beginning.”

Anyway.  John’s first chapter covers that beginning, telling us that the Word both was God and was with God, and that all of creation—everything: rocks and trees and flowers and bees—came into being both in and through him, and it was nothing short of life, that was the light of the people, that provided for them and illuminated the way.  And thus, the first part of John's prose poem operates on a cosmic scale, and indeed, this Word is what theologians have called the cosmic Christ, or less personally, the Christ mystery, the eternal Word that became incarnate in an unique way as Jesus of Nazareth.

If the first part of this passage is on a cosmic scale, it quickly moves to the human as it describes a forerunner: “There was a man sent from God,” we are told, “whose name was John.”  He wasn't the light that was life, but came as a witness—and in Greek, that’s martyr, and we know that he would be both: witness and martyr, perhaps the first to give his life in service to the incarnate one.  And the true light—which, remember, was the light of the people—was coming into the world.  It was, as Paul would say, emptying itself of its godhood, its eternity, and taking human form

What must it have been like to be John the witness?  To know, from before birth, your role as the one who foretold?  After that one leap in the womb, that first awakening of the heart in Elizabeth's womb?  Did he but count the days until that fateful wilderness meeting?  Did that prenatal encounter cock his eye, did it throw him off, just a little, so that his friends growing up would point and say “here comes crazy John, talking about the chosen one again?”

From the cosmic notion of the pre-existent Word, who was with God and who was God, to a very human, hair-shirted wilderness-hopper seems a long ways, but was it really?  After all, in the very first words of the gospel John we’re told that all things came into being through him, and at the same time in him, and what more intimate relationship can there be than that?  I mean, my liver is in me, and my eye, and they are part of me . . . And they are of me as well, they are made of human cells containing 23 pairs of human chromosomes each, and in this way a human heart is human and not porcine or avian. And by the same token, something in a dog is canine, something in a cat is feline . . .

And John the gospel-writer tells us that all things are in this Word, all things share in this Word-ness, mountains and lilies and cattle and telephone poles, right on down to one John the locust-eating Baptist, right on down to you and me.  We are all in the Word, so we are all of the world.  We share in the divine nature by way of being part of the divine Word of God..

So, in a real sense, incarnation occurred 14 billion years ago, as Richard Rohr puts it. when creation was brought into being through and in the Word, through and in the Christ mystery.  If we are part of the divine, then the divine spirit is part of us.  Created matter is not separate from divine spirit, but intertwined with it.

Some seven centuries and change ago, an Italian philosopher and theologian named Giovanni di Fidanza (later canonized as St Bonaventure) rediscovered this and wove it into his theology of incarnation.  According to Bonaventure, everything emanates from God, everything is an example of God, and everything returns to God in the end.  Emanence, exemplar, consumation—those are his words for it.  We, and everything else, are created in and through the Word; in us, and in everything else, we can see the Word; and we, and everything else, return to the Word in the end.  That was one theologian’s conception of what all this means, anyway . . . And emanation is a pretty fair description of what John is talking about here in his first chapter—we are created in and through the eternal Word—and exemplar seems to line up with the incarnate one’s own description—whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me—and “returning to God?”  Well, just as matter and energy are conserved, wouldn’t divinity, wouldn’t divine spark be as well?

Well.  Seven and a half centuries after Bonaventure, science is coming around to describe the same thing, from a different angle, and thinkers like the late Teilhard de Chardin and Walter Wink are speaking of a re-enchanted universe, and it's important to understand that the universe isn't being re-enchanted, it's always been enchanted, we’re just coming to realize it again.  After centuries of a disastrous, dualistic view, where spirit was considered separate and superior to matter, to flesh, we are re-imaging the universe as being full of spirit, full of divinity, and there are ramifications of this at all levels.

On a policy level, if everything is enchanted, if everything contains a spark of the divine,  how can creation continue to be exploited, with whole species being driven to extinction at an ever-accelerating rate, species created through and in the Word, and thus incarnate spirit us?  How can we mow down the God-haunted mountains, just take their tops right off, to line coal-company pockets, or poison our divine rivers and streams with pesticides and fertilizers, so they are at once depopulated and choked with over-bearing single-celled life?

For that matter, how can we keep whole populations impoverished, whole nations enslaved to the false Gods of consumerism and greed, when whatever we do to them we do to the Christ within them?

And on a personal level, what would happen if each one of us recognized the divine in every other human being?  The God-spark in the woman sitting next to you in the pews, the guy in the pickup truck cutting you off, the Muslim praying to Allah?  How could we treat one another—our spouses, our children, our friends and neighbors—as we sometimes do if we recognized and acknowledged the Christ in every one?  We are all incarnations of the divine Word, the mystery that is Christ.   As Richard Rohr puts it, there is incarnation at every level of our enchanted universe.

Well. Our passage ends the with the classic line: “The Word became flesh and lived among us”—I prefer the King James’ more poetic “dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”  And I think this verse answers the question some of you all might be asking: if incarnation happened with the creation of the universe, if creation is indeed incarnation, why did the eternal Word empty itself of godhood and become human.  It is so we can say we have seen it, so we have experienced it, so we can point to it and say: this is how it is.  This is how it looks when divinity and corporeality, divinity and humanity, are in perfect balance, in perfect harmony one with another.  This is how it can be for you and me who are, after all, siblings of the incarnate Word through Christ.

Poet, theologian and novelist G.K. Chesterton commented that this truth can only be understood on small stages, and this is my New Years wish for us all: that we begin to (or continue to) look for and recognize the incarnate Word in everybody and everything we meet on the small stages that are our lives.  Amen.