Sermon: Hope’s Gem – 24 Dec, Rev. Dr. Katherine M. Lehman

Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Christ (fresco), 1477.

Christmas is a mystery. It’s the mystery of the incarnation. It’s not that it makes no sense. It’s more that it makes an uncanny kind of sense. Or perhaps, the nonsense that it makes continues to arrest and engage us, until we are more capable of ambiguity and ambivalence, more open to multiple meanings. To entertain the mystery of God’s relation to humanity requires a willingness, to venture into what Yeats calls the land of unlikeness (H 464), and as John the Evangelist says, there to find ourselves at home (John1:11).

The Christmas story works this mystery within and among us, from our earliest hearing of it, through our yearly appreciation of it, in our  pondering of its scenes and characters, in our wonder at its myriad implications for living a life of faith, hope, and love. This story shapes our lives. Our continual appropriation of it yields the richest rewards imaginable, and even more, better than we can ask or imagine. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

Have you been to the Smithsonian to see the Hope diamond, with a capital H?  In a darkened exhibit room, the gemstone is lit from beneath. Viewers rotate slowly around its gleaming radiance, wide-eyed, to see its splendor from every possible angle. Meanwhile, its light is refracted around the room, making faces and bodies sparkle, dappling walls and ceiling. The Christmas story is like that. It’s hard to imagine how such a beauty could have been hiding in the mud, encased in rock underground, for so long. It’s a wonder that someone learned enough to recognize the signs pointing in its direction, that someone spotted the diamond in the rough, that someone unearthed it. The Christmas story is like that.

The capital Hope diamond was reportedly cursed. Its financial value has  prompted acts of greed and treachery. In contrast, we can see that the Christmas story is another kind of hope diamond, lower case h, a gleaming gem of hope, and it is reportedly blessed. Indeed, it has been a blessing for ages and for multitudes. Its value is purely priceless. It has prompted countless acts of generosity and goodwill. Instead of being hoarded by a few, it has been shared by many, having made its way around the world.

The story tells of God’s presence and power, God’s sympathy and patience, God’s continual enthusiasm for the human enterprise and for the planetary fulfillment that depends upon its outcome. Heaven and nature are singing a duet because they are conjoined. God and humanity are bound together in common cause. There is no part of creation beyond the redemptive reach of this salvific alliance. The wise are humbled. The humble are enlightened. The poor are enriched. The rich are found to be in want.

Beasts and angels, God’s otherkind, are in the know and on the team, working in their distinct capacities to support God’s providence and purpose for humankind. We’re the ones who need to get the picture. We’re the ones who can’t see the sparkle through the mud. In his book, entitled Earth Community, Earth Ethics, Lutheran theologian, Larry Rasmussen observes that “the language of heaven thus works to name the vision of earth redeemed,” (12).  And Luther himself calls nature God’s disguise (Ibid, 279). So, of course, heaven and nature sing in tune.

As the Christmas story has made its way through the succeeding centuries and cultures, there have been many interpretations of its meaning, along with some inevitable distortions of its value. Here are a couple of common ones that miss the mark. If we can just work an alliance with God and then endure life’s slings and arrows, then we’ll escape one day to heaven, and to hell with all the rest. Or how about this one? Long ago and far away, there was a day of creation. Then God went behind the moon. Later, God sent Jesus in the act of redemption. Then they both went behind the moon. Sometime in the distant future, they will reappear for a judgment day, to mete out reward or punishment. In the meantime, we must do the best we can to increase the odds of receiving the carrot instead of the stick.

These common misinterpretations of God’s relation to humanity make no sense at all, when viewed from the fullness of the Christmas story and from the testimony celebrating God’s Christmas gift in the mystery of incarnation.  Why on earth would a God who goes to the trouble to give himself into our hands and our hearts, to behave so inconstantly? It is of the utmost consequence that we grasp and proclaim the sheer grace of God’s constant love for us and continual self-giving to us. That too is the mystery of the incarnation.

Also, it is essential that we assess God’s particular gift of freewill to humankind, the gift that deep ecologists have come to call the moral consciousness of the planet. We must weigh the implications of our choice. We are free to receive God’s Christmas gift or not. But it is only by our free reception of the gift that we can be fulfilled as human creatures and so also that all creation can thus attain its fulfillment in God’s providence and purpose. A lot is riding on our choice!

Anglican theologian, John Polkinghorne, says it this way in his book, entitled Serious Talk: Science and Religion in Dialogue. “The new creation will be something different…for it is the transmutation of the world consequent upon its free return to its Creator,” (107). It is the message of the Christmas story, and the mysterious gift of God’s incarnation, that presents us with the invitation, with the unique opportunity. We may have opened the gift. We may have tried it on, to see how it fits. Now we need to wear it constantly, as a festal garment. We must grow into it, until it is we who are conformed to Christ.

And if, in our freedom, we reject the gift or set it aside with indifference, we cut ourselves off from that transformative possibility. Then, not only are we lost to the creativity of life itself, but also, what life might become is diminished. Honest to God, you’d think, wouldn’t you, with that kind of choice confronting us, that we’d have all gotten it right by now, at least in theory, if not yet perfect in practice? Instead, there are still the all too familiar and perverse attempts to game the system and to beat the house. It cannot be done, thank heaven!

In the beloved scripture appointed for this holy night, the Old Testament readings are addressed to the people of Israel, in general, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem in particular. The New Testament readings use the faith tradition of Judaism to address the Hellenistic world of the Roman Empire. Even so, stop to notice that every one has universal intent. They are clear that God’s purpose extends to all nations and peoples. They are convinced that creation rejoices to participate, all of it part of the universal providence and purpose.  As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, in her book, entitled An Altar in the World, Christ proves to us that “matter matters to God,” (62).

Christ comes, as Rasmussen puts it, “so that earth is not damned by our presence but may rejoice in it,” (Ibid, 179). The gift of the Christ child gives us the full measure of God’s hope in us. Irenaeus, third century bishop of Lyons, observes that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive,” that is, in full accord with God’s creative will. The name of that fully alive human being is Jesus, born in Bethlehem to Mary of Nazareth, his earthly father Joseph the carpenter.

While it is undoubtedly true that creation extends beyond our capacity to comprehend it, so also it is true that, as a species, our comprehension has been enlarged considerably, through the centuries. We can now appreciate our planet as a whole, as seen from space, as a relatively small habitat in a vaster universe, as an  ecosystem. We can now appreciate, in an expanding worldview, our growing allegiance to an ever more interdependent global community and commons, however endangered by dysfunction.

The good news of the alliance between heaven and nature means that there is hope for us. There is hope incarnate in Christ. There is hope incarnate in those who receive the Christmas gift, unpack it, don the festal garment, and keep the feast of thanksgiving for the gift. There is hope for otherkind, who await our awakening to obedience, with baited breath. Ecologist David Korten wrote a book entitled The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. In it he rejects a predatory reading of evolutionary process. Instead, he observes, “the species that survive and thrive are those that learn to sustain themselves in ways that simultaneously serve the needs of the whole. The defining challenge for each new species is to find its place of service, a challenge we humans have yet to meet,” (309). Jesus Christ meets the challenge and encourages us to rise to it. All who are in Christ, by grace through faith, will do so, for the sake of the world God so loves.

The way the gift of the incarnation make sense is if God intends humanity and creation, that is, this life and this world, to be redeemed and renewed. As Jesus grows up to teach us, God’s hope is that his will be done on earth as in heaven. God gives us every resource we need, to receive and to appropriate the gift, to respond with everything we’ve got, to give back as we’ve been given. We are buoyed by God’s ready presence, here and now, immanuel, God with us in the endeavor. For all of it is God’s own, into which we are being called as full partners. God asks that we align our hopes with his, for heaven’s sake and for earth’s.

For those of us here tonight, having lived through a pretty grim first decade of the twenty-first century, we hear this Christmas story, and we receive this Christmas gift, which is the hope for an earth communion, in which all parts function in service to the whole organism, which eco-theologian Sallie McFague has called the body of God, God’s very incarnation. For it is God’s nature to keep on giving, and it is the potential of our created nature to become as Christ. Let us practice the incarnation with gratitude, as our part in God’s Christmas gift to the world. AMEN

The Rev. Dr. Katherine M. Lehman+
St. Bede’s, Menlo Park