Christmas, 2015
T
|
he voice of the wise man speaking in T. S. Eliot’s “The
Journey of the Magi,” says,
…set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?...
Christmas
is about the hardest time of year to preach the gospel. You’d think it would be about the
easiest. But nearly everyone comes to
church pretty much knowing a story. Each
of us imagines that the story that we know is indeed the Christmas story. And why
not? There it is, all over the place: on greeting cards and magazine covers; in
commercials and on television; in carols blaring at us in shopping malls and in
lovely concert settings with choruses singing “O Come, all ye faithful, joyful
and triumphant.” To be sure, all of those things have something perhaps to do
with the gospel, even in a clumsy way.
But the core of Christmas is well buried beneath the presents under the
tree. Eliot, wise man that he was, knew
the mysterious question that lies in the manger all wrapped up in its own
swaddling clothes: birth or death? Which is it that we celebrate?
About the
last thing on anyone’s Christmas wish list is to come to a Christmas Eve
midnight mass to hear a sermon about death.
I once got myself roundly chastised by an appalled parishioner, a mother
of young adult daughters, one of whom came to church on Christmas and of all
things found herself in tears at a true story I told about a Santa Claus in a
children’s cancer ward who stayed with a little boy during his last hours,
fulfilling the kid’s wishes while inadvertently incarnating the very Presence
of Jesus, which is what I thought Christmas might be about. Christmas, she scolded, was not the time for
social action sermons, least of all those that make us cry. This is the season of joy, or unbridled
merriment, of jingling bells and spicy smells and poinsettias all in a
row. And I don’t want to spoil that for
you, I really don’t. But this might be
my last crack at actually saying something truthful about Christmas before I
leave parish ministry after 44 years, and I hope you’ll cut me a little
homiletical slack to depart ever so slightly from the conventional romantic, if
not jolly, script.
The minute
Jesus was conceived, he became subject to everything that any human being has both
to enjoy and to contend with simply by being a body in this world. I have no way of knowing what Mary thought
about her little infant. I imagine she
was, like most young mothers of firstborn children, maybe nervous about
nursing, concerned that there be enough dry swaddling clothes, perhaps
wondering about the economics of a third stomach to feed in the months and
years to come. I suspect she was not as
prone as some modern parents might be to look on this tiny being, squalling in
the manger, all red from the birth canal, and to compliment herself on having
such a fine baby, who just might one day become President. Living as she did in an age where children
rarely survived the first few years of life, it might have passed her mind that
this baby was indeed mortal, and subject to death. She might even have prayed that he be spared
early death. There was no getting around
it: to be born was to die. And that still is the case. Being divine, if that is what you want to
call it, was no insurance whatsoever that your mortal body was anything but
mortal.
Somebody was to jeer at him a few
decades later, jeer at him pinned to his rude cross: “If you are the Messiah, come down from the
cross.” Skip out on death. Prove that gods and saviors don’t have to
die. And he wouldn’t of course. He couldn’t.
He had made a pact by that time that mortal he was and mortal he would
be, and thus would have to do what mortals least want to but must do eventually: face mortality. Die.
That is the lynchpin of this whole project of incarnation. It is about nothing less than embracing
mortality. One of the oldest Christian
hymns we have goes like this:
though
he was in the form of God,
he
did not regard equality with God
as
something to be grasped,
but
emptied himself,
taking
the form of a slave,
being
born in human likeness.
And being
found in human form,
he
humbled himself
and
became obedient to the point of death—
even
death on a cross.[1]
Ironically the Church has a piece
of good news here, but in my experience we rarely hear it and even more rarely
believe it. The good news is that it is
a fine thing to be mortal. It is a very
wonderful thing to be a body. Millions, billions of years have gone into the
evolving human frame; and for all their aches and pains and vicissitudes, these
bodies are not junk to be jettisoned on the last day, but temples of the Spirit
that indwelt Jesus, warehouses of creativity, bearers of the resurrection life,
the flesh that is transformed by the divine life who gives himself to us to be
quite literally ingested as bread and wine.
And we get to enjoy many of the fruits and sweets of bodily life not
exactly without charge, but generally without having to pay anything like what
our senses, for example, are truly worth.
The kicker is that none of this means what it could mean until we fully
embrace it. And fully to embrace bodily
life means that you have to get over being afraid of dying.
Now you
think, I’m sure, that I am talking about fear of physical death. To some extent I am. But that is only a secondary fear,
subordinate to other, more formidable, fears.
Humans are hard-wired for connection, and the truth is that nothing
scares us quite so much as the prospect of being disconnected or unconnected
from others, especially those on whom we are physically or emotionally
dependent in some way. And so we invest
huge amounts of energy in trying to be lovable, trying to be accepted, trying
to be approved, even when some of our behavior sabotages us. We carry around loads of shame—shame that
turns into cold fear that we’ll somehow be at the end of our tether some day
and no one will notice or care. Beside
that, death is hardly anything to fear at all.
The dying that we most have to do is letting go—getting out of the
way. Or, to put it in the vocabulary
that Jesus himself used, we can choose “to become as little children,” honest,
direct, simple, playful, receptive, trusting.
That kind of outlook does not happen automatically. Even little children sometimes have to learn
to let go. Much more so do adolescents
who generally play to audiences that they hope will accept and not ostracize
them. Even more so do adults who
continue to believe that our true measure is what we earn, accomplish, do,
rather than how vulnerable—open—we are willing to be.
It is
exactly at this point where Eliot’s mage’s question is most poignant—and
helpful. “Were we led all that way for
birth or death?” He goes on to say that
he had seen birth and death and had thought they were very different. This birth, though, the birth of Christ, was
hard and bitter agony for him and his companions, like Death, their death. So they returned, those wise men did, to
their old kingdoms. But no longer could
they go about life quite so easily as they once had. And that is the heart of why the Birth of
Christ feels so much like Death to anyone who gets it. All the old stuff that used to mean so much
just doesn’t work so well any more. The
old dispensation, the old literalism, the old cop-outs, the refusals to give
oneself over to loving passionately beginning with one’s body itself, the
self-protection programs designed to make us look good under scrutiny: all those things are like so many little
household gods that are supposed to work like charms—crystals and talismans, and
also orthodox ideas and sacred formulas—none of it matters once you’ve actually
laid eyes on Being itself lying in a manger ready to become food at any
instant. Somewhat like the raised Lazarus
in Kazantzakis’s novel The Last
Temptation of Christ, once you have been dead and raised by Christ, living
in the old world with those who don’t get it pushes one into feeling, well,
dead to all that is untrue, and alive to all that is true. And the worst part about it is there is no
way to explain it to those who insist on a rational, predictable formula that
will work for everyone the same way.
Norman O. Brown wrote in Love’s
Body that incarnation is a good bit like reincarnation.[2] It is not just Christ who is born. It is we who are born all over again once his
life touches ours. And it is that being
born all over again that feels so much like Death, because that is exactly what
it is.
If any of
this frustrates the hell out of you, well, just say goodbye to the hell and let
it go. There is simply no way to work this stuff out in your head so that you
can come to a place of believing it and then get about the business of living
it out. It doesn’t work that way,
because, you may have noticed, life itself does not work that way. You enter life the way Jesus did, kicking,
puking, muling, screaming. Much later
you start figuring out what your life is all about. Same thing is true for the New Life that you
and Eliot’s Wise Man begin when you encounter Christ’s New Birth. You are changed. All you can do is laisser les bons temps rouler, as they say in New Orleans. “Let the good times roll.”
Live! James Broughton, poet of Big Joy, who, in my
opinion grasped the dazzling beauty of the incarnation and was overjoyed with
it as much as any priest or prophet, wrote in his poem, “Song of the Godbody,”
I engender all the women of men
I engender the men of all women
I love you in every man’s body
I live you in every man’s lover
Trust that I know my own business
Cherish your fact and your fettle
Respect your perpetual motion
Relish your frisky divinity
You are my ripening godling
You are my fidgety angel
You are my immortal shenanigan
You are my eroding monument
I am ever your lifelong bodyguard
I am always your marathon dancer
Let your feet itch with my glory
Dance all the way to your death[3]
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2015
[1]
Philippians 2:6-8.
[3]
“Song of the Godbody,” in “Mysteries of the Godbody,” Ecstasies: Poems 1975-1983
(Mill Valley, CA: Syzygy Press, 1983), pp. 58-59.
