Homily for Sunday, 25 December 2022– The Nativity of the Lord, Mass during the Day

Readings of the day: Isaiah 52:7-10; Psalm 98:1, 2-3, 3-4, 5-6; Hebrews 1:1-6; John 1:1-18

Sisters and brothers in Christ, Merry Christmas!

The word of God today, on this Christmas morning, is all about remembering beginnings so that we might discern what (or whom) God is revealing to us here and now.

This Christmas morning we hear the first words of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” I wonder if this is just because just because I am the consummate theology professor, my mind and spirit warped by sitting at my desk these last few days grading papers and exams, or if anybody else here finds it jarring to hear anything but the more typical Christmas story in our Gospel: The baby Jesus born to Mary into a manger in Bethlehem, because there was “no room for them in the inn,” and shepherds greeted by the song of an angel and told to go to the manger to greet the newborn Saviour of the world.

All of that happened. Other Gospels tell of those details of Jesus’ birth. But John has nothing about a baby, nothing about angels, nothing about Joseph. Mary is not named in John’s Gospel; she is “woman” at the wedding at Cana and “the mother of Jesus” at the foot of the cross. John’s Gospel has no shepherds and no manger scene. The first time John introduces us to Jesus is when he is an adult being baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist.

Instead of the more familiar Christmas story, the kind we can put on greeting cards and show in a Nativity scene, John takes us back to the very beginning, not only of Jesus as a human being, but of the universe itself. The people who first heard John’s Gospel would have been attentive to its unmistakeable allusion to the first words of the entire Bible, in the Book of Genesis, about the first moments of the creation of the universe: “In the beginning.”

And what was there “in the beginning,” before God created anything of the universe, or anything in it? Well, there was nothing. Genesis says that “in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.”

That is it? “A formless void” and darkness over “the face of the deep”?! That sounds a little boring. But then God decides to create something. God breathes wind, God’s spirit, over the nothingness. And God creates light. Now we are talking, God; we have some excitement in the creation story!

John’s Gospel picks up on this creation of light motif just as well as Genesis does. John says in our Gospel today, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.” And then John introduces to us John the Baptist. John the Gospel writer is clear: John the Baptist is “not the light, but he came to testify to the light.” John’s function is to point to Jesus, “the true light.”

So John the Gospel writer identifies Jesus as the Word, “and the Word [as] God.” The Word of God, with God the Father and the Spirit, was present when our universe was called into being: “‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” The Word, the Son of God, called forth the first light of creation. At the same time, he is the light identified by John the Baptist and John the author of our Gospel.

John connects these two events: The first movements of creation and God’s coming into our world in the person of Jesus Christ: Word from Word or, as we pray in our Creed, “God from God, light from light, true God from true God. Through him all things were made.” But John hearkens back to creation, back to the beginning, to set up the next movement of this magnificent prologue of his Gospel.

It would be one thing for John to remind us of the action of God in our favour—for our salvation—all the way back to the creation of the universe. But John does not stop there. Remember that the purpose of John’s invitation to us to remember back to “the beginning” is to help us to discern what, or whom, God is revealing here and now, in the present. The punch line in our Gospel reading this morning, the central point of John’s opening chapter (his prologue), is this: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

We are familiar enough with this statement from John that God, who existed before the universe was created, when nothing else existed, has put on our human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ “and dwelt among us.” Until this point in John’s Gospel, his first hearers would not have been too disturbed, either. In Jesus’ time and that of the Gospel writers, expectation of a Messiah, the world’s Saviour, was widespread. But, besides the small minority of people in the vast Roman Empire who had already come to believe in Jesus as the Messiah by John’s time, the people, Jews and Gentiles alike, did not expect (or readily accept) that God’s Messiah would enter the world quite in that way, in our human flesh.

For God to become human, to experience everything it means for us to be human—joys and sorrows, birth and death—was preposterous to most people in Jesus’ or John’s time. This is why John includes a bit of a reality check in our Gospel this morning: That “the world did not know,” did not recognize its creator and its Saviour in human form; “he came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.”

But, to the minority of people of John’s world (and, frankly, our own today) who did accept Jesus as the Saviour, God the creator of the universe “in the beginning” was revealing his ongoing plan for our salvation in a new way. And this new way of continuing old revelation—God has always been with us—changes who we are in relationship to God, John says. We have been given “power to become children of God.” We are now the human flesh, the hands and feet, the loving, kind, and just heart of Jesus, the Word, in our world. God’s work of our salvation that started with those first moments of creation, “in the beginning,” is not finished yet. And it will not be finished until Jesus returns in glory at the end of time.

“We have seen [God’s] glory,” John affirms in our Gospel today. We have seen the Word of God, made flesh and dwelling among us. But even the prophets, hundreds of years before Jesus, were proclaiming a message very similar to John’s. Isaiah was active during the exile of the people of Israel in Babylon, over five hundred years before Jesus. He was preparing the Israelites to return to their homeland after Babylon had been overtaken by the Persians, who allowed Israel’s return home. The Israelites were weary. They were worried about having to rebuild their land from ruins. So Isaiah convinces them to return home by returning to the beginning of his message. A significant part of the Book of Isaiah, the middle sixteen chapters, from 40 to 55 of Isaiah, begins with a message of comfort: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem… that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.”

Isaiah now concludes this section with a similar message. And, Isaiah says, “how beautiful on the mountains” of Israel “are the feet of the messenger who announces” this message of peace and comfort, of salvation and reconciliation with God. “Your God reigns,” Isaiah proclaims. The same God who reigned over the nothingness before creation and said, “Let there be light”; the same God who would take on our human flesh reigns and saves now and forever. Isaiah, like John, goes back to the beginning as if to say, “This is the same God, and our same relationship with God. Yet, in the context of old revelation, God is doing something new.”

We hear from the Letter to the Hebrews this morning essentially this same message: God has been with us through the prophets. God has created and ruled over “all things.” And now he has revealed himself as human, in the person of Jesus Christ. This is what we celebrate this morning, sisters and brothers: “We have seen [God’s] glory.” We can continue to proclaim with the Psalmist that “all the ends of the earth have seen the glory of God.” We have seen God take our human form in the person of Jesus Christ. We are reminded of God’s creating and saving power, all the way back to “the beginning,” to when the universe was nothing, “a formless void.” This is so that we can look forward to God completing the work of our salvation. We are invited to participate in God’s work of our salvation, to put human flesh on the presence of God in our world through works justice, kindness, and peace, until our Saviour, the Word, God made flesh, returns on the Last Day.

Homily for Saturday, 24 December 2022– The Nativity of the Lord, Mass at Night

Readings of the day: Isaiah 9:1-6; Psalm 96:1-2, 2-3, 11-12, 13; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:10-14

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”

I marvel at this first line of our reading tonight from the prophet Isaiah every time I hear it. Isaiah proclaimed this message of “great light” in a very dark time for his people, the people of ancient Israel. The nation of Israel had been overrun by the Assyrians many years before Isaiah’s time. The corruption of Israel’s own leaders did not help. Long before Isaiah, Israel had split into two kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah in the south, around Jerusalem. Assyria had conquered the north, and Sennacherib’s army, “like a wolf on the fold” in the poetic words of Lord Byron, had been stopped (barely) at the gates of Jerusalem, just before Isaiah’s time.

But things did not get any better for Israel and Judah from there. Israel was surrounded by much more powerful nations than it: Assyria, Babylon, Egypt. And each of those nations wanted Israel’s territory, its fertile land and its position on major trade routes. The kings of Israel and Judah tried to appease their mightier neighbours by agreeing to worship the other (pagan) nations’ gods and making military alliances with these nations against another. Israel had forgotten that a trusting relationship with its God, our God (we call this a covenant relationship), was the only way to ensure Israel’s survival as a nation. So, after Assyria, it was Babylon’s turn to conquer Israel and Judah. After Isaiah’s time, the people of Israel and Judah would endure about seventy years of exile in Babylon.

Amid all this darkness of impending national destruction and exile, Isaiah proclaims that “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” Now there are a few possibilities for why Isaiah would proclaim a message like that. Maybe Isaiah was ignorant of the obvious reality, that Israel was doomed. Maybe, much like the people of Israel, Isaiah wanted to remain optimistic that Israel’s national disaster of conquest and exile was farther off than it really was. And maybe, against all odds, Israel’s God would miraculously and immediately save it from being overrun by its more powerful neighbours.

But Isaiah, like any true prophet, was no pollyannaish prophet. Nor was he ignorant of the disaster that awaited Israel and Judah in Babylon. After all, Israel, all but Jerusalem, was already occupied by the Assyrians by Isaiah’s time. And Israel’s God would not miraculously and immediately save Israel from being conquered by and exiled in Babylon. God saves, but not in that way. Isaiah, like the other prophets in our Bible, had no difficulty scolding Israel and its leaders for their corruption and idol worship that would surely bring Israel to doom, to exile. God saves, but there must be consequences for breaking the covenant relationship with God as the leaders of Israel and Judah and their people were doing in the time of the prophets.

So, what is this in Isaiah’s prophecy about people walking “in darkness” seeing “a great light”? Two weekends ago, I co-led an Advent retreat at the Providence Renewal Centre in Edmonton—a wonderful place to be on retreat, if any of us ever have this opportunity—with leaders of other Christian traditions, members of the Edmonton and District Council of Churches. One of the retreat speakers was Stephen London, the Anglican Bishop of Edmonton. Rev. London invited us to a practice he calls “slow spirituality.” It is “slow” in that it is a patient response to conflict or trouble in our world or our personal experience.

How often do we stop and realize that the usual human response to conflict or trouble is a fight-or-flight response, by hard-wired primitive instinct? Rev. London calls this the instinct, when faced with conflict, either toward aggressiveness (to confront and fight) or avoidance (to flee the conflict). It is amazing, when we think about it, how often we default either to aggressiveness or avoidance of conflict, to fighting or fleeing.

For me, I am perfectly fine, especially if I have my coffee first thing in the morning… That is, until I hear the news or read the newspaper! Here is my little (non-sacramental) confession: I hate all the senseless violence in our world, the nationalism, the instances of selfishness that scream: “My country first, my party first, my soapbox first, me first”! When I hear, from when I wake up in the morning, about Ukrainians trying to survive the winter, trying to survive the latest Russian bombing raids on their cities, their infrastructure, their civilian population; when I hear of demoralized Russian soldiers, not really wanting to be in Ukraine to fight their government’s unjust war, I become very angry. When I hear the latest plans to weaponize social media, attempts to promote the next convenient conspiracy theory under the guise of a little blue bird and “absolute free speech,” this, too, triggers my anger. And then I think, “What could I ever do about this silo mentality of our nations, our societies, and our media? It is seemingly each person for her or himself.” I suppose I try to live and preach the good, social justice and the common good as I see these. But, really, too frequently I (and I do not think I speak only for myself; not by far) retreat into a kind of despair, a kind of avoidance of conflict, of trouble, if I am honest with myself.

But this aggressiveness or avoidance response is not the way of a prophet. It was not Isaiah’s way. And it is not God’s way. So, what is the prophetic way forward? What is God’s way of responding to the troubles and conflicts (while also living the joys) of our world and our experiences? What is the way of patience, of “slow spirituality” of which Rev. Stephen London speaks? I think Isaiah gives us a clue to answer these questions in those first words of our first reading tonight: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”

“The people” Isaiah addressed included himself. Isaiah and the other Old Testament prophets not only preached great oracles and visions—doom or consolation—to Israel. They lived what they preached, died for what they preached, witnessed Israel’s destruction, exile, and rebuilding, went into exile in solidarity with Israel’s people for what they preached. Isaiah and Israel’s other prophets “walked in darkness” with their people. This was the only way that light (hope, joy) would come from the darkness, so that the people could see and live it together.

This is the way of the prophets. This is the way of patience, of “slow spirituality” as Rev. Stephen London puts it. This is the way of what Pope Francis often calls “pastoral accompaniment” of God’s people. This is the way, from when Vatican II published its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes (“The Joys and the Hopes”)—back in 1965—that our Church identifies as solidarity with all the “followers of Christ” in our “joys and… hopes…griefs and… anxieties,” especially those of people “who are poor or in any way afflicted.”

This is God’s way. This has been the way of our Lord Jesus Christ, from the moment he entered our world through Mary’s womb, fully human in all things but sin, fully in solidarity with us in our human “joys and… hopes…griefs and… anxieties.” This was Jesus’ way from that very first Christmas, in a stable in Bethlehem long ago.

And who were the first masters of “slow spirituality,” of patience, of overcoming our basest instincts to fight or flee trouble, at the moment of Jesus’ birth? The first masters of this—the prophets’ way, God’s way—were Mary and Joseph. And then Luke’s Gospel says to us this night that there were humble shepherds, “keeping watch over their flocks by night,” who are visited by “an Angel of the Lord.” And, sure, when “the glory of the Lord” first shone around them, Luke says, the shepherds “were terrified.” Those were terrifying times. Israel, not much differently than in the time of the Old Testament prophets, was under brutal foreign occupation. Caesar Augustus ruled from Rome; Quirinius ruled from Syria. The rulers of the world into which our Lord Jesus was born were all Roman.

But a baby, born into a manger—a food trough for animals—would rule over all these big names whose rule stopped at might and terror. Jesus was not to rule this world with might and terror, earthly power to match earthly power. No, Jesus’ rule begins as “a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.” Jesus’ rule would involve dying at the hands of the big-name bringers of brutality and occupation and their enablers among Jesus’ own people, on a cross. Jesus’ rule, his light, hope, joy, and salvation, would involve walking in our human flesh, in our darkness, in solidarity with us.

This is the prophets’ way. This is God’s way. This is the way of Christmas, sisters and brothers. This is a way that has brought us everlasting “good news of great joy for all the people.” This is the only news—imagine reading this first thing in the morning—that can overcome and disempower the worst of our darkness, trouble, and conflict, if we dare not fight or flee but encounter the God of our salvation in this moment, in the trouble and conflict, but also then in the joy of this night.

For God has brought us “great joy”: To us “is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Christ, the Lord.”