Have you a favorite painting of the nativity? For painters of the Italian school of Renaissance painting, the nativity was a favorite subject. On the front of the Christmas bulletin, we see a reproduction of the central panel of St Martin’s altar reredos. The celebrated muralist of the Art Deco period, Hildreth Meiere has depicted the nativity in the style of an earlier artistic period. In nativity paintings, our attention is deliberately drawn to the action in the foreground.

Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus seem suspended in time against an imaginative depiction of a manger in a state of near disrepair. Surrounded by representatives of the animal kingdom, here we find shepherds, wise men, and in some instances the patrons of the particular artist who have had themselves inserted into the nativity scene among those who have come to pay homage to the infant Christ child.

Have you ever noticed the backdrop? Because our attention is always is drawn towards the figures in the foreground we fail to notice how the nativity event is set against the backdrop of ruins. The ruins of a pre-Christian antiquity; a symbolic expression of former things now superseded by the nativity event.

I particularly like those paintings where the backdrop is divided between two contrasting scenes. On one side we see depicted organized rural life, neatly tended vineyards, winding roads leading to a walled town in the far distance. The other side shows darker more turbulent skies beneath which we see the tumbledown ruins of antiquity, overrun by nature. As a backdrop to the birth of the Christ-child, human manicured countryside is contrasted with the collapse of civilization and wild revenge of nature’s reclamation.

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Art depicts in a highly stylized form the figures of the Holy Family who seem unnaturally illuminated. Most of us are more than comfortable with this stylized depiction of enchantment. Our comfort lies in the way that the paintings speak to a part of us that longs for the return of a sense of long-lost enchantment; a hankering for a return of innocence.

The painters of the Renaissance period still lived within an enchanted mindset and worldview. I borrow the term enchantment from Charles Taylor’s tracing of the rise of our present secular age. What characterizes an enchanted perspective is the interpenetration of the divine within the material structures of our world. Here, the spiritual dimension is part of the material fabric experienced in places, through objects, and in persons. Yet, there was also a terror within the enchanted worldview for if the divine inhabited material existence so did it’s opposite, evil. The painters give voice to these fears in the almost hidden details of the backdrop scenery.

In contrast, we live in what Taylor calls as the age of disenchantment. Our disenchantment can be roughly traced back to the age of Enlightenment at the end of the 17thC. Enlightenment is an ironic term for a long social movement, which on the one hand freed us from the darkness of superstition and fear, yet ushered in a new kind of darkness, a darkness of despair. A despair born of the realization that human emancipation from enchantment has left us occupying center stage with God now banished to wings. As we celebrate our emancipation it also begins to dawn on us that we are now alone in a universe now largely of our own making and breaking. Today we find ourselves flat-lining in a world of profound disenchantment and increasing disillusionment.

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In the infant Christ, God enters into a world that is turbulent and chaotic. In the conventions of Renaissance painting, this is the world of the ruinous backdrop where we wander around among the ruins, stumbling over the fallen stones of the forgotten and half- remembered.

Some will find this last statement shocking. Not because they deny its truth but because they abhor my timing. Christmas Eve, of all times, is a night for joy and celebration. Yet, I stand by my statement not because I have submitted to the darkness of despair but because our journey towards the illumination of the nativity event depicted in the foreground can only begin once we take an accurate compass bearing from our location among the fallen stones of the forgotten and half remembered. Our journey to the Christ-child progresses from among the ruins of our lives and the brokenness of our world on into the light.

God’s coming into the world is not a coming of strength into a world of light reflected from glossy surfaces. Jesus’ incarnation is not like the incarnation myth of Augustus Caesar – a divine prince of light coming gloriously and dazzlingly into a world made perfect by his arrival. God’s coming in the fragile form of a human infant, in insignificance and the hidden obscurity of the wrong part of the world is an entry of the divine into a world of instability and uncertainty.

Christians understand the nativity of Jesus as God’s final act of creation. Having created the world, bestowing stewardship responsibilities on humanity, God has watched over creation sometimes in anger, but mostly in sorrow. God has time and again called his chosen back to share the original vision for the creation. Now in the act of Incarnation, creation is made complete through God’s self-emptying entry into the experience of the created order from the inside out, as it were. Our God, Emmanuel –God is with us – comes not to visit, but to stay.

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We cannot go back to an enchanted mindset. The Enlightenment has irrevocably reshaped our modern minds. Rather our contemporary task is to abandon the solitary hubris that is the root of our despair and encounter the transformative experience of the transcendent within the here and now remembering that for which we hope is already not far from us because of our daring to have hope.

As we journey from our wandering among the ruins of the backdrop towards the illumination of the scene in the foreground we become, as Bishop Nicholas Knisely puts it, charged with the light photons of the nativity scene. We begin to glow more brightly with every step of the way as we journey out of the backdrop and into the foreground where our transformation takes place.

What is the nature of this transformation, this glowing more brightly?

1. We celebrate the ordinary and everyday nature of our lives in which vulnerability and risk are foremost.
2. We become more relational for relationship is the medium the God of the universe chooses to be known through, ensuring that our relationships and communities become the places where grace is encountered.
3. We witness to the nativity, taking heart that it is our ordinariness, our unworthiness, our invisibility that makes us the objects of God’s love, and being so loved, we go and do likewise.

Luke in writing his account of the nativity of the Christ child is writing theology, not history, and certainly not science. In a recent article in the New York Times, Peter Wehner quotes the writer Garry Wills who describes Jesus as: undiscriminating and inclusive, not gradated and exclusive ... a man who honors women and considers sinners his friends. Here is the heart of Luke’s theology, a theology that we are called to make real in lives well lived.

On Christmas Day, our gospel reflection will move on into the Prologue of John’s Gospel. Here, John speaks of the coming of Christ, not in the language of nativity. He declares Jesus to be the Word present at the moment of creation. The Word of God– in Greek Logos – is the communicative element in God. The Word is God irradiating outwards from God’s self as en-lighten-ment.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ….. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. 

As we approach 2017, for many of us it seems the world has taken a turn towards the embrace of darker hues. But we are those who know that the light has come into the world, and thus we are called through our baptism to be the bearers of that light. The responsibility is huge – to shine in the darkness and not be overcome; to be that light the world so urgently needs.

A sermon from Linda Mackie-Griggs for Advent III  

 

“What then did you go out to see?”

Among all of the words in the English language, the word, “expectation” has got to be one of the most freighted. It brings with it, on the one hand, the eager anticipation of, and preparation for, something wonderful in the future, or on the other hand, the stomach-churning realization that something we anticipated has disappointed somehow. No one wants to deal with something, in others or in ourselves, that has not lived up to expectations.

Listen to John’s words from prison: “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we wait for another?”

In earlier accounts, John the Baptist has greeted his cousin with awe and joy as the Anointed One who is to come and rescue Israel:“Behold, the Lamb of God!”, he has declared to his disciples, palpably excited that the hopes of his people are about to be fulfilled.

But now John has been jailed by Herod. He may not know it yet, but he will die in prison. And his hope is ebbing as he realizes that his joyful expectation of Jesus’ triumph over Roman occupation is in jeopardy. He is losing hope. You can almost hear the accusatory tone; the impatience, the doubt: “…should we look for another?”

And Jesus responds, as he often does, by turning to Israel’s roots. He alludes to the prophet Isaiah, some of which we heard today in the first lesson. Jesus says, look around. The things that the prophets told us of are actually happening; healing and justice are abounding—the Reign of God is breaking in, just like Isaiah said it would. Don’t lose hope, John, he says. All is going just as it should.

But of course, that is part of the tension here. Jesus says that the words of the prophets are being fulfilled, but evidently, John has different expectations of exactly what that should look like. John expects a heroic Messiah who will overthrow the Roman occupation—and he’s definitely not the only one who feels that way. But thus far Jesus is not meeting those expectations. There is a disconnect between differing visions of the Kingdom—the Reign of God—and this disconnect may well lie in how we read Isaiah, which is the foundational text that informs Jesus’ response.

Isaiah wasn’t a single person who wrote at a single point in time. A number of prophets wrote under that name between about 8^th and 6^th centuries BCE, and their writings are generally seen as being organized into three major sections, as we heard last week. The reading we heard today falls in First Isaiah, which emphasizes the importance of worshiping one God who will purify Jerusalem before inaugurating a vision of peace, healing and reconciliation. Of particular importance in this vision is the Davidic line of kings, of which, according to the Gospel accounts, Jesus is the culminating figure—the Anointed One that Isaiah prophesied over a half-millennium earlier.

Isaiah describes the coming Reign of God as a time of healing and justice, and Jesus alludes specifically to this in his response to John. But, as we just heard in the first lesson, that isn’t all Isaiah said. It’s not just about humanity:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom;

like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,
and rejoice with joy and singing.…

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;

the burning sand shall become a pool,
and the thirsty ground springs of water;

the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp,
the grass shall become reeds and rushes. 

Do you hear that? The prophet’s vision of the coming Kingdom encompasses all of Creation. This isn’t something we usually consider. But as we look at the water protectors at Standing Rock and what they have accomplished, and as we grieve the destruction and suffering being visited upon our Mother Earth due to pollution and climate change, we are invited to broaden our vision of the Reign of God beyond the anthropocentric—to remember that it’s not just about us.

Jesus turns to the crowd, and he begins by asking them about their expectations of John. “What did you go out to the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind?” Some scholars speculate that this was a reference to an image on royal coinage. Jesus continues to press the issue—what did you expect to see? Royalty in soft robes? Really? What kind of kingship do you think the prophets were talking about?

Or, did you expect a prophet? Well that’s what you got—and you may not know it yet, but you’ve gotten a lot more than you expected.The implicit question to the crowd in this interrogation has been, “What is YOUR vision of the Kingdom?” Because Jesus is implying that he’s about to turn it upside down. He says,

“Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

And it’s the last part of this statement that rocks the world. Yes, John is important—he’s the forerunner sent to prepare the way for Jesus. But what does it mean that he is the least in the Kingdom?

To answer that, I have another question:

What is our expectation of the Kingdom? If our expectations are in any way informed by the world as it is and not as we are called to help form it, then we are probably off the mark.

Let me introduce you to a living parable.

Steve Blackmer has been dubbed by Harper’s Magazine, ‘The Priest in the Trees.”* He’s an Episcopal priest, ordained just a couple of years ago and called from the beginning of his discernment to a ministry focused on conservation and healing in the natural world. During his time in seminary, he was struck in his study of Scripture by how much of the narrative is immersed in the land—mountaintops, valleys, lakes, gardens, deserts, rivers, wilderness. His Church of the Woods, now a year old, is comprised of just over 100 acres not far from Canterbury, New Hampshire. Liturgy in the Church of the Woods involves hiking, stargazing, storytelling, meditation walks, trail work, and open-air Eucharists. His vision is to help people understand, and repent of, what he calls ‘ecological sin.’

Steve tells this story of a major turning point in his ministry: He calls it the Chainsaw Eucharist. As he was clearing brush and saplings in the forest he came upon a stand of mature beech trees that were in the way of a new meditation trail. He cranked up his chainsaw and began chopping away. But as tree after tree fell, he became increasingly uneasy. He stopped. He realized that in cutting down those trees he had neither shown nor felt the slightest regard for the fact that he was taking lives that were worthy of reverence. Right then and there he set up an altar with his traveling Communion kit and turned to the Lectionary reading for the day. It was from Isaiah:

I have swept away your transgressions like a cloud, and your sins like mist. Return to me, for I have redeemed you. . . . Shout, O depths of the earth! Break forth into singing, O mountains, O forest, and every tree in it.

The author of the story writes: [Blackmer] prayed the prayer of confession, consecrated the bread and wine, and offered them to his fellow congregants — the trees — before partaking himself.

Set aside the complete lack of liturgical orthodoxy of Blackmer’s actions here, and see it, as I said, as a living parable: What is the Kingdom of God like? The Kingdom of God is where Jesus gave himself for ALL of Creation–for everything that God declared Very Good from the beginning of time. ALL of it.

None of Creation, not the natural world that we steward, nor the poor, nor the sick, nor the outsider are to be regarded as something that is in the way of our selfish desires. God’s Dream is to turn all of that on its head; in the words of the Magnificat, to cast down the mighty and lift up that which we would treat as lowly. It’s audacious, it’s what Isaiah envisioned, and that’s what Jesus wanted John the Baptist to understand.

Because, you see, John’s expectation was as imprisoned–as boxed-in–as he was. As he began to lose hope he thought he might have been expecting too much of Jesus, when in fact, he expected too little; as did the crowd that Jesus addressed. They expected to see the liberation of Israel—something they could imagine– not the unexpected–beyond imagination–, which was the healing and renewal of all Creation.

The prophetic imagination of Isaiah, and of the entire Gospel message, calls us to participate courageously in the Dream of God. It is a daunting message, and at the same time a hopeful and joyful one. Today we lit the pink candle on the Advent wreath to mark Gaudete Sunday, which means Rejoice. And we can rejoice today. We can rejoice in the audacious expectation and hope that the God who comes as a child is faithful to all of Creation, and calls each of us to be the ones that we’ve been waiting for.

*http://harpers.org/archive/2016/12/the-priest-in-the-trees/