December 25, 2000 | Christmas Day

Eclipsed by God

Carol J. Allen
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

John 1:1–14

“He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being,
and he sustains all things by his powerful word.”

Hebrews 1:3 (NRSV)

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Christmas is God’s day. It is the day to be still, to stop all preparations, to let God talk. The Scripture is full of God talking. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” “He was in the beginning with God.” In the beginning God said, “Let there be light,” and the world came into being. “Let us make people in our image,” and humankind came into being. Let there be law, and Torah came into being. God spoke to a young woman, and Jesus came into being. When God speaks, creation happens. When God talks, the natural world (that includes you and me) is illuminated by grace for a brief, shimmering moment. Kathleen Norris, in the quotation on the front of the bulletin, describes incarnation, the experience of God in human flesh, this way: “When a place or time seems touched by God, it is an overshadowing, a sudden eclipsing of my priorities and plans. But even in terrible circumstances and calamities, in matters of life, and death, if I sense that I am in the shadow of God, I feel light, so much light that my vision improves dramatically. I know that holiness is near. It reveals that ordinary circumstances of my life are full of mystery. . . . This is good news.”

Not long ago, at the back of Blair Chapel, I had the occasion to sit down next to a nanny holding the baby son of a woman who had come to memorialize her father. The service had ended and the parents of the boy were greeting family and friends out in the hallway. As the nanny and I sat chatting, the baby in her arms began to speak in his language. He leaned slowly in my direction and gently placed his cheek against my cheek and left it there. He and I sat very still so as not to break the spell. Maybe this was because it surprised him as much as me—our touching—how good it felt. We sat there in companionable silence and savored the warmth and softness of each other’s skin. We were totally focused on the pleasure of our communication—a grown-up and a baby, the universe to each other for a moment. I was overwhelmed with the grace of his action. I didn’t want the intimacy to end. I was utterly captivated by it. Feelings of joy crowded out all others. Great gratitude continues to mark that event for me. It was a fleeting moment. It came and went. I did not control it. I could only open myself to it. The memory of that baby carries the hope for me that the future holds more such talk, the talk of intimacy, not only with babies but with all kinds of people. I am able to go a long way on the memory of that moment. It is a sustaining kind of memory. It helps me get on in life. It provides me with, as Norris puts it, “some measure of peace when I soldier on in the daily round.”

Ann Weems says it this way in her collection of poetry, Kneeling in Bethlehem: “It is not over, this birthing. There are always newer skies into which God can throw stars. When we begin to think that we can predict the Advent of God, that we can box the Christ in a stable in Bethlehem, that’s just the time that God will be born in a place we can’t imagine and won’t believe. Those who wait for God watch with their hearts and not their eyes, listening, always listening for angel words.” This means to me that Christmas wasn’t just an event long ago, captured in familiar stories, songs, and traditions. Christmas keeps happening. God keeps talking to creation. Creation includes you and me. Love and words came together in the past in my life and in your life. I trust that they will come together again in the future when we least expect it.

Love and words came together once upon a Christmas for Dr. Rachel Remen while she was attending patients at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. For her, over the years the silent, peaceful, dark wards have become associated with the holiness of the season. This was not always the case. She did not welcome her first Christmas Eve at Bellevue. Patients who could be sent home had gone and the drama she had come to associate with doctoring was also gone. She resented being there. Trained, she said, as “a state of the art young physician,” she was put out at being there at a holiday time. She resented being a single woman assigned there in order to relieve those who had families to go to. It seemed to her a waste of her skills and time.

She remembers one patient with nowhere to go. Petey was a “gentle, elderly man, no longer exactly certain of his age, a derelict who had lived on the Bowery for more than twenty years.” There was not much to be done for him medically; he seemed to understand, and he appreciated all that could be done to make him comfortable. Remen recalls how service groups such as the Salvation Army had come and gone throughout the day, distributing small gifts to the patients. By nightfall, they had all gone and it was snowing outside, covering over the ugliness of city streets. “A few bed lamps made little islands of light in the darkness.” The hospital was quiet, and Rachel moved among the few patients who remained, checking IVs, inquiring about symptoms, and offering pain or sleeping medications to those who were still awake. As Rachel approached Petey, he beckoned to her, “Missy Doc,” he said, reaching over and opening the drawer of the battered bedside table. Inside was “most of what he owned—a pocketknife, a toothbrush, a razor, a comb, some small change, and two beautiful navel oranges he must have been given earlier in the afternoon. He held one of the oranges out to Rachel. ‘Merry Christmas,’ he said.”

Rachel reflects on her experience with Petey in her book My Grandfather’s Blessings. “I saw in his face a deep pleasure at having something to give, and I was stunned into silence. I had felt that kind of joy once too. Other Christmas Eves came back to me. . . . But that was a long time ago. I had learned a great many things since, but I had also forgotten things. With a contraction of the heart, I remembered the resentment I had felt only a short time before. I had not even wanted to be here.” Rachel had learned a way to live by the example of her grandfather, but her grandpa’s voice had become covered over by the voices of her family, her colleagues, her professors. Petey was showing it to her again. “Petey’s old face folded into a smile, ‘Merry Christmas,’ he said once again.” Rachel’s eyes filled up with tears, and she reached out and took the orange with both hands. Rachel concludes her story with these words, “It takes many years to remember that everything of value we have to give was not learned from a book and that the wisdom to live well is not conferred with an advanced degree. But real teachers are everywhere. The life in us will be blessed by others over and over again until finally we have remembered how to bless it ourselves.”

Robert Jewitt, a Scripture scholar, says the book of Hebrews was written for pilgrims, God’s faithful people traveling through the adversities of this life. At the heart of the faith of the author of Hebrews is this statement of belief about Jesus: “He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.” This means to me that to be true to God’s own nature, God had to become a human being who lived a style of life that attended to the well-being of other human beings. Jesus was a fulfillment of God’s own being and purpose. This is why the church later on could say there was no sin or shame in him. In his presence, those who had been taught to see themselves as persons rotten to the core, as persons with no value, as persons marginal to power, felt accepted and whole. In Jesus of Nazareth, God’s presence eclipsed their shame, invited them up to God’s table, and made them members of God’s own household. This is why Mary of Bethany lavishly poured expensive ointment on Jesus’ feet and why a Roman official set aside his own authority to acknowledge the greater authority of Jesus and to ask for healing for his daughter. This is why others thought Jesus was possessed by demons or called him a blasphemer. He was not controlled by conventional morality. His talk went deeper and touched the innermost belief systems and self-images of people to call them to a better way.

On the wall over the dining table in my apartment is a copy of a painting that reminds me of the holiness that talk can carry. A man and woman are sitting at a small table under a blossoming tree. Their faces are shrouded in shadow. Coffee fixings are on the table between them. The man holds a cup to his lips and the woman leans toward him. He seems to be listening intently. There is a worshipful quality about this scene for me. It depicts a reverent waiting. The moment seems to hold the opportunity for a different kind of relationship between the two—an intimacy, a deepening exchange of understanding, holy talk.

I can hear preacher and teacher Barbara Brown Taylor making her reflections. Despite all our technical know-how and advances in scientific knowledge, Jesus came to show us what true love means—reconciling us to God and one another. She writes in her book The Luminous Web, “Trying to follow Jesus in the way of that love is as hard now as it ever was. . . . I can believe in the big bang theory without losing one minute’s sleep about how much stuff I own, and my acceptance of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle does not make any requirements of me in terms of how I treat you. . . . Because science does not deal in ethics or morals, it cannot tell me how to live or whom to love. . . . All it can tell me is how the world works . . . and refer me elsewhere for answers about how to live honorably in the world.” Taylor goes on to add that God came to us in physical terms, in the flesh of Jesus, so that “we might discover the holiness of our own lives in the flesh.”

She discusses the limits of religion as well as science. “No one knows what caused the big bang. No one knows the mind of God. I go looking for the first kind of knowledge. I must wait to be given the second kind.” Science sends us out to make observations. Religion sends us into the inner world of relationships, trusting God to open up space for faith, “a radical openness to the truth, wherever it may turn out to be,” in religion or in science. Because of God’s incarnation in Jesus, humankind had been given a central place in the scheme of things. Humankind is where God has chosen to make a home. This means to me that God is hovering over us in all times and places, in all seasons of our lives, sending out words of love and acceptance, words that call us in turn to practice kind forbearance toward one another and to do deeds that serve the common good. Because of God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ—God with us in the flesh—on this our celebration of Christmas Day, we can be bold to affirm the faith of composer John Ylvisaker as expressed in his poem “I Was There to Hear Your Borning Cry.” In it, he links incarnation and the Sacrament of Baptism:

I was there to hear your borning cry,
I’ll be there when you are old.
I rejoiced the day you were baptized,
To see your life unfold.
I was there when you were but a child,
With faith to suit you well;
In a blaze of light you wandered off
To find where demons dwell.

When you heard the wonder of the Word
I was there to cheer you on.
You were raised to praise the living Lord,
To whom you now belong.
When you find someone to share your time
And you join your hearts as one,
I’ll be there to make your verses rhyme
From dusk to rising sun.

In the middle ages of your life,
Not too old, nor longer young,
I’ll be there to guide you through the night,
Complete what I’ve begun.
When the evening gently closes in
And you shut your weary eyes,
I’ll be there as I have always been
With just one more surprise.

I’ll be there to hear your borning cry,
I’ll be there when you are old.
I rejoiced the day you were baptized,
To see your life unfold.

(from Rosemary Catalano Mitchell and Gail Anderson Ricciuti, Birthings and Blessings, Crossroad, 1992).

All praise, thanksgiving, and honor be to Almighty God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, One God, now and forever. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church