December 9, 2012 | 8:00 a.m. | Second Sunday of Advent

A Christmas Anthropology

Edwin Estevez
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 126
Baruch 5:1–9
Luke 3:1–6

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us. . . . We are far too easily pleased.

C. S. Lewis
The Weight of Glory

There is recent excitement in the field of anthropology, which is the study of all things related to human beings. With the maturation of research in the fields of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and quantum physics and developments in psychology, this field has a large quantity of data to ask the question, what does it mean to be human? In a recent book titled In Search of Self, edited by Dr. Van Huysteen, a theologian in the area of theological anthropology explores what the answer to this question means to our faith and age-old theological questions. The book’s allure is found in its array of writers, from the fields mentioned above and added to by philosophers.

Theological anthropology fascinates me because it challenges my comfortable understandings of God’s creation and my faith. For instance, the psalms and many a biblical passage use creation as a metaphor to speak of God’s goodness and God’s sovereignty. Indeed, in the Christmas season, you will doubtless hear about snowflakes, trees, and the wondrous beauty of children playing. But theological anthropology asks about the not-so-pleasant things about the human experience of creation.

What does it say about God when the hungry lion pounces on the weakest of the zebras left behind by the rest of the herd and tears it to pieces? What does it say about God that, as far as can be measured, most of the universe is dark matter, which to our eyes means darkness, having no light, very little life, as we know it?

The questions are perhaps better illustrated with a story .A pastor, now a chaplain at Princeton, says she was looking out her home’s window, smiling as she watched birds playfully splash around in the decorative backyard fountain. She called her husband over, a teacher of social studies and history, who found the scene not cute but curious. She explains that while a sermon was surely developing in her mind, as happens to most preachers, her husband went out to photograph the birds, finding that their “splashing” was in fact their pecking at a dead bird in the fountain, whose eyes were now missing, and the scene was more out of Law and Order, with a body and a literal bloodbath, than a Sunday sermon illustration.

However small it might seem to us that a small bird was pecked to death by fellow birds, you could actually do your own research and find animals very similar to us have shown even more violent tendencies, as research has shown chimpanzees violently torturing one another, forming death squads, and bullying.

This morning’s scripture is of cosmic proportions; the use of the metaphor “the mountains will be made low, the valleys will be raised up” resonates because upon observing the entire world, we might all see something amiss. Without a narrative, the world looks cold, desolate, and unfriendly. Without hope, we stare into the abyss of a short life, full of suffering moments, where we try to make the best of it and fade into nonbeing.

In the Christmas season, this intuitive and observed experience of the world—that something is “amiss” not just with humanity but with the entire world—isn’t resolved very nicely. John Lennon famously sang his lament “Merry Xmas (War Is Over)” to speak to the reality that, in fact, the war was not over, not even at Christmas. And war and conflict today are not over. Nor is the abundance of opulence and starvation in the same country. Nor is gun violence on the streets of Chicago. Nor is homelessness, drug addiction, mental illness, gang membership, sex trafficking, exploitation of children, poor labor conditions for millions, discrimination against vulnerable populations. No, no. no. Not even at Christmastime.

But in this season of Advent, perhaps we could hear something about the hope and promise of this text. This is, after all, a notice that John the Baptist, the voice crying out of the wilderness, is charged with the task of preparing the way of the Lord, announcing his coming, the advent of Emanuel, God with us. And that there is something of cosmic and epic proportions about this coming; the world as we know it will change. The high and mighty will be brought low, and the small and lowly will be raised up. The mountain meeting the valley will mean a plain field where all are made equal in God’s kingdom—it is love that makes us equal, not some false sense of sameness, but that in our difference, we are loved.

Friends, John the Baptist announced that he would come, and he arrived on the scene: God Emmanuel. Here I return to anthropology. Charles Darwin is once again causing a stir in this field, as theologians like Dr. Van Huysteen develop Darwin’s claim. In Descent of Man, Darwin argues (and remember he only has his naked eyes and intuition to make the claims that research seems to confirm) that human beings and animals are a lot alike; in fact, for each thing we have often believed makes us different from other animals, Darwin and others suggest otherwise. Rationality? No. Making tools? Communication? The thumb? Forming complex social structures? No, no, and no.

Darwin claimed that what made human beings different was one thing: morality. We alone, he wagered, are inherently moral agents. In his book Alone in the World?, Dr. Van Huysteen uses this very claim to propose the following: the image of God, what theology calls imago dei, is found in this moral agency with which we are gifted. In his own anthropological research, Dr. Van Huysteen states that no civilization has been found without a religion. He even argues that the cave wall paintings dating some 30,000 years ago, discoveries made in the caves of Lascaux, France, and in Spain, suggest that human beings were participating in ecstatic, religious behavior as they painted cave walls with images of dreams and visions that perhaps represented deeply held hopes and fears. He cites evidence that these caves were even frequented in the human quest to understand the world, to relate to it, to seek meaning, and thereby make moral decisions. This relating to the world around us, to God’s creation, is what Van Huysteen calls the image of God, imago dei.

Moral decisions have impacted our world, haven’t they? I wonder if the Christ who has come to us has not reignited this human quest and, in so doing, begun to heal the ways in which we related to our world, to all of creation. I can point to, however cautiously and knowing that more and better can always be done, our choices as a species to think of vulnerable populations. I tread cautiously acknowledging that we are not the saviors of the world.

Yet unlike the social Darwinists of the nineteenth century, whether it makes financial sense or is justified biologically, human beings have advocated for our fellow men and women who are handicapped, who deal with mental illness, who struggle with poverty, who starve, whereas we sometimes find in the animal kingdom examples of the weak, disabled, and vulnerable being left to die or serve as prey to the predator. Is this human advocacy for the vulnerable perhaps God at work, carrying the healing of fruition through these small acts of kindness and advocacy? There has been an awakening, over a millennia, about the necessity of finding alternatives to war, about lifting up those who’ve been oppressed, women, people of color, people who are without shelter and with little access to resources.

Yes, the change is slow. We can do better and much more, and perhaps I am too optimistic, but then blame this text for my optimism—because I believe something happened when the Christ came to us, as John the Baptist prepared the way. The world was turned upside down, and the ways in which we looked at the hungry, the orphan, the widow, the prisoner, the sick, all the vulnerable, began to change because of how Christ related to the world around him.

Today, we are called to a Christmas anthropology, that is to live into the ways in which our humanity is caught up in Christ; our way of relating to the world is the image of God fully alive in us, charging us with the task of preparing the way, like John the Baptist, for another advent, for another return of the Christ—and we prepare by advocating for the vulnerable and call to task the high and mighty.

And we can take comfort in the words from Baruch, in the Apocrypha of the Bible:

Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem,
and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God. . . .
Arise, O people of God, stand upon the height;
look towards the east,
and see your children gathered from west and east
at the word of the Holy One,
rejoicing that God has remembered them. . . .
For God has ordered that every high mountain and the everlasting hills be made low
and the valleys filled up, to make level ground,
so that God’s people may walk safely in the glory of God.

Amen.