The Hint Half Guessed, the Gift Half Understood | A Sermon on the Incarnation
A sermon written for Christ Church, Georgetown, and preached by the Reverend Tim Cole (I had the flu!) on the first Sunday after Christmas, December 29, 2019.
Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Psalm 147; Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7; John 1:1-18
Time is a funny thing. To ask the internet “What is Time?” is to open yourself up to somewhat destabilizing discussions of space-time, multiverses, and theories on the fundamental nature of time, which are, to my mind at least, completely confusing.
At its simplest, time is what the clock reads. At its most complex, it becomes the stuff of cosmic visioning. At its most confusing, it is non-existent.
At least, according to Julian Barbour, a British physicist, who makes a claim of time that “is as simply stated as it is radical: there is no such thing.”[1]
And yet, we experience time. We have too little it. Too much of it. We are on borrowed time. We have plenty of time. There was that one time. You say that all that time. Where has the time gone? I am running out of time. It is time.
This Sunday seems particularly right for speaking about the complexity of time. I don’t know about you, but Christmas, and Christmas festivities, really throw off my sense of time. Advent seemed particularly short this year. Christmas Eve seemed to last a week (and yet, it was still gone too soon). Some gatherings were over too quickly and some went on far too long. Family members, particularly the youngest among them, seemed to have grown faster than expected - after periods that felt like a long time - away.
This past week, I found myself frequently asking, “What day is it (again)?”
In the midst of all this confusion about time, our Gospel proclaims a beginning. Not the baby lying in the manger, as you might expect, but one of the more cosmic variety.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being (John 1:1-3).
In Advent and on Christmas Eve we considered the nativity. We meditated on the humility of Mary, the fragility of her body, and the power of her spirit in its resounding “Yes.” We joyfully anticipated the birth of our Lord almost as parents-to-be “nest” in anticipation of the arrival of their own baby. We raised our voices in song, proclaiming “Oh Come Oh Come Emmanuel.” We knelt at the Crib and joined our voices together in “Silent Night.” And, finally we sang “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!”
I have heard it preached that if the nativity says what happened, the incarnation testifies to what it means. Let us take a moment then, before we move beyond the nativity and into the new calendar year, to consider what our reading from the Gospel of John has to say about the incarnation.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us (John 1:14).
What does it mean that the Eternal Word, the Word that was in the beginning with God, decisively and intentionally entered the human condition, the material world, to dwell among us? What does it mean that the Word spoken at the beginning of the creating of the heavens and the earth, the Word that gave life and was life and is life still, what does it mean that this Word became flesh, became human, made itself proximate to us and to our condition?
It means, my friends, that we are intimately connected to the Eternal. Jesus, in entering human flesh, saw it, knew it, and blessed it. Jesus Christ, the Eternal Word, was knitted together cell by cell, like each of us, within the womb. Was birthed fresh and new and tragically and gloriously alive from the body of a young woman.
In entering the world in this way, Jesus blessed fragility, powerlessness, and vulnerability. In entering the world this way, Jesus transformed us and redeemed us, challenging us, through holy proximity, to see each other and ourselves as mere mortals, flawed and even broken, and, yet, beloved and part of God Eternal.
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 (John 1:4-5).
William Shakespeare tells us that “the past is prologue,” setting the context for what is present. What then are these words, which are commonly referred to as the prologue of John’s Gospel, asking us to consider as context here and now?
Nothing short of the timeless meeting the temporal - the wondrous mystery of the Eternal Word made flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.
In so doing, it makes clear this truth: What you will read here has happened and yet it is also still happening because the incarnation is both in time and also beyond it. It is both conceivable in the flesh and blood of Jesus of Nazareth and inconceivable in the transcendent eternal Word.
This has fascinating implications for what will follow. What I mean is this: later, in the Gospel of John, when Jesus encounters the blind man. And, upon encountering this blind man, spits onto the earth, make muds with his saliva, smears it with his Holy hands onto the eyes of the man, and makes him see. This act, this act of touching, of healing, of providing sight, this is an eternal act. When Jesus weeps at the grave of his friend, Lazarus. Those, my friends, are eternal tears. And, Jesus’ subsequent call to Lazarus to “come out!” That call is meant for our ears too. The Eternal Word issuing of a Word eternal —Come out. See. Live.
The Word became flesh and lived among us. And, from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace (John 1:14).
Beginning, end, or somewhere in between, wherever you find yourself in time’s contemplation today, take a moment to rest in the knowledge and love of God, and his Son, Jesus Christ, who did truly, as T.S. Eliot so beautifully puts it, allow for “grace dissolved in place.”[2]
For what is grace but those sometimes rare, always unbidden, and ultimately fleeting moments of transcendence – still points in the midst of our busy, scattered lives, where we connect to God and to whom we truly are: God’s beloved children. Where we, in our temporal lives, brush against something gloriously timeless. Truly, all things have been filled with the knowledge of God.[3]
T.S. Eliot writes:
The moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts
These are only hints and guesses
Hints followed by guesses;
and the rest is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.[4]
As the Christmas decorations come down, and guests leave, as party invitations stop arriving and school begins again – as our lives once again become more ordered and ordinary – let us hold fast to the truth of the incarnation: God descended with little fanfare in the form of a rather ordinary baby who had no “beauty that we should desire him,” (Isaiah 53:2) and everything changed. Everything.
We are left, as W.H. Auden writes,
Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.[5]
As one theologian puts it: “Our vocation in light of this is not to live a perpetual holiday. It is to be as ordinary as Jesus was, for our God loves the ordinary. This means the long labor of loving in the ways Jesus loved: seeing everyone as You and no one as an it.”[6]
Evermore and evermore.[7]
Amen.
[1] https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-09/book-excerpt-there-no-such-thing-time.
[2] T.S. Eliot, “Marina” (1930).
[3] This isn’t mine, but I can’t remember where it comes from.
[4] T.S. Eliot, “Dry Salvages,” from the Four Quartets (1941).
[5] W.H. Auden, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio,” (1944).
[6] Terence Sweeney, “The Ordinary Time Being,” in First Things, January 17, 2018, https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/01/the-ordinary-time-being.
[7] Of the Father’s love begotten, Hymnal 1982, No. 82.
