This was originally preached on January 1, 2006. There has been some updating.
I don't usually make my sermons into stories. That's just the way they come out at times. I will be thinking of some story in the Bible and it will resist dissection. And that's natural. Living things resist being cut up. And the stories in the Bible are filled with life, which is why we relate to them so strongly and why, I suspect, God saw to it that the majority of scripture is a story. He could have given us a rule book. He could have given us a tome of systematic theology. And I think a lot of Christians would prefer it that way, especially those who loudly profess their supposed devotion to the Bible but only pick and choose certain portions of it to follow or believe. But God gave us an anthology, a collection of books, with just enough rules, just enough theology and a whole lot of poems, songs and stories.
So sometimes, rather than dissect a perfectly good story, I will retell it and weave the points I wish to make into the fabric of the tale. Quite frankly, it often starts with me waking at 5 in the morning with the story telling itself in my brain. And I know from experience that I must get up and get it down in writing if I am to have any peace. I do research to keep it as accurate as I can, and I consult my own experiences and emotions to keep it real. And I trust God to guide my words.
But sometimes the details in the stories distress people. They would rather not hear about the Virgin Mary breastfeeding, or about how messy Jesus' birth must have been, or about dogs fighting over the remains of crucified criminals, regardless of whether we know these things happened, or had to happen or very probably happened. I confess that some of these things come from my medical background. If you're ever in a hospital cafeteria, don't sit next to a bunch of nurses on break. We can discuss things over lunch that would make you lose yours. But these things are nevertheless real. We are physical beings in a physical world and so were the people in the Bible. That is not to say we are not also spiritual beings. As C.S. Lewis put it, we are amphibians, at home in both realms. And that is the point of today's celebration.
In the liturgical calendar of the church we call the first day of the year “Holy Name Day.” But it used to be called “The Circumcision of Our Lord.” A Jewish boy was circumcised on the 8th day after his birth. We celebrate Christ's birthday on December 25th because of an ancient belief that people died on the anniversary of their conception. Jesus died in the spring when Passover was held and so he was thought to have been conceived then and thus born in the winter. So we celebrate his circumcision on January 1st. This is important because circumcision was the physical sign that a Jewish boy was a party to the covenant between God and Israel. A covenant,or treaty, was cut. Usually this involved the sacrifice of an animal and the shedding of blood. (Genesis 15) But the old covenant (which is what “Old Testament” means) between God and Abraham's descendants required the cutting off of the foreskin. (Genesis 17) It's painful and a little bit bloody and the mark it leaves is unmistakable. It is still a major rite of passage for religious Jews and is called a Bris, which is Hebrew for covenant.
So how did this day come to be called “Holy Name Day?” Because when a child was circumcised he was officially given his name. (Luke 1:59-63) The name meant something. It might be the name of a recently deceased relative or a revered ancestor. In the Bible we see infants named to commemorate God's blessing or some significant event. Abram is renamed by God as “Abraham,” which means “father of many nations.” Sarai is renamed “Sarah,” which means “princess.” Isaac means “laughter,” recalling Sarah's laughing with surprise and a little skepticism when God promises that she will give birth long after menopause. Jesus is Greek for Yeshua, which means “Yahweh is deliverance” or “Yahweh saves.” Because Hebrew was originally written without vowels, “Yahweh” is as close as modern scholars can come to working out the pronunciation of the covenant name of God revealed to Moses. “Yahweh” is a form of the Hebrew verb “to be.” It can mean “I am that I am,” or “I will be who I will be,” or even “I will be there for you.”
So on this day we commemorate 2 things: Jesus' circumcision and his naming. One seems primarily physical, the other primarily social but each has a deeper meaning. The first means that Jesus is fully a member of the covenant people of God. The second hints at his role: to be the one who brings God's deliverance.
That said, I wish we still called this “The Circumcision of Our Lord.” Because we are not in danger of failing to spiritualize things. We are in danger of forgetting that spiritual things have a physical impact.
A friend once proudly displayed her stuffed Santa. I pressed his hand and he said, “The true meaning of Christmas is in your heart.” To which I say, “It depends on what is in your heart.” The BTK killer murdered one of his victims 2 weeks before Christmas. He was president of his church council. Whatever was going on in his heart was not about God's love for all.
By making Christmas a purely internal private thing, we make its meaning hopelessly subjective. If it can mean anything we want it to, it will come to mean nothing. The true meaning of Christmas is steadily getting divorced from the objective physical meaning for its existence: the birth of Jesus, complete with amniotic fluid, blood, pain and a placenta. God did not metaphorically become one of us; he actually and physically became one of us.
That has always disturbed some people. At the time of the early church, there was a movement called Gnosticism, from “gnosis,” the Greek word for “knowledge.” Gnostics believed salvation was an intellectual process. It depended on having a secret knowledge of the world. And that knowledge was that the physical universe is evil, made by an evil demi-god. Only what is spiritual is good. So some gnostics were ascetics, trying to separate themselves from the physical world as much as possible. Others thought that because you can't redeem the physical, it was okay to indulge in every kind of physical pleasure as long as you were intellectually pure. Only when you die and escape the prison of the body can you be wholly spiritual. Gnostics found things they liked in Christianity and made inroads into the church, bringing with them their dualistic view of the physical (evil) and spiritual (good). The church condemned Gnosticism but its taint remains.
We still have Christians who try to separate the physical from the spiritual, forgetting that God created the world and pronounced it good. So we have those who act as if true Christianity occurs in some other dimension. And the consequences of radically separating the two are the same today as they were in the heyday of Gnosticism. Some Christians try to withdraw from the world, which goes against the Great Commission. (Matthew 28:19-20) Others act as if it doesn't matter what you do with your body so long as your heart is in the right place, forgetting that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. (1 Corinthians 3:16-17; 6:19-20) Both of these are equally erroneous and they account for a lot of the troubles the church has had in relating to the world.
First let's look at those who look down on the body. After Christianity was legalized, there were few opportunities for becoming a martyr. Those who sought to live an extreme form of Christianity decided that, because they couldn't sacrifice their bodies in defiance of pagan officials, they could mortify the flesh. They took phrases from Paul's letters about learning to control one's body and twisted his sensible if subtle ideas into feats of self-torture. (Romans 13:13-14; 1 Corinthians 9:24-27; Galatians 5:19-25) These people went out into the desert and fasted, and whipped themselves, or sat on the top of pillars for years. This asceticism has more to do with Eastern body-denying philosophies. These hermits sought to show their devotion to God by literally crucifying their flesh. And people flocked to see them. It makes you wonder if this showy kind of religious practice wasn't some form of exhibitionism—especially when you have seen, as I have, an entire valley, located between Jerusalem and Jericho, that is dotted with the tiny caves of hundreds of so-called “hermits” that used to live there.
In that same valley there is an ancient monastery that goes back more than 1000 years. When I visited it on a study trip in 1975, there were only 3 aged monks rattling around in this vast holy building. And another of the monks did not get along with the other 3 and moved into one of the hermit caves. Not the best way to show that “God is love.” (1 John 4:8)
Now monasticism has done a lot of good. At their best monks and nuns ran hospitals, schools and universities. Some created breathtaking art, initiated social reform and served as model communities. During the so-called “dark ages” they preserved classical works and learning, both Christian and pagan, which was despised by the barbarians who overthrew the Roman empire. Many of the early scientific discoveries came from the learned priests and monks who lived and worked in the monasteries where they made their observations about medicinal herbs, animal husbandry, weather, clock-making and more.
Still, the impulse behind the monastic movement, at least in the beginning, was the idea that it was easier to be a Christian if you just withdrew from the world. And since the second greatest commandment, according to Jesus, is to love our neighbor, it seems odd to think he meant to separate yourself from people. This kind of Christian practice concentrated on purifying oneself in a controlled environment. The problem is that even the monasteries and the nunneries were not immune to sin.
Often what happened was that if a monastery or an order of monks were good at what they did, they attracted wealthy patrons. As the monastery grew rich, its disciplines grew lax and its original goals were forgotten or modified. The reason why in the Robin Hood stories he often held up abbots and bishops was that they often controlled a lot of land and therefore a lot of wealth. Sins of the spirit, like arrogance, were evident, followed by sins of the flesh. In his meticulously researched novel, The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco has his detective, Brother Henry of Baskerville, uncover all 7 deadly sins in a large and important monastery. Which brings us back to the problem of finding the meaning of Christmas in your heart. Jesus reminds us that there are some pretty dark things in our hearts and by itself changing our external circumstances is not sufficient to save us from sin. (Mark 7:21-23)
On the other hand, we find those in the church who think that externals are of no importance at all. Many so-called “Christians” are living lifestyles that are no different from nonbelievers. Misunderstanding Paul's discovery that our salvation comes from God's grace through faith and not from our works has led lots of Christians to feel that as long as their heart is right with God, what they do is their own business. This is like an alcoholic thinking that as long as he attends A.A. meetings and says his affirmations, he can continue to drink. So we have Christians who think nothing of sleeping with others without making explicit the implicit promises and commitments the merging of two lives demands, or seeking God's blessing. We also have Christians taking marriage vows without seriously considering what they are saying. There are Christians who don't see the contradiction between being a temple of the Holy Spirit and ingesting chemicals, both legal and illegal, just for fun, despite the fact that they impair their thinking and physical functions. We have people on the one hand saying that Jesus is their Savior while on the other refusing to repent or take responsibility for the acts that harm themselves or others.
In fact there are whole groups of Christians who want the church and society to excuse whatever harm they do because they are at the mercy of familial, societal, political, economic or biological forces that they insist they cannot resist. They know the commandments against murder, stealing, sexual immorality, etc, but they plead they are victims of oppression, injustice, deprivation, neglect, or abuse as if they were mere puppets and incapable of doing any differently. We have a lot of people who want love and acceptance but not salvation from their destructive and self-destructive actions. They don't want to be saved from what they say tyrannically rules their lives.
Christ became a man. He had brothers and sisters. He did a physical job. He ate and drank and went to the bathroom. He had sexual organs and sexual urges. That's part and parcel of the incarnation. And it means we are not to despise God's physical creation nor our own bodies. It also means that, as it says in Hebrews, we have a high priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses. His knowledge of our troubles comes firsthand.
Hebrews goes on to say that Jesus was tested in every respect that we are, yet he did not sin. (Hebrews 4:15) Jesus drank but he didn't get drunk. Jesus got hungry but he didn't spend every idle moment stuffing his face. Jesus had sexual urges but he didn't act like a dog in heat. Jesus got tired but he made time for prayer. Jesus observed the rules of his faith but he never let those rules stop him from helping those in need.
And though he was a physical being, Jesus did not run from the painful consequences of preaching unpopular ideas to the hostile powers that be. He was beaten and tortured to death. As gross as it may seem to us, his blood was spilled to cut the new covenant between God and humanity. The physical and spiritual impact one another. If you truly believe in something, you act on it. If something happens to you, you seek its meaning. The physical gives concrete expression to the spiritual and the spiritual gives meaning to the physical.
In the death of Jesus on the cross we see what self-sacrificial love ultimately looks like. We see God in Christ taking upon himself both the spiritual and the physical impacts of our sins, and the society and systems we have created and acquiesced to. He endured the inventive cruelty of our inhumanity to each other, the self-preserving disregard for another's suffering, and the ever-present belief that the end (in this case, civil peace) justifies the means (eliminating the source of troublesome ideas.) We also see, when Jesus cries, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” the Trinity, the eternal divine love relationship at the heart of all being, absorbing the spiritual desolation and estrangement that is the natural consequence of our parting ways with God.
Of course, all of this would be so much speculation if God had not raised Jesus physically from the dead. Had the disciples not seen Jesus, if they hadn't touched him and ate with him and felt his breath upon them, they wouldn't have had the courage to step into the streets again and to go into the temple again and to loudly proclaim, at the risk of their own lives, that Jesus is Lord.
God physically invaded this world. He came to show us in Jesus what he is like and what we can be. He came to show us that we should not look down upon our earthly existence as nothing but dirt nor knuckle under to its forces. What we can do is transform it into what he has always intended it to be: our home and his realm. We are flesh and blood; we are soul and spirit. We need to embrace both elements of our makeup because we will need both to accomplish the mission to which he calls us—to be living embodiments of his love and grace and forgiveness and deliverance. Our world, spiritually blind to God's goodness and physically enthralled by evil, desperately needs to feel the impacts of those spiritual truths in action and hear us announce the good news that God have infiltrated time, that the Spirit is spreading the kingdom of God and that we can be liberated from the tyranny of race, gender, state of health, age, nationality, ethnicity, geography, politics, economics, history, culture, family, and biology because Jesus, and only Jesus, is Lord of all.
No comments:
Post a Comment