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The Glory of
Jesus
by the Rev. Rich Smith
December 24, 2006 – Advent IV
John 1:1-14
Back when we lived out West, and often found ourselves
driving long distances on nearly deserted roads, frequently in the dead
of night, we resorted to all kinds of things to keep ourselves from
boredom, to keep alert. After we’d played “20 questions” and the solved
all of the world’s problems we would amuse ourselves by singing
Christmas carols to the wrong tunes. You might want to try it
yourselves – just please not on the Beltway. Here, let’s try one
now.....
(Sing “Away in a Manger” to “O Come All Ye Faithful” – that actually
works. Now try it to “Jingle Bells” – more of a challenge!)
Another game we played, which is recommended only for deserted roads or
Christmas parties, is to guess the original names of these politically
correct Christmas carols...
Move Hither, The Entire Assembly of Those Who Are Loyal In Their Belief
(“O Come, All Ye Faithful”) Vertically Challenged Adolescent
Percussionist
(“Little Drummer Boy”)
Its Arrival Occurred At Twelve O'clock During A Clement Nocturnal Period
(“It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”)
Exclamatory Remark Concerning
a Diminutive Municipality In Judea Southwest Of Jerusalem
(“O Little Town of Bethlehem”)
Commence Auditory Reception, the Announcing Cherubs Vocalize
(“Hark the Herald Angels Sing”)
Now, I love Christmas carols! I love the old, traditional ones. I love
hearing new ones. I love finding obscure ones. I love discovering that
some carols can legitimately be sung to more than one tune, that
different hymnals in fact use different tunes. Do you know the two
tunes to “It came upon the midnight clear?” Or the three tunes to “Away
in a Manger” in common use (there have been some forty tunes used over
the years!) Or the three to “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” There’s the
traditional one which we sang a moment ago. The Episcopalians sing it
to “Forest Green,” which is a tune we use often for other lyrics. And
The Christian Science Hymnal has a third tune, with some additional
lyrics as well, which is quite beautiful. I used it on Christmas Eve a
couple of time, surprising a few people. We usually like to do things
in the traditional way, but forget that once upon a time these carols
were new songs, and most of them have evolved over time. We sing some
in translation (“O Come All Ye Faithful,” “Silent Night”); and others
we would hardly recognize in their original form - “Hark, How All the
Welkin Ring,” for example.
My love of carols has also led me to look more closely at the words,
and I have discovered that I enjoy many of them a lot more if I don’t
take them too literally. Like the Bible, seriously, but not literally.
Most of them reflect a first-century cosmology, flat earth, waters
below, heaven above....stars that move, angels that come out of the
heavens, and so on.
For another thing, many of them are not all that true to the biblical
story itself. For example, they combine different versions of the
Christmas story into one. We do it all the time – we take Luke’s story
which has Jesus being born in a manger in Bethlehem because that was
the only lodging available to his out-of-town parents, where he is
visited by the local shepherds – we take that and combine it with
Matthew’s story of Jesus being born in the house where his parents
already lived, in Bethlehem, where the visitors were wise men from the
East, who arrived several days later. Somewhere along the way we made
them into kings, which Matthew never says they were. But we have this
picture of them showing up at the manger right behind the shepherds,
all in the same scene, an appealing picture, no doubt, but just not
biblical.
Of course the original narratives themselves were not meant to be
historical in the first place, so perhaps the carols are a form of
midrash, expanding on the story. And the story includes things that
historians can’t really say actually happened, such as the slaughter of
the innocents in Matthew, or Luke’s depiction of Herod and Quirinius
ruling at the same time. (Herod died about three years before Quirinius
became governor of Syria, and to be fair Q isn’t mentioned in any
carols that I know of.) With the birth of Jesus, there is no way to
know what really happened. These are great stories, but not historical
in their details. It’s always a matter of looking back and seeing a
meaning of an event that wasn’t evident at the time it was happening.
After all, as Bishop Spong points out, “No one waits outside a hospital
room for a great person to be born.” (Well, my father did, but that’s
another story!) It’s only in retrospect that a birthday is honored, as
a person becomes great in later life.
The birth narratives and the carols they inspire are not so much about
history as they are theology, about the meaning of Jesus! They are
there to celebrate who he was and is. But even there, I find a lot of
bad theology. Jesus is rarely presented as human at all - “the little
Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.” That doesn’t describe any child I ever
had. In Charles Wesley’s famous carol, which we’ll conclude our service
with, the lyrics border on docetism, which was declared a heresy in the
fourth century. Docetism is the idea that Jesus was not human at all,
only pretended to be - “veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail the
incarnate deity” – a heavenly visitor whose flesh is only a cover for
the divinity which is his real and total essence. And then there is the
sacrificial theology that pervades carols like – “I wonder as I wander
out under the sky how Jesus the Savior did come forth to die for poor
ordinary people like you and like I.” Bad theology and poor grammar!
The idea here is that Jesus’ sole purpose in being born was to die for
our sins. It doesn’t matter what he taught, doesn’t matter how he
loved, doesn’t matter how he challenged the authorities and the
conventional wisdom of the day, doesn’t matter how he cared for and
stood with the poor, ate with outcasts, healed the sick, fed the hungry
– it doesn’t matter how much he opened up a window on God during his
life, nor does it matter how he presented such a compelling way of
living that millions have been willing to follow him and lay down their
own lives if necessary – it was only by dying for our sins that he
achieved his reason for being. That’s known as sacrificial theology,
which fit nicely into the Jewish Temple practices of the day, and was
used to explain Jesus to those who would understand this. It kind of
took over, edging out other understandings of who Jesus was, and we
need reminding that some of these other ways have validity as well!
Now I’m willing to overlook the sentiments in the carols that are not
good history or correct science, because, after all, this is a big
story, so big that it can only be told through music and art and
poetry, and these things are never literal or meant to be. But I
confess I do have more of a problem with this one-sided view of Jesus.
Maybe I will write a new carol....
The Gospel of John doesn’t tell the traditional Christmas story, of a
peasant family making a hazardous journey, a scandalous birth,
shepherds, angels, a manger and the like. John puts it more cosmic
terms: The Word – that is the very essence of God which existed from
the beginning of time, became flesh, and dwelt among us full of grace
and truth, and we have beheld its glory.
What is this glory? Traditionally, Jesus’ glory was seen in things that
highlighted his divinity – things like his virgin birth, scenes like
the transfiguration, or the crucifixion, or ascension. One of the
ancient creeds says that “he shall come again in glory to judge the
living and the dead.” Artwork and images show this other-worldly Jesus,
one with God-like qualities, majestic, awesome, grand and glorious,
surrounded by pomp and all the trappings of royalty, and somehow
removed from anything we as mere mortals can relate to.
To me the glory of Jesus is not this, but rather his humanity, a
humanity that is real, that cries as a baby, acts out as a teenager,
struggles with temptation as a young man, enjoys food and
companionship, feels the pain of rejection, and the anguish of torture,
and yet manages to love and show us the best of what we can be.
Frederick Buechner put it this way:
"The word became flesh," wrote John, "and dwelt among us, full of grace
and truth." That is what incarnation means. It is untheological. It is
unsophisticated. It is undignified. But according to Christianity, it
is the way things are. All religions and philosophies that deny the
reality or the significance of the material, the fleshly, the
earthbound, are themselves denied. Moses at the burning bush was told
to take off his shoes because the ground on which he stood was holy
ground, and incarnation means that all ground is holy ground because
God not only made it but walked on it, ate and slept and worked and
died on it. If we are saved anywhere, we are saved here. And what is
saved is not some diaphanous distillation of our bodies and our earth,
but our bodies and our earth themselves. Jerusalem becomes the New
Jerusalem... Our bodies are sown perishable and raised imperishable.”
And he says, “One of the blunders religious people are particularly
fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.”
That is, to see the glory of Jesus as something other-worldly, not in
the flesh and blood of a real person, the dirt and straw of a manger,
the joys and pain of life in this world. But God, it would seem, is
plainly concerned about the things of earth.
The glory of Jesus is the glory of being human at its best, when we act
as we were created to be, and let the light of God shine through us.
Granted, we have not done this very well, as the daily news and the
horrors of the age make clear. Yet the Word still becomes flesh, and
that is where we behold glory, in the midst of what is human. I have
always liked what William Faulkner said when accepting the Nobel Prize
in literature over a half century ago (which I’m paraphrasing just a
bit):
I decline to accept the end of (humanity). It is easy enough to say
that we are immortal simply because we will endure: that when the last
dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock
hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then
there will still be one more sound: that of our puny inexhaustible
voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that we will
not merely endure: we will prevail. We are immortal, not because we
alone among creatures have an inexhaustible voice, but because we have
a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The
poet's... duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to
help us endure by lifting our heart, by reminding us of the courage and
honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which
have been the glory of our past. The poet's voice need not merely be
the record of humanity, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help
us endure and prevail.”
Courage, honor, hope, pride, compassion, pity, sacrifice – this is what
human glory has been about. It’s what we have done when we have been at
our best as humans, when we have been most like God, in whose image we
are created. Not powerful, or controlling, or arrogant, or wealthy, but
more like Jesus. His glory is seen in his humanity, a fragile yet
enduring humanity that reflects what is most like God.
That’s what we really sing about at Christmas. Though the language is
couched n poetry and story and myth, which is probably the only way
such a story can be told, it is about the meaning of Jesus, the glory
of Jesus. And so I will sing the carols, the old, the new, the obscure,
the hauntingly beautiful – in spite of their 1st century world view and
their sometimes bad theology – because ultimately they tell a great
story, which is our story.
I’ve never forgotten another story that was told by the preacher at my
ordination over thirty years ago. He related how he had been laid low
with a siege of the flu, went into his room, closed the door and got
into bed, virtually defying anyone to come near him. Wallowing in his
misery, he soon heard the pat of little feet, pausing at the door, and
then gently opening it and coming inside. Before he could growl “Go
away!” he felt the hand of his three-year-old daughter, and heard her
in the tiniest whisper ask, “Can I hurt with you, Dad?” Nothing else
was said, or needed to be. She crawled in and held him, and he learned
once again, he said, that the essence of being human is caring and
being cared for. It is the essence and the glory of being human. It’s
also the glory of Jesus. The Word has become flesh and lives among us,
full of grace and truth. And we still behold its glory!
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
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