Preacher, on the Feast of the Nativity, less is more! The time will come to explore, perhaps even to argue the case for the Incarnation. Days will follow, plenty of them, for diving into every nook and cranny of the duties and delights of discipleship. Even then we will never fully know and understand the mystery of the Incarnation. Today it is enough to celebrate the beginnings, to ponder convergences, to reflect on the Incarnation as the glue that connects us to God and God’s beloved world, to ruminate on the mysteries of Word and Flesh.
You know the story. Many of your hearers are at least acquainted with it—a baby, a barn, shepherds, songs of angels. Perhaps less familiar is a story of the first Word, the in-the-beginning-was-the-Word word.
Perhaps because of the way the ecumenical creeds were structured, we are inclined to proclaim Christmas stories as the beginning of the story of salvation. When we do, we can miss and dismiss the stories of salvation, healing, restoration and reconciliation that fill the Hebrew scriptures. And we’re as likely to gloss over the stories of creation and new creation in the Christian scriptures, echoing those we know from the Hebrew scriptures.
How do the Christmas stories resonate when we hear them, these stories of creation and beginning, under the winter sky, listening for the voices that are still singing? What do they sound like in the places where our nostrils are filled with scents of life—humus, blood, sweat, milk, straw, manure? Where do they transport us when we stand in the places where nothing but a gritty, earthy spirituality will do?
I believe we can (and indeed must) always read the Gospels from the very places where we stand. As I’ve read and contemplated Luke 2 and John 1 in 2022, I am struck by how these two tellings of the story of Incarnation speak now. The Gospel of Luke reflects the heart of Christmas, filled with the pathos, the longing of the earth, the poor, and (stay with me!) women, BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color)—in short all those who yearn for the all-shall-be-well world of God’s promised shalom.
If we were staging a performance of Luke 2, I can imagine a kind of split backdrop—the palatial palaces of the powerful on one side and the dank, dark depression in the rocky ground that housed the animals at the inn on the other. Can you sense that both can be alien, foreign worlds? Now douse the lights and enter the night world of sheep farmers. Here in a darkness deeper than any barn, a song: Glory to God in the highest places and peace on earth. Singing moves us! And this song takes the farmers to the barn where they see the child. Birth! Beginning. Life, new life before our very eyes. And for those with eyes to see, this is the beginning of the New Age (as Frederick Danker names it in his commentary on Luke, Jesus and the New Age).
John, the mystical poet, the delver-into-the-depths, writes in the language of logic and reason about this creative Word that is now becoming flesh. Here all takes place in the light. We are moved from the world of theories, hypotheses, and observing-at-a-distance. We are drawn away from denying creation and hating the world, because! Because the Word is, right here, right now, among us, becoming flesh. The light which cannot and will not be overcome is shining. It’s as if it is all beginning fresh and new. Creation, like a seed, ripe-to-bursting with life, grace and truth.
John Philip Newell in his The Rebirthing of God: Christianity’s Struggle for New Beginnings says it this way. “We find this same connection at the heart of the Christian household, looking to the Glory at the center of life in such a way that the whole of life is seen to be suffused with that same Light. This is what the story of the nativity of the Christ Child does. The sacredness of the Christ Child, born of the marriage between heaven and earth, reveals the sacredness of the universe, conceived by the union of spirit and matter.” (p. 46)
Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass writes: “The problem with these people (us!) is that they don’t have both feet on the shore. One is still on the boat. They don’t seem to know whether they’re staying or not. This same observation is heard from contemporary scholars who see in the social pathologies and relentless materialist culture the fruit of homelessness, a rootless past….But can Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore? What happens when we truly become native to a place, when we finally make a home? Where are the stories that lead the way?” (p. 207)
We are people of just such stories: the story of Word made flesh! The story of God become human! A gritty, earth-bound story. A story of all creation, planted and nurtured in the rich soil, the humus of the Word made flesh. A story reminding us that we are dust, humus, and to dust we will return.
Again, John Philip Newell in The Rebirthing of God.
Last year I was in Cuba at the beginning of Advent, staying at the Convent of Santa Brigida in Havana. One of the Brigidine sisters had spent days preparing the nativity scene in what historically had been the stable on the ground floor of the convent. Its double doors swing open onto a busy street in Havana. There, hundreds of Cuban families stop every day during the Christmas season to gaze at this life-size representation of the Light of the Christ Child. They gaze with delight not because the nativity scene is pointing them to a foreign figure in a far-off land and age. They gaze because they have recognized something of this Light in the newborn countenance of their own children. And they gaze, I believe, because they are distantly remembering deep within themselves the Light that no darkness on earth can extinguish.
Sister Maria is excited to show me the manger scene and to tell me all about the creativity that goes into preparing it each year; she exudes enthusiasm as she speaks about how Cuban families come from all over the city to stop and stare at this depiction of the Christ Child. But this ties in with the passion she brings to her work year-round among the poorest of Havana. This passion is inextricably linked to the vision of Light that inspires her community to feed the hungry and to welcome strangers as if they were feeding and welcoming Christ. It is no coincidence that, in the thirteenth century, St. Francis first introduced the tradition of the nativity scene. It brought into focus for him the Light that he saw in the earth and in every creature, the light of “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon,” as he called them in his Canticle of the Sun, or “Sister Water” and “Brother Fire.” (p. 47
Preacher, echoing the words of the Psalms, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” Amen. May it be so.
Pastor Dick Bruesehoff
Minocqua, Wisconsin
Pastor Dick Bruesehoff and his wife, Naomi, live on Anishinaabe (the Lac du Flambeau band of Lake Superior Ojibwe) land in northcentral Wisconsin. In retirement Dick is serving as a spiritual director and retreat leader. A major vocation is loving and learning to live well with five acres of mixed hardwood and pine forest on the shores of Broken Bow lake, land that Naomi’s family has tended for over a century. They have feet in two worshipping communities: St. Matthias Episcopal Church in Minocqua, Wisconsin and Christ Church Lutheran in Minneapolis, Minnesota.