Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC
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Merry Christmas! May you know deeply of Immanuel, the God that is at the core of all things. Today, with the prologue to the Gospel according to John, we receive Good News indeed. And we receive it in the form of a beautiful poem. It may have been a hymn sung by Christians even before John wrote his gospel.
As it is, I am mighty grateful that John passed it on to us. It gives us an entirely different nativity than the synoptic gospels; a nativity that goes back to the creation of the universe.
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John assures us that in the very human person of Jesus of Nazareth, we came to know the Word of God, Godself. And this anointed one, this Christ, is everywhere and always present from beyond time and space and through and through all of time and space. There wasn’t, there isn’t and there won’t ever be a time when God is not intrinsically present to all creation.
God was revealed in creation from the beginning of time and space, from the eruption of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. The Logos of God, the Sofia of God was already there when the concept of “there” started existing. The Trinity of God actually was existent even before that, when there was no “there” and no “then” to speak of.
The Universe is an outpouring of God’s Love. And in God’s universe “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). God is being, beingness, isness. God is the essence of existence. We get befuddled with language here.
And in time and space and the universe, God brought about a canvass for us to have an experience of enfleshed existence. And on that canvass came to exist elementary particles, atoms, molecules, cells, plants and animals, sentient life, humanity. And God is not finished with painting.
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.
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.
Christian theologians use the expression the Scandal of the Particular. It evokes for me how the God who is the source and principle of all existence came to be known to humanity in incredibly underprivileged particular circumstances.
In a Galilean crafts people village family, in a colonised, militarily occupied backwater of the Roman empire, was born a little boy, whom in time, we came to know as the Christ, the anointed one, the Son of God.
The life of that man of Nazareth seems to point out how it mattered to God to have an enfleshed experience of human existence, joy and suffering. And it was thanks to that existence that we more fully embraced the wonder of incarnation.
The incarnation of God in the stuff of the universe and in the person of Jesus Christ shows that the spirit nature of reality (the spiritual, the immaterial, the formless) and the material nature of reality (the physical, that which we can see and touch) are one. God is not separate and remote, what I referred to in another sermon as an absent landlord. God is intrinsically involved in all of reality up to and including the human experience.
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He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
Immanuel, God with us is what we are celebrating this Christmastide. We are participating in the God experience. We are God-infused in a God-soaked universe and we are building God’s kingdom with Jesus’ solidarity and engagement.
When we recognize how God-drenched reality is, we cannot but engage with God, believe in the universal Christ and participate in God’s adventure of an ever-evolving universe.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin talked about the Omega Point. In the book of Revelation, God is referred to as the Alpha and the Omega; the beginning and the end.
We are participating in the increasing unification of creation in the Body of Christ. We may not notice it every morning with our first cup of coffee but we are.
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And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.
Thanks to Jesus, whose human birth, we just celebrated, we have come to know the Creator of the Universe more intimately than was imaginable before Him. We are on the receiving end of an everflowing source of truth and grace.
Thanks to Jesus, we have come to know that we are heirs of the Reign of God in the Body of Christ. We are deeply known, acknowledged and loved in the particulars of our humanity. And that humanity is part of what it is to be God. We, and all of Creation with us, are at the Sacred Heart of God.
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As the Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians:
“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!" So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.”
(Galatians 4:4-7)
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Immanuel, God with us. And us with God. Merry Christmas!
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