Christmas Eve Sermon, December 24, 2010

“Birthing the Sacred”, A Sermon preached by the Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2010 at Church of the Ascension, Rochester, New York

Merry Christmas to all of you! We gather on this most holy night, one of the longest, darkest nights of winter, the time of dormancy and barrenness in our exterior landscape, to celebrate a birth, the bursting forth of the sacred in the midst of the cold and barren landscape of the profane world. Our observance of Advent, the season of expectancy and waiting and hopefulness, is now concluded and we move to the festival of Christmas, where we welcome God incarnate in the form of a baby born to two young teenagers in a stable long ago. The idea of God entering the human world in the form of a baby is one with which we are so familiar, having heard this age old story every year of our lives, that the power of this story of the incarnate God may easily be lost on us.

The whole idea of the holy, eternal creator God taking on human flesh is not entirely unique to Christianity. In the Hindu tradition there are numerous stories of God entering the world in human form. In fact Hindus believe that God has to do so periodically when things here on earth get out of control. As I thought about how these two world religions handle the story of god entering the world in human form, I was struck by how each religion puts its own unique spin on the tale and how each can inform the other with its peculiar spiritual wisdom.

The Hindu stories of incarnation are quite different from the story we read tonight in the gospel of Luke. In the Hindu stories God becomes incarnate in a human being who is superhuman, who has magical powers or is able to do wondrous things that mere mortals cannot do. There are stories of the god Krishna being born in the world as a baby, but he is a baby who can talk and, once when he was reprimanded by an adult, he opened his mouth to respond and the person who reprimanded him saw all of the universe, all of the stars and planets of space and the distance between them, all the lands and seas and earth and the life in them, all the days of yesterday and tomorrow in that open infant mouth. In other words, Krishna turns out to be no ordinary human baby. He is divine, superhuman. Similarly the stories of the god Rama and the god Vishnu entering the world in human form are also replete with magical details. These incarnations of God are powerful, mighty, superheroes even when they take on human flesh.

In the novel “The Life of Pi” by Yann Martel, the protagonist, a Hindu boy who is trying to understand Christianity, says with respect to the Hindu legends about incarnation, “This is God as God should be. With shine and power and might. Such as can rescue and save and put down evil. This Son, on the other hand [Jesus], who goes hungry, who suffers from thirst, who gets tired, who is sad, who is anxious, who is heckled and harassed, who has to put up with followers who don’t get it and opponents who don’t respect Him – what kind of God is that?” (p. 55) What kind of a god indeed. A god that enters the world as a very human baby, so vulnerable that his father has to take the family and flee to Egypt to keep the child from being killed by Herod’s armies. This is no superhuman baby at all but rather a very real, vulnerable human baby in need of care and nurture if he is to survive to adulthood and live into the vocation that is to be his. This God that entered the world in the infant Jesus did not come equipped to survive all on his own. He needed his human parents and his human community to nurture him and raise him to adulthood before he could complete the work that he was destined to do.

While the Hindu stories about their baby gods are full of legends about their superhuman powers, the rituals in Hindu temples belie this notion of superhuman invulnerability on the part of the incarnate deity. In Hindu temples the deities are adorned in exotic attire but every day the priest bathes and dresses them in the morning, and then tends to them again at night before “bed.” In some Hindu temples, the god Krishna, is worshipped in his baby form. In those temples the baby Krishna is bathed, dressed, fed and put to bed each day in elaborate rituals with chanting and offerings of food and incense and flowers as a liturgical expression of human love for God that is analogous to the way parents love their children. Harvard scholar and author Dr. Diana Eck explains, “The religious feeling, called bhava, that is nurtured here is that of the spontaneous, tender love that parents have for their child. … A [Hindu] priest explained, “The bhava I feel is of being both mother and father at once. I often think of myself in this service as Krishna’s mother.” (Eck, A New Religious America, p. 132.) As Diana Eck explains, the human love that Hindus act out in these rituals is the unconditional love of a parent for a child. This particular kind of human love experience becomes the model for an experience of love between the human being and God.

As I reflected on the Hindu beliefs and rituals around their incarnate gods, I was struck both by how similar it is to some of our Christmas rituals, where we tenderly place the Christ child in the manger and sing Christmas lullabies to the holy child, and yet how radically differently we Christians relate to this God who came into the world as a child. While we are completely comfortable with our various Christmas observances wherein we worship the baby Jesus and think about him as the holy child, most of us do not think of God as our child, but rather as our divine parent. We are comfortable with the idea of having a parent/child relationship with God, but we are far more accustomed to thinking of God as the parent and ourselves as the child. What would our relationship with God feel like if we took a page from our Hindu friends and approached God with the kind of love and tenderness with which we approach our children?

If we love God as we love a child, then our love for God becomes something that requires self sacrifice and is lived out daily. Parenting is a full time job and it takes constant attention and emotional energy. No task is too small, no need too great for us to undertake. We feed, bathe, play, laugh, discipline, train, teach and learn with our children. We enjoy an emotional connection and intimacy that is rooted deeply within us, and yet we work hard to let them go and let them become who they are. How many of us are willing to let God go and become who God really is, as opposed to the God we want to have? One thing that Hindus do much more easily than Christians is to hold loosely to their images of God, recognizing that the many images they have of the divine are only that – images that humans need to draw closer to the sacred reality. They are remarkably willing to let God be God in various and surprising ways. As parents we learn early on that the image we had in our minds about who and what our children would be or become would have to yield to the reality of the person who actually arrived in our lives and so it is with God. We can no more force God to be who we want God to be for us, than we can force our children to live out our dreams for them, rather than their own.

Another aspect of the parent/child relationship that is important if we think of our relationship with God in this way is vulnerability. As parents we know that our children are vulnerable when they first enter this world, and we take it upon ourselves to protect and guide them so that they will not be hurt in their vulnerability. Being a parent also makes us vulnerable – open to pain and hurt in ways we couldn’t imagine before the entry of the child into our lives. The idea of God being vulnerable may be a little hard to grasp at first, and yet our Christian story of the God who died on a cross certainly carries that idea of sacred vulnerability to its most extreme expression. It is that vulnerability that so intrigues the character in The Life of Pi as he tries to figure out what all this Jesus business is about. The holy and sacred is best born and nurtured in places of safety and trust, places where justice and peace reign and where violence, oppression and degradation have no place. When we take seriously our call to nurture the holy and sacred in our world we become peacemakers and reconcilers, people who can be trusted with the vulnerable and tender in God and in life. We also make ourselves vulnerable so that the holy and sacred can enter in and transform us in surprising ways.

During this holy season of Christmas, author Jan Richardson writes, “we share with Mary and Joseph in giving birth to the holy. Bringing forth the sacred depends not solely on the physical ability to give birth. ….We give birth too when we create with our hands, offer hospitality, work for justice, or teach a child. We share in giving birth whenever we freely offer ourselves for healing, for delight, for transformation, for peace. And we become, as German mystic Meister Eckhardt wrote in the Middle Ages, ‘mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.’” (From Night Visiions, p.74-75)

The Christmas story has staying power because it taps into the longing of our human souls for the presence of God in our lives and hearts now and every day of our lives. Christmas isn’t just about an event that happened at some time in the distant past – it is about the joy of the sacred and the holy being born again in our hearts and souls here and now, in our homes, schools, workplaces and churches. As we hear the story of the baby Jesus, we are invited to become adults of God, theotokos (God-bearers), bearers of the sacred and holy in our troubled world, mature, wise, loving and responsible as we care for all of God’s creation. The magic of Christmas is the magic and mystery of the Creator of the Universe, come to us in human flesh, in the form of a vulnerable all too human baby, loving us and transforming our lives quietly, silently and inexorably. May you have a holy and happy Christmas and allow yourself to give birth to the sacred in this holy season and the year to come. Amen.