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Love’s Body
Peter JB Carman
Emmanuel Friedens Church, Schenectady New York
10:00 AM December 24, 2017
I.
On this fourth Sunday of Advent, we light the candle of Love—for even as the words of a scripture passage we read often at weddings remind us: though faith and hope and love abide, “the greatest of these is love”.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” begins the fourth gospel. “…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.” And then it concludes: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory… full of grace and truth. The words that begin John’s Gospel tell us that the love of God, coming into an unready world, means that the Word no longer stays distant apart, a mere idea or a concept from on high. Love means that the word takes flesh and dwells among us… full of light. Full of truth. Full of grace, full of steadfast love. Love has a body now.
We as people of faith love the stories of Christmas. Because love has a body. Love’s body is apparent in the very physical details of pregnancy and fear and promise and reassurance and babies moving in wombs, and birth: the reality of the birth, down to where the child is laid and what they wrapped him in There is more to this story, we bring in the shepherds and the angels, the sheep and the goats, and even the magi from the east, but its heart is in a birth—one particular specific unique Jesus birth.
We know God’s love in the coming of a human child. God has stepped out of the usual role, come in from the distance, made a home in a world even though it was—we were—unready for the gift. Love has a body.
II.
There’s more. We know the body of God’s love in one human body. But we also experience it in the bodily way, the solid real simple practical loving way this birth, this child, pulls people together. This delivering God who does not scorn the little people, the powerless, the oppressed—pulls community together out of almost nothing. This God pulls the story together, with little or no working materials. Where there is no palace to be born in, in fact no place at all, God provides the manger to catch the infant. Where there are no courtiers lined up to care for mother and child, God brings shepherds. Where there are no heralds to take out the proclamation of the birth of a savior, God provides a heavenly chorus. God creates community even in the most unwelcoming of places and most hazardous of times.
On this Christmas Eve morning, on this Sunday dedicated to the candle of Love, one family has brought two children to be dedicated today. Malia and Roman, today your mother and your father and your siblings were willing to have you come into this, God’s house, to be dedicated in your upbringing, to learning the ways of God’s love. Love makes a difference! And love has a body.
As we get ready to remember the beginning of Jesus’ life, we are making promises to bring you two up knowing about how Jesus loves us, and about a God who is all about setting people free, all about affirming the dignity of the shepherds as much as the powerful, affirming the power inherent in the young girls as much as the big public power figures in the world. Love has a body, and you two are part of that body, loved and beloved, right at the heart of the body of Christ.
You two, Malia and Roman, are still young enough to know through your feelings and experience, that is in your bodies, the difference that love makes. That knowledge is the kind of thing we adults are in danger of forgetting as we get older.
We grownups are indeed forgetful. We forget how the gift of utter loving affirmation can heal and make a person’s world a safer place. We forget how even the community of some sheep and a couple shepherds can create a place of royal apprehension. We forget what you know in your bodies, that a hug is not to be underrated, that we all need kindness and justice is in the details, and a good shout can express more hope than all the ideas in the world. We need to hear your cry for deliverance, your saving cry… your Jesus.
Roman, Malia, we adults need you, and all the children like you, just as much as you need us to teach you. We need to have you among us to remind us what love is, and what hope is, what the body of Christ is all about—and that the greatest of all these is still love.
III.
Love has a body. It is the body of an infant child, whose name, Jesus, is made known in his borning cry—the cry signaling deliverance to come, for all of humankind.
Love has a body. It is the body of any group of people that God can catch together, amid uncertain chaotic times, in a lovely, difficult world. For in the love a community shares—we meet Jesus, again and again.
Love has a body. We know it when we receive you children, just as the adult Jesus reminded us we needed to do, to receive, to experience the reign of God. We know it in the lessons you teach us through their perceptiveness, through your joy, sometimes through your anguish and need, through your grace.
The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
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.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, [a parent’s only child], full of grace and truth.
Artwork: Adoration of the Shepherds, Stained-glass composition by J. Le Breton (glass studio of Gaudin, Paris.) 1933. from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. Used under Creative Commons
Christmas Eve Meditation
Peter JB Carman
Emmanuel Friedens Church, Schenectady New York
7:00 PM December 24, 2017
I was there to hear your borning cry,
I’ll be there when you are old.
I rejoiced the day you were baptized,
to see your life unfold.*
It is a night for memories and wonder. It is a night full of longing and perhaps haunted by a little regret. It is a night for a child’s wonder and a grandparent’s secret wondering. It is a night to come once more to an ancient place we carry as much in the memory of our bodies as in our minds or our reading.
I have seen 8 mm films of my mother at Christmas in the 1930s, looking at the tree in candlelight, there in Europe where she grew up. I have memories of preparing for Christmas in India with my missionary grandmother, a little beach pine set up in the corner of the room—and her picking out tunes on the piano, old gospel songs she wanted me to learn. And I have recollections of my own children when they were little…candles in the church, listening to a story that tells itself, singing carols, just like tonight.
I was there when you were but a child,
with a faith to suit you well;
In a blaze of light you wandered off
to find where demons dwell.
What do you remember from long ago at Christmas? And what pictures do you carry of your ancestors’ Christmases before you? And what mystery comes again and again, unexpected yet familiar, to catch your imaginings on this night of the year? Or if you are still young at heart, a child waiting on the morning, what gifts do you long for that only God can give, what grace do you need, beneath not the tree, but rather beneath the surface appearance of your life?
Each of us has our own memories and our own wonderings. But what draws us all together is a curious story from roughly two thousand years ago. And that strange tale, of animals and dreams, of a young pregnant girl and her husband to be, of dislocation and promise, of angels and shepherds, of searching Zoroastrian priests and fearful cruel tyrants… that story continues to bring us back around, to reexamine the very foundation of our lives.
We don’t actually know at what time of year the Christ child was born. The church did not settle on December 25th for centuries, and then it was a decision based more on practical and cultural considerations than any knowledge of when it actually happened. To this day, many still observe what some southern mountain people still call “old Christmas”. For once upon a long ago, the churches mostly observed Christmas on January 6th!
We don’t know when it happened to the day, nor even the precise year. But the gospel tells us who the emperor was, and who was the governor, and suggests that the whole population was being “registered” the better to be taxed. Mary went with her fiancé Joseph, to his home town, to be registered there. And every inn was full.
We don’t actually know if the child she bore that night first drew breath in an open field or in a stable, but the story goes that they laid him in a feeding place for the animals, not in a cradle or a crib. They wrapped him tight and warm in bands of cloth as was the custom with the well-cared for infants of that day.
They named that baby Jesus, or Yehoshua, or (if you are Spanish) Jesus. And we don’t know, and the scholars don’t even agree on exactly what the name means, but it means something like “God saves” or “Deliverance.” Or here’s the version I like best— “A cry for saving”. I wonder, I wonder, did his parents hear his first infant wailing cry—and in it hear the good news of deliverance for their people, and for all the world’s suffering masses of humanity? I was there to hear your borning cry…
So came this child into the world, in a troubled time, in a town that had known better days, a town once known as home to the great Judean king of old, David. It’s what the story says. It tells us that a savior came, and the way he showed us was not the way of rulers and conquest. It was the gentle way of a child, the sure hand of a healer; the clear call for justice from a God who can see our borning cry…. And every discovery and struggle in all the years to follow.
When you heard the wonder of the Word
I was there to cheer you on;
You were raised to praise the living Lord,
to whom you now belong.
If you find someone to share your time
and you join your hearts as one,
I'll be there to make your verses rhyme
from dusk 'till rising sun."
In the middle ages of your life,
not too old, no longer young,
I'll be there to guide you through the night,
complete what I've begun.
When the evening gently closes in,
and you shut your weary eyes,
I'll be there as I have always been
with just one more surprise.
I was there to hear your borning cry,
I’ll be there when you are old.
I rejoiced the day you were baptized,
to see your life unfold.
* John Ylvisaker, the hymn “I was there to hear your borning cry,”1985, written to a tune of Ylvisaker’s own composition, and included in numerous hymnals.