Dec. 21 - Fourth Sunday of Advent
Dr. George Mason
Luke 1:46-55; Luke 1: 39-45, December 20, 2003 -
It was my first day in Florence on my sabbatical in the summer of 2000. Still jetlagged, I walked straight to the Piazza di’ San Marco, hoping to wander round the convent museum of San Marco to see especially the frescos of Fra Beato Angelico. I made it just after the opening at 12:30 but found out that that somehow meant 1:30, even though the sign on the door said 12:30. Italy, don’t you know?! Anyway, I found a bench to catch a quick nap in the little piazza across from the church and museum.
As fate and faith would have it, I sat next to a beautifully bronzed girl with a Mediterranean look. She was sun bathing or sun worshipping, I don’t know which. We struck up a conversation and I found her name was Parigi and she was from Pisa, working in the Armani store just down the street. I felt a rush or a blush as I thought about sitting with a girl named Paris in the City of Flowers. We exchanged pleasantries about Texas and America, and then I noticed this small tattoo on her wrist. It looked like Chinese characters. I asked her about it and she said she got it in Malaysia. It meant freedom.
So, are you free? I asked her. I guess that could have been taken two ways. “Now I am,” she said. “But it has taken a long time.” She had had some bad experiences with her family and had traveled the world seeking what she felt she could not find at home. Things had turned out well, and now she and her mother had reconciled and become like girlfriends.
Did God help you get free? I asked, ever the preacher. “No, I got free on my own. I don’t really believe in God the way the Church says, but I am a very spiritual person. If there is a God then I believe God is inside of me and inside each of us, helping us to get free.”
I wondered out loud with her about how to distinguish between God and oneself. I said I thought it was important to think also of God outside of myself. “Well, yes, this is just what I mean,” she said. Whatever is right for you. Each person must find the power to be free from somewhere. So maybe you take God from the sun or from the mountains or rivers. If this helps you …”
Parigi’s Christmas celebration is close enough to the church’s to make you think it’s the same, until you dig a little deeper. She represents many people today who think that genuine spirituality comes from accessing the divine within you in whatever way is right for you. It’s actually an ancient take that some early Christians even favored: the idea that the conception of the Christ within Mary is only a symbol of what must take place within each of us in our own way.
Just over a hundred years ago the Nag Hammadi scrolls were discovered in Egypt. Other gospels, like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and The Gospel of Thomas were among the cache. (I have copies in my study if you are ever curious. The runaway bestseller, The Da Vinci Code has put some of this into popular culture now.) Some scholars argue that these books represent the losing view in the fight for orthodoxy in the early church, and that they have been wrongly repressed as heresy, when in fact it should be celebrated as simply another voice, even as the four Gospels in the canon have their varied voices. But there is a distinction especially between John’s gospel which declares Jesus to be the light of the world and Thomas’s, which one scholar summarizes this way: Thomas offered readers a message of spiritual enlightenment. Rather than promoting Jesus as the only light of the world, Thomas taught individuals that ‘there is a light within each person, and it lights up the whole universe. If it does not shine, there is darkness.’ [From a review of Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (Random House, 2003) by Publishers Weekly, on the Amazon.com web site for her book.]
With Christmas close at hand, and our text depicting Mary as the unique bearer of the God who comes to us in the form of the flesh and blood Jesus of Nazareth, the line we walk is this: Do we worship God within us as a given in our humanity, or the God within us as a gift to our humanity? Said another way, Is Mary only an example of spiritual enlightenment that we are all capable of achieving by ourselves with the faith of our choosing, or is Mary the first receiver of the gift of the coming Christ that God wishes for each of us to receive?
It is true, as Parigi and the Gospel of Thomas suggest, that we must each of us have a personal encounter with God. No dry intellectual assent to doctrinal creeds of the church will do. No being brought up in the church and being told you are a Christian, rather than a Hindu, say, will do. There must be something deeper, something intensely personal and transformative. So much so that language like conception feels right – we do talk about being born again, don’t we? But the Christmas story is that God has come among us in Jesus the Christ; and God wishes to enter into each of us, as light into darkness. We cannot achieve enlightenment apart from God’s enlightening us, anymore than a child can be born without being conceived. Something decisive has to happen to us that is beyond us, yet within us, if it is to transform us.
Claire Boothe Luce was married to Harry Luce, the magazine publishing magnate who founded Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated. Clare’s testimony of her conversion experience gets at the truth of it: I find it difficult to explain what did happen. I expect that the easiest thing is to say that suddenly SOMETHING WAS. My whole soul was cleft clean by it, as a silk veil slit by a shining sword. And I knew. I don’t know now what I knew. I remember, I didn’t know even then. That is, I didn’t know with any ‘faculty.’ It was not in my mind or heart or blood stream. But whatever it was I knew, it was something that made ENORMOUS SENSE. … Then joy abounded in all of me. Or rather, I abounded in joy. I seemed to have no nature, and yet my whole nature was adrift in this immense joy, as a speck of dust is seen to dance in a great golden shaft of sunlight. [Quoted by Martin Marty in Context (Dec. 15, 1987): 4.]
How beautiful is that? First, note that it was not her achievement of knowledge but rather a kind of acknowledgment of something that was not there and then all at once was there. Just as Mary came to sense that something was there inside of her that was not her doing and had not been there before, so also when God comes to us it is as if Christ enters us and changes nothing to something, darkness to light, death to life. Faith is first of all accepting this. It is not making something come to be or taking something in, it is accepting what comes to us as a gift of God.
For that reason let’s have done with talk of rocks or coal in stockings for little bad boys and girls. Christmas is not about rewards for good behavior; it is unmerited favor, a gift that comes to us all undeservingly.
And then there is the joy. Clare Luce said she did not know whether joy was abounding in her or she was abounding in joy. But it was joy either way – maybe joy unspeakable and full of glory?! If you’ve ever been in love, you know the blessed confusion of love, lover, and beloved.
This is the kind of surprise of God’s coming to us that C. S. Lewis also spoke of when he had to acknowledge that somehow a joy had entered him that was no achievement of his self-adjustment to the world. It had no explanation other than the one he came to see as divine. He had every reason to be a depressed and sad person. His personal journey was fraught with loneliness and abandonment and loss. And yet, this joy. What to make of it? It was a gift that he had finally to give in to, to attribute to a Giver.
But so far we have only touched on how this experience is like unto Mary’s as she carried the Christ within her. Our text tells us that when Mary’s cousin Elizabeth heard her voice, the child within her – not the Christ himself but rather John the would-be Baptist – leapt for joy. In other words, the experience of joy within is found in relationship to Jesus as the gift of God. It wasn’t just that Elizabeth’s child jumped the way Mary’s did and they could swap stories about the joy of their pregnancies. No, the point Luke makes is that wherever Jesus comes into contact with us, he brings a transforming presence not only to the one who already knows him intimately, but also to those who would receive him themselves.
Christianity is personal, but it is never private. God comes to us, each one, but God comes to all of us, too. Christ was not an idea that dawned on a young woman one day, who then shared her wisdom with others about how knowing God is something like expecting a child. No, it was by unexpectedly expecting a child that she learned the expectancy of faith. God chose to come into the human sphere as a human. God came into a human family. God came unto a people, Israel. The gift of salvation, therefore, that comes from the God who comes to us in Christ, is not hidden truth perceived by a few. It is public truth witnessed to by many.
In other words, if you are looking for the coming God, as we have been putting it this Advent season, then you must look within, yes; but you must also look within others, too. You may first have to encounter the presence of Christ in someone else before you can believe Christ can be alive in you, too. If you have never experienced the personal presence of the coming God, allow yourself to be open today to the Christ who comes to you even now. Maybe you will sense that immediately within yourself and know you have received an unexpected gift that, although you cannot explain it, makes enormous sense. It may be, though, that you are more like Elizabeth today. You sense in the sound of the voice of another the presence of Christ in your midst. Something leaps inside of you because of it. And it amounts to the same thing, either way – God is with us … Immanuel.
John Killinger tells the story of a little girl hospitalized at Christmas in the Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville. She was from a well-to-do family and her room was stuffed with toys and gadgets and stuffed animals of all kind. The girl’s mother was a socialite type that was always dressed to the nines and flitting about from this affair to that. On one day during the holidays the little girl was clinging to her mother’s dress as she was trying to get away for some social function. The mother reached back for some expensive toy that she hoped might distract her child long enough to let her leave for her appointment. No, Mommy, the child cried. I don’t want a toy. What I want is YOU! [Source not cited by Charles Johnson, Serve, sermon to Second Baptist Church, Lubbock, Texas, December 19, 1999.]
What you want this Christmas is not a toy or gadget or tie or scarf or slippers that will distract you from your deepest longing. What you want – whether you know it or not – is God: the God who comes to you and stays, the God who has come as Jesus the Christ. Receive him and you will have a Merry Christmas.
(214) 452-3100