CELEBRATING THE BIRTH OF THE SON OF MAN, WATCHMAN FOR HOPE AND KINSHIP
As we enter Hanukkah and Christmas, the Judaic-Christian celebrations of hope and life, the latest issue of Christianity Today, founded years ago by the Rev. Billy Graham, has another wonderful selection of “Quotations to Stir the Heart and Mind” compiled by Richard A. Kauffman.
Some examples:
• St. Jerome’s Homilies on the Psalms, circa 384, said of Christ’s humble birth:
“The entire human race had a place, and the Lord about to be born on earth had none. He found no room among men. He found no room in Plato, none in Aristotle, but in a manger, among beasts of burden and brute animals, and among the simple, too, and the innocent. For that reason, the Lord says in the Gospel: ‘The foxes have dens, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
• St. Bede the Venerable (673-735) wrote in his two-volume Homilies on the Gospels that God “chose a time of utmost peace as the time when [Christ] would be born, because this was the reason for his being born in the world, that he might lead the human race back to the gifts of heavenly peace. … He, as a kind mediator and reconciler, has made one house of God of angels and humanity.”
• Katherine Elaine Willis Pershey of Torrance, California wrote a marvelous homily a year ago titled A Feast Juxtaposed:
“Advent isn’t about pretending we don’t know that the baby will grow into a man named Jesus, who will teach us how to live and move and have our being in God,” Pershey wrote.
“No. Advent molds our hearts into sentinels, watchmen charged with the work of waiting and hoping for God’s next move. Advent names the darkness in which we live. It gives us permission to consider the dark night of Creation’s soul in which the light of Christ appears. It readies us for a more authentic Christmas elation: joy that is wrought from the fires of sorrow, praise that is coaxed from the flames of lamentation.
“On Christmas Eve, we stand in the thin and holy space between the history and the future. Everything is different after that First Noel. The impossibility of lasting peace and goodwill among all of God’s people is abruptly made possible. The reconciliation of God and his wayward creation is determined by God’s waylaying love -- love that is distilled and embodied within the person of Jesus Christ, who is our King, our Savior, our Brother, and our Friend.
“We know full well that the work begun in that manger is not yet complete. Christmas is, for the time being, a feast of light juxtaposed with darkness.
“We brighten our sanctuary with candles, but the night persists beyond these walls. Though we wipe our tears away to join in the yuletide celebration, we are still a people who mourn. Though we have seen the light of God’s love and been utterly transformed by it, we are still a people who walk in darkness.
“Heaven and nature sing, but God’s beloved creation is still ravaged by violence and death.
"Mary has suffered her last contractions and rallied for one final push, but the final cadence of our redemption has not yet been delivered. The Son of God came to earth, preaching of an everlasting Kingdom. And all of Creation is still groaning in labor for the nativity of that peaceable realm.
“The promise of incarnation — the gift of Christmas — is the assurance that soon and very soon, God’s will shall be done on earth as it is done in heaven.”
St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) told us in his Sermons for Christmas and Epiphany: “What you do not understand, treat with reverence and be patient, and what you do understand, cherish and keep.”
More than a century later, in 593, Pope Gregory the Great noted Prophet Ezekial’s words from his Biblical text:
“Now it came about at the end of seven days that the word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘Son of man, I have appointed you a watchman to the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from My mouth, warn them from me.
“When I say to the wicked man, 'You shall surely die,' and you do not warn him or speak out to dissuade him from his evil way that he may live, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand.
“Yet if you have warned the wicked, and he does not turn from his wickedness or from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but you have delivered yourself.” (Ezekial 3:16-19)
In a sermon based on the Ezekial text, Pope Gregory said, “Note that a man whom the Lord sends forth as a preacher is called a watchman. A watchman always stands on a height so that he can see from afar what is coming. Anyone appointed to be a watchman for the people must stand on a height for all his life to help them by his foresight.”
Christ in his life exemplified hope and love –- what St. Paul in his letter to Corinth called charity. Studs Terkel, in his book Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Troubled Times, quotes a migrant Mexican farmworker, Jessie de la Cruz:
“With us, there is a saying, ‘La esperanza muere ultima.’ Hope dies last. You can't lose hope. If you lose hope, you lose everything.”
Or put another way by author Walter Elliot in his essay on The Spiritual Life: “A true Christian should have but one fear — lest he should not hope enough.”
Dallas Willard, in his book The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering our Hidden Life in God, posits a more activist way to experience God by knowing Him as an essential part of the here and now – not as a remote savior. He calls us into a more authentic faith where we step aside from contemporary politics and Christian pieties to reject lukewarm religious practice.
“There are none in the humanly ‘down’ position so low that they cannot be lifted up by entering God's order,” he writes, “ and none in the humanly ‘up’ position so high that they can disregard God's point of view on their lives. The barren, the widow, the orphan, the eunuch, the alien, all models of human hopelessness, are fruitful and secure in God's care.”
But it takes a lot of work on our part, which is part of the miracle of the spirit of Christmas and Hanukkah that can refire our optimism and perseverance for the necessary task of personal rebuilding.
“Hope without patience results in the illusion of optimism or, more terrifying, the desperation of fanaticism,” Methodist theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas observed in his A Community of Character.
“The hope necessary to initiate us into the adventure must be schooled by patience if the adventure is to be sustained. Through patience, we learn to continue to hope, even though our hope seems to offer little chance of fulfillment,” Hauerwas wrote. “Yet patience equally requires hope, for without hope, patience too easily accepts the world and the self for what it is, rather than what it can or should be.”
Or as Richard Wright wrote in 12 Million Black Voices, refining it down to an optimistic racial paradigm: “The differences between black folk and white folk are not blood or color, and the ties that bind us are deeper than those that separate us. The common road of hope, which we all traveled, has brought us into a stronger kinship than any words, laws, or legal claims.”
Hanukkah, Advent, and Christmas are celebrations of life and hope. “Jews and Christians are therefore immune to Darwin’s ‘horrid doubt,’” Os Guiness of the Trinity Forum wrote in his great essay, Time for Truth.
“In the biblical view, we humans can think freely and passionately pursue the full range of human inquiry – from coffee-bar discussions to the strivings of the noblest art to the tireless search for the scientific secrets of the universe and knowledge in all fields. And all the while we know that our intellectual powers and our very disposition as truth-seekers are underwritten by the truthfulness of the Creator of the universe.”
Guinness notes that John Paul II’s brilliant encyclical on truth in 1993, Veritatis Splendor, told us “this is all possible thanks to ‘the splendor of truth which shines forth deep within the human spirit.’ Truth transcends us as humans; as we follow it, it leads us on, back, and up to One who is true.”
St. John’s Gospel opens, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
“In other words, for both Jews and Christians, truth is not finally a matter of philosophy but of theology,” Guiness concluded.
“Philosophical issues are critical and – at least for philosophers – fascinating, but the theological issue is primary. For all the fragile precariousness of our human existence on our tiny earth in the vastness of space, we may throw the whole weight of our existence on God, including our truth-seeking desires, because he is wholly true.”
