Today is the Second Sunday after Christmas, it concludes the season of Christmas and it also anticipates the beginning of the season of Epiphany, which will start tomorrow, on January 6th, but already we have heard the famous story of the wise men visiting Jesus in Bethlehem. When we think about the Christmas season, what it is all about, I guess a simple answer would be to say that it is the season where we remember Jesus’s birth, the season where we talk about Jesus’s childhood. We were a little group meeting at Sonja’s on Tuesday for lunch, and we had together a short service of prayer to celebrate the “Feast of the Holy Name” that is kept on January 1st. This Feast is the remembrance of Jesus’s “official” naming in the Temple and also his circumcision, that would have taken place eight days after his birth. So that’s another story of Jesus’s infancy. There are other stories for the season of Christmas and we don’t hear all of them each year. For example, there is the famous one of Jesus teaching in the Temple when he was twelve years old, and he almost gave his parents a heart attack disappearing for three days. So yes, Christmas is the season to hear about Jesus’s childhood, and there are many stories in both Luke’s and Matthew’s Gospel, as of today with the visit of the wise men. But if we only think about Christmas as Jesus’s childhood, we may end up making Christmas cute or nostalgic, by focusing on nativity scenes and pageants or on our favorite hymns or on our favorite traditions, some of them having nothing to do with the Gospel, like I was taught when I was a child that Christmas was the night where animals could talk (as you can imagine, a lot of expectations was built each year around our dog and our cat). All of this isn’t really harmful I suppose, but it can get a bit cheesy and at any rate, it’s a little bit all too fanciful to make it much relevant to our daily reality. And this is really a shame because if there is a feast that should be relevant to our daily reality, our daily humanity in all its splendor and its miseries, that should be Christmas because it is first and foremost the feast of the Incarnation, a big word to mean that God took human flesh in Jesus. We contemplate the mystery that God came to live with us, to be one of us.
The season of Christmas is first of all the story of the Incarnation, that God visited us in the flesh, it starts with Jesus’s birth but of course it encompasses all of Jesus’s life and not just his childhood. And it’s so much more than a cute story like the Christmas pageant, and so much more even than a fairy tale like story like the wise men following the star. Christmas is about the incarnation, about what it means for God to visit us in the flesh and for this reason, I really, really like the collect we read together this morning. I am going to read it again:
O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ.
You know how we often hear that God loves us, right? But here the collect says how God loves us. God loves us because God created us, but also because God restored us, and more specifically God restored our dignity. God restored our dignity by taking on our mortal flesh in all its little pains and great tragedies, taking on our small and great infirmities from the circumcision to the cross, and because he inhabited all of it, God can makeall of it beautiful, meaningful and holy. Christ took away our sins, forgave our sins, and he also assumed the consequences of our sin, sparing us the shame of our sins by accepting to inhabit our pain, our diseases, our agonies. If you were there on Christmas Eve, you may remember that we talked about it a little bit already, that God came as an infant in Jesus, one who could not speak because God didn’t come first to teach us a lesson. God came to be with us, and that’s what love is about, to be present for one another. Again, if you remember, I told this story about this woman who came to help people in Haiti and she was so overwhelmed with all the needs of the people, she complained about it to God in prayer, and she heard God telling her that she was only there to love. She just needed to be there and she just needed to love, because basically that’s what Jesus did for us. But today we hear a little more: Loving is about being there to restore people’s dignity.
We can see that in the woman’s story: She was certainly not going to fix the problem of hunger in Haiti, but by being there and doing the little she could do, she was saying to the people: Even if the world forgets you, somebody sees you, notices your pain and thinks that your life is worth something. She could have stayed in her nice suburban house in United States, but she had come all the way to be with the people of Haiti, she wasn’t indifferent, they mattered to her. She restored their dignity not by patronizing them, but by showing up for them and expressing her solidarity. If you remember as well, I told about Mother Teresa who showed love by “saving people she couldn’t save” do it, taking dying people off the streets, not so she could cure them because she couldn’t, but so those people could die with a roof over their heads, knowing that someone cared for them, knowing that they weren’t just litter on the sidewalks of Calcutta. Loving people is showing up for them and by showing up for them, in a way or another, restoring their dignity. It can take may forms: We may regain dignity by getting a new job, a place to live, or just finding a friend who listens to us.
And I think it’s important to hear about that because these days, almost each time we hear about saving human dignity, we know we’re going to talk about enabling some people to die when their life “is not worth” living anymore. We say that if people aren’t able to experience pleasure anymore, if they are very sick or very disabled or even very lonely or depressed, well maybe they have the right to die now, before it gets too bad. Now I am sure there are some sufferings that make life unbearable and so we are not here to judge those who make these decisions, and certainly there are times we shouldn’t try so hard to prevent the natural process of death to take place. But it’s also possible that as people get sick, age or suffer from disabilities or depression,or even after they’ve done some terrible mistakes, they need more than ever to know that they are important, that their lives are still worth living, that their being there is important to those who care for them, that they are still able to receive love and to give something meaningful. Actually, if we look at this from the perspective of the incarnation, I don’t think there is any time where we could say that some lives are not worth living. As a mother is not disgusted with her child, God is not disgusted with us, God always find us worthy to be loved even in our disgrace, even in our sins and the consequences of our sins, and that’s what the incarnation means. Not only God does not look down on us but God comes down to be with us.
In Matthew and Luke’s Gospels, Jesus did not just show up in the flesh all grown up and looking clean, he came in the world naked, as a helpless baby who needed his mother to be fed, and also needed her to change his diapers, and he had to be circumcised like any little Jewish boy, and then at the end of his life he was more helpless than any other, dying naked on a cross for all the world to see, blood and bodily fluids pouring out of him. And yes this could be such a disgrace but in the midst of that, because he assumed it instead of avoiding it, he restored human dignity. I don’t know how this works, honestly, but I have another story. Many years ago, I had a spiritual director in France, whose name was Father Maurice. He was a very knowledgeable priest, he could open a Bible in Hebrew and he would just translate it for you as he read. Around the Diocese people had a lot of respect and admiration for him. Well, it happened that he was found with a bladder cancer and when I visited him at the hospital, he looked very different wearing one of those silly little nightgown they give you. I guess he was a bit embarrassed with me seeing him like that, but because that day happened to be a Good Friday, Father Maurice said to me looking at himself: Well, I guess I am like Jesus, they took away my garment. He said that with humor, humility and also strangely, with a little bit of pride too. He didn’t see only his disease, his helplessness, he saw it through the lens of his faith, through the lens of the incarnation, he could see himself weak and vulnerable, but he could also see himself walking with Christ. And that changed everything for him.
Incarnation is not just something that happened in Christ, it happens to all of us. We have to live this life in this body, trough this body and all that it encompasses, but there is still light that can shine through our flesh. We can find our dignity not just in our independence, being able to do everything we want to do, neither in beauty nor health, we find our dignity in being inhabited by Christ, each one of us, shining some of his light in this world, to each from their own point of view, and surprisingly, the weaker we are, the more we may be able to let him shine through us just because we don’t try so hard to be someone, we let him be in us and he can sustain us through it all.
I heard once that we are not human beings having spiritual experiences, we are spiritual beings having a human experience. This flesh is our vehicle, not our destination. We’re on a journey and all the readings today talk to us about this spiritual journey. Journey where we will find Christ in each other and in ourselves. Ultimately, the place of Epiphany, of God’s manifestation is not so much in the sky as the wise men will learn it, it is in human flesh: Jesus’s flesh, our own flesh, the flesh of all those who are living this life. That’s where we need to look for him.