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January 1, 2006,  The Holy Name, All Souls' Episcopal Church

Daddy, I found you
Luke 2: 15 – 21

 I’m going to begin this sermon on this Sunday after Christmas which this year is called Circumcision or The Feast of the Holy Name and it is on New Years Day…. I’ll begin it all with an Hasidic tale from the Jewish tradition. It might seem strange, but I feel that the following little story comes extremely close to capturing the “dynamic” of the Christmas Event and hopefully will give us some thoughts for the New Year.  The story is taken from a marvelous book called Everyday Miracles:  The Healing Wisdom of Hasidic Stories. 

The story goes….”Once upon a time, a carefree young girl, who lived at the edge of a forest, and who loved to wander in the forest became lost.  As it grew dark and the little girl did not return home, her parents became very worried.   They began calling for the little girl, and searching in the forest, but it grew darker.  The parents returned home and called the neighbors and people from all over the town to help them search for the little girl. 

“Meanwhile, the little girl wandered about in the forest and became very worried and anxious as it grew dark.  She tried one path and another and became more and more tired and confused.  Coming to a clearing in the forest, she lay down by a big rock and fell asleep. 

Her frantic parents and neighbors scoured the forest.  They called and called the little girl’s name but to no avail.  Many of the searchers became exhausted and left, but the little girl’s father continued searching throughout the night. 

“Early in the morning, the father came to the clearing and saw where the little girl had lain down to sleep.  He suddenly saw his little girl and ran toward her tearing through the bush, yelling and making a great noise which awoke the girl.  The little girl saw her father running toward her, and with a great shout of joy she exclaimed, “Daddy I found you!”    

And so this is the heart of the Christmas message.  That God has found us.  We too, in many ways, are often lost, alone and sometime wandering direction-less. God has found us!  Here we are in the Christmas Octave. It is an unprecedented and unrepeatable event we proclaim. The glad and glorious news is that we have “been found” by God as we encounter this squalling newborn who, at His circumcision, has been named Jesus….the name the Angel gave Mary before His Birth. But our human response is not so much that God has found us but that as the shepherds in our Gospel, we must continue to seek to find Him and that He is there for us to find! 

Thus the Incarnation is at once a message as embarrassing and humbling as it is exhilarating.  For while most of us are ready to affirm God’s acting in the world, we, because of so many detours and distractions, have a harder time with God’s actually entering the world.   

His acting in the world, we can handle with certain ease; for example:
v   We are ready to affirm God’s handiwork in creation.
v   We are eager to recount the Lord’s spine tingling power in the Exodus, freeing unarmed Hebrew slaves from the most powerful nation on earth.
v   We are happy to accept the giving of the Law as the revealed pattern in which we are to relate to God and our neighbor.
v   We affirm the might of the Lord in the pronouncements of the prophets……….and on and on……..

 And that isn’t all. We are delighted to wonder at God’s grandeur in a sunset, or…….under a microscope……..or in a “goose bump” experience where we are touched by the Holy Spirit…….or in countless other ways.

Yes, God has acted in the world for thousands of years from time immortal! 

However………The author, E. B. White, remarked, “To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult every year.” Here, he is talking about God entering the world. What do you suppose he means? Well, I think the answer is that perhaps in our familiarity with Christmas and our customs and present culture, we are apt to gloss over the Christmas difference between God acting in the world and God actually entering this world. We can easily miss the present day scandal that the “silent night, holy night” brings.

Yes, we have a difficult time today finding His entrance into this world. As we know, many people are refusing to even use the word “Christmas”.  Everything is “Holiday.” On a personal note, it became so clear to me this year when I attempted to get Christmas stamps at the Post Office.  I asked for the ones we got last year of the Madonna and Child.  I was told they were not available and that the Post Office will not have any Christmas stamps in the future…only “holiday”………There are, of course, countless other incidences with which you are familiar how Christmas has been placed on the “back burner” in our society today. John Gibson on Fox News even has a book out entitled, The War on Christmas.

So Mr. White is correct….Christmas is hard to perceive through it’s wrappings.
But, in our contemporary culture, it seems that we are not even allowed, at times, to unwrap this gift to us from God to enjoy. 

Please be aware of this…..God, physically entering history actually has nothing to do, initially, with a religious figure.  The process, if you remember, actually unfolds in far off Rome where a pagan imperial power—Caesar Augustus—orders a census in the unruly land of Palestine.   The Romans, always fastidious over numbers, took pains to account for the human and financial resources of each of the provinces.  Big government, then and now, cannot live by bread alone.  So through the bureaucratic channels in Rome, a peasant couple in Palestine is required to set out on a hundred mile journey to a tiny village in Judea called Bethlehem. Teenage Mary is in the last stage of her pregnancy. So…….. one tiring, terrible step after the other, the couple makes the journey-only to be shut out of a decent place to stay. 

But the preposterous part of this story is that this child, with these parents, in that situation will be heralded as Savior, Son of God, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, The Wonderful Counselor and Prince of Peace.   How can this be? 

But that is the resolute message we proclaim this season.  It is a brazen, some say preposterous, claim.  And rest assured, all interfaith goodwill aside, no other religion will go along in confessing it.  No Muslim, or Jew or Buddhist or Hindu will affirm what we do. In Bethlehem’s “stall of straw” surrounded by mute animal, the Risk of all Risks was taken.  The Unknowable becomes known.  The Infinite becomes finite.  The Formless take form.”   “Being” itself becomes being.  The Word becomes flesh.  God’s rescue operation—God’s great Adventure—freeing the world from the grip of evil—is set in motion.  To those who believe, the New Creation has already begun to take hold. Here is the dynamic in a two-line poem:

“Great Little One, whose all embracing birth,
lifts earth to heaven, and heaven to earth”

This is God’s offer of love to us……..God initiates! 

But, any time anyone initiates…..offers…. love, that person become vulnerable. You see, God’s Enfleshment in Jesus is love’s risk.  It is God’s vulnerability.  God’s fullness made empty.  God’s richness made poor.   God’s “otherness” becoming “realness”—for us and our salvation.

And therefore the “power of response” is in your hands and mine. We were all created with the ability to accept or reject. God did not create us as puppets!

The birth at Bethlehem:  Will this love be recognized as God’s ultimate self-disclosure?  Will it be reciprocated?  Will we take to heart the words of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who said:  “He became what we are that He might make us like He is.?  Or will this Christmas love be thwarted and frustrated through our distractedness or pure rejection? We must each answer for ourselves. ( and, of course, some day down the road, we will answer for ourselves!

 Anais Nin once said:  “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.  Doesn’t that make you think?  And maybe the whole question of the triumph or tragedy of Christmas lies in just how willing we are to let the Holy Spirit bestow upon us the gift of recognition: for on our own we cannot see it. We must allow the Holy Spirit’s guidance to reveal to us the Enfleshment of God in Jesus Christ. It won’t happen any other way, my friends. Will we allow this to happen? Will we allow the Holy Spirit to enable us…to empower us…to give us this gift of recognition!

The late Presiding Bishop John Hines was fond of telling the story about the traveler who passed through the Louvre Museum without so much as the faintest stirring of the spirit within him.  As he stalked out the door, he said quite loudly, “There is nothing all that great to see in here.”  A museum guard standing by the door overheard his remark, and took up the challenge.  In his quiet manner he replied, “Sir, the paintings in here are not on trial.  It is the spectators who are.” 

And, similarly, it is not Jesus and the Holy Family who are on trial in the Christmas festival.  We are.   

The little girl in my opening story cried, “Daddy, I found you!”  

May I suggest a prayer for all of us?  

“Lord Jesus Christ, please give us the gift of recognition that in this New Year of 2006, we will be mindful of  Your Holy Name……JESUS….. and that it may be found and implanted in our hearts…….in everything that we do! 

In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost…….Amen

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