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December 27, 2009 The First Sunday after Christmas Day, All Souls' Episcopal Church

When the fullness of time was come …

      Whenever I hear the Christmas story I am always struck by the way in which the well known narrative and familiar images convey to us messages so layered with meaning we learn something new and important each time we are presented with the moving account of our Savior’s birth. St. Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians:

But when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Wherefore, thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ. (Galatians 4:4-7)

      St. Paul employs a lovely phrase when he writes of “the fullness of time.” The phrase refers to the right time or the appropriate time, but it means even more than that. By “the fullness of time,” St. Paul means the summing up and completion and conclusion of what has been longed for. A note in the New English Translation (the NET Bible) defines the phrase as an “idiom for the totality of a period of time, with the implication of proper completion.” In other words, the birth of Jesus was what all of human history had been leading up to, not only as some sort of inexorable conclusion but as the very purpose of time itself.

      That first Christmas certainly didn’t seem like the ‘right time,’ or the “appropriate time,” let alone the fullness of time. It seemed like the worst possible time for Mary and Joseph. Everything had been turned upside down by the required census making the Holy Family travel far away from home just when Mary was about to give birth. I wonder how often Joseph might have scratched his head and marveled at the bad timing of it all? What we learn from this is that God’s timing is not our timing. Think of it this way: Imagine there is an important but difficult conversation which you as a parent have to have with your child. If you try imposing that conversation upon the child, you’ll end up with predictably dismal results. On the other hand, if your child comes to you and is ready to have that conversation, will the times find distracted and too busy or will you be open and receptive? In a similar way, we must be vigilant by remaining open and receptive to God’s timing. We are on God’s schedule, so to speak, and so it’s not a matter trying to work him into ours. We must remain on-call – open and receptive to the God who knows us perfectly.

     One of the details which has always bothered me about the Christmas story is that there was no room for the Holy Family. I know there was the census and that apparently there were far more people than there was room, but who doesn’t make space for a young teenaged mother whose water was about to break? How completely devoid of compassion are you when you turn away this young mother who is having contractions? How tightly do you have to squeeze your eyes shut, and how many pillows do you need to wrap around your ears to ignore this situation. She was having a baby! St. John tells us, “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” It would appear that our response to Jesus the Christ, the suffering servant, continued the way it started out. Our track record when it comes to welcoming the Incarnate God leaves a lot to be desired all the way from Bethlehem to that hillside near Jerusalem where we tortured him to death. My question today is a simple one: Are we yet willing to make room for him? Are there rooms we still won’t let him enter – like that room where we keep all of our grudges, or that room where we store all of our resentments? Do we have room for him?

      Another familiar part of the narrative is the message of the angels. The shepherds were told: “fear not,” for there were glad tidings of great joy. John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah, St. Joseph, and the shepherds all were told not to fear. Instead of fear, the angels promised “great joy.”

      Fear is a useful tool in a world of predation which is why it’s hard-wired into us prompting a fight or flight response which can save our life. However, even though it is a normal human response to stimuli, like hunger, or like any other natural impulse, fear is a really horrible filter or interpretive principle through which to respond to the world. Fear always tends to lead us to stray from our principles, away from the better angels of our nature. The message of the angels is that we are not to fear. Instead, they offer us glad tidings of great joy. Imagine for a moment that joy instead of fear was the lens through which you view the world. Imagine that your first response to the good fortune of another was always unbridled joy. After all, we were created for joy. We were created in God’s image; with the capacities of reason, memory, and will is that we could know God and enjoy him forever. Joy is our destiny in God. We must begin with the joyful knowledge that everything in this world was created by God as an expression of his love. Knowing God in faith and rejoicing in his presence is supposed to be our starting point. The joyful knowledge of God ought to be the filter and interpretive principle by which we seek to engage the world. It would be like embracing the second great commandment, to love our neighbors, because we have been so thoroughly inspired by the first great commandment and love God. In the end, this is what has to happen in order for us to receive the other part of the angels’ message in which we glorify God and have “peace on earth, and good will towards men.”

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