Falling In Love All Over Again

Christmas Day; Isa. 52:7-10; John 1:1-18; St. Paul’s, Smithfield, 12/25/2016

Jim Melnyk: “Falling in Love All Over Again”

Christmas is about falling in love – about falling in love with God.  On the surface it seems like it’s about music and lights, wonder and magic – but in reality it’s actually about mystery, awe, and love.  Christmas is about opening one’s heart once again to the presence of God in our world and in our lives – and it’s about the heart of God being held wide-open for us.  Christmas is about falling in love all over again.  Christmas is about the mystery of the Word of God made flesh, and the people of God being inspirited – being filled – with the Incarnate Word.

Christmas asks us to put aside for at least a few moments our best scientific-critical mindsets and revel in the mystery of the Word made flesh.  That is, allow ourselves to revel in what it might mean to believe in a God who can and does love us into existence – and who can and does love us throughout our existence.  Author Thomas Moore, writing about the spiritual life, tells us, “We live in a society that sees a mystery as a challenge, and you are successful only if you dispel the mystery and replace it with an explanation.  Religion,” explains Moore, “takes a different approach to the mysterious.  Rather than try to explain it away, [religion] creates ritual and song and story around the mystery, holding it and revering it.  Religion,” and I would say religion at its best, “assumes that a mystery is valuable in itself…. It is a powerful, unfathomable truth that is to be honored and lived – and which offers insight to our own humanity and our reason for being. (Thomas Moore in A Life at Work, quoted in Synthesis).

And so each year we tell the same story – the same old, old story of Jesus and of God’s love.  Because it is a story that touches our hearts and our souls – because it is a story surrounded by and enfolded in mystery – because it is a story that helps us fall in love once again – even if only for a few moments or a few short days – because if only for a short while, it gives us hope – it gives us the ability to fend off the demons of this world – it gives us the confidence to carry out our baptismal calling to seek the transformation of this world. 

Christmas is about falling in love all over again!  Have you ever fallen in love with God?  Have you ever wanted to fall in love with God?  Have you ever considered that God has fallen in love with you?” For me the answer is “Yes!  Yes this has been true for me!”  At the same time I realize how easy it is to forget that love, and how wonderfully the season of Christmas works to remind me of that love.

I also realize that apart from mystery, these questions about a God who falls in love with us, and who desires more than anything else in this world that we fall in love in return – well, absent the mystery – absent a belief that God can and does desire to be in relationship with us – it makes no sense. 

Last night I said, I don’t know about you, but I need and want a God who falls in love with us – a God who falls in love with me of all people!  I need and want a God who dreams of a creation that finds its “purpose for being” wrapped up in the wonder and the mystery of love. 

I need and want a God who embraces my humanness – our humanness – who embraces our frailty – who embraces our needs – who embraces our hopes and our dreams.  I need and want a God who chooses to be identified with us in the most tangible of ways – in our very flesh and blood.  For if God isn’t a God who is so intimately connected with us and with the whole of creation, what’s the point? As Julian of Norwich wrote centuries ago, “Would you know [our] Lord’s meaning in this?  Learn it well….  Love was our Lord’s meaning.”

Throughout time humanity has fallen in love with God – the real sort of love – the kind with all the bumps and bruises – with cantankerous grumbling and with contented sighs – along the way. 

We – God and humanity – speak poetic words of love to each other.  We fight with one another – sometimes we fight rather unfairly!  We – God and humanity – forgive one another and we make up with one another.  We are transformed by one another’s hopes – we are transformed by one another’s dreams and by one another’s fears.  We are transformed by one another’s love.  This is the God of Christmas – this is the God who calls to us across time and space – this is the God who enters into our human space – this is the God who calls to us in the very depths of our human hearts.

           

Christmas and the love of God are mysteries we are called to revel in rather than puzzles we are challenged to unravel.  Former Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has said that Advent “is the season when Christians are called to live with more hope than the world thinks is reasonable.” 

Episcopal priest and blogger Susan Russell reminds us that Christmas is the moment in which we experience the incarnation of that hope – more hope than the world thinks is reasonable.  Christmas, Russell reminds us, is about “a God who loved us enough to become one of us in order to show us how to love one another.  We wonder again,” writes Russell, “at the power of a love great enough to triumph over death and we claim a Christmas Truth greater than any of the traditions it inspires: the mystical longing of the creature for the Creator – the finite for the infinite – the human for the divine – all wrapped up in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.” 

And just perhaps, I believe, as we revel in the mystery that is Christmas, we might catch a glimpse of the mystical longing of the creator for the creature – a longing of the infinite for the finite – the divine for the human – a longing for love returned – a longing for us to fall in love one more time – and perhaps this is the most outrageous and comforting hope of all.  Amen.