The Nativity of the Lord

John 1:1-18

December 25, 2012

In the beginning was God.

Out of the infinite silence, God spoke       himself

and the Son became Word.

Their intense relationship generated the Spirit of love.

And, since love by its nature is effervescent, this trinitarian love reached a critical mass and exploded in creation.

Planets were flung like fireworks into the black abyss.

Eons later, one of the smaller stars cooled and congealed into a state that supported life.

Myriad varieties of life teemed and progressed in complexity and perfection until human life finally happened.

God had created a creature that could love God back. 

So the Hound of Heaven chased her beloved down the centuries and across continents, in good times and bad.

Each human infidelity increased God's determination to have and to hold humankindCuntil, one day, God's fervor for us reached a critical mass and  gave birth to Jesus.

God's own Word became our flesh.

They named him Jesus.

Like him, each of us is born into the same stream of history.

Why do some of us drown while others get in the swim of things?

Is it genetics or environment or the will to live?

The late psychologist Ernest Becker thought that, in humans, repression replaces the animal instinct to live.

Becker believed that we are constantly bombarded by so many aspects of reality and our consciousness is so delicate that we become frightened.

The only way to prevent acute anxiety is to repress whole slices of reality, of experience.

Thus, by the time we are adolescents, most of us have denied our original sense of a miraculous creation and settled for a safe set of ordinary things called normalcy.

Do you remember the day you traded miracles for normalcy?

Baby Jesus never did that.

He was born with Jewish Chutzpa and grew up in a small town where everyone was famous and everyone was necessary.

CSo he never had to repress his sense of the miraculous.

CHe trusted his instinct that to be fully human was to be engaged with realityC

Clike a baby with its thumb

CSo he drank in wine and hope, and exuded courage and compassion.

But even Jesus had to bow to the human law that only our childhood is ours

the rest of our lives belongs to strangers.

Besides personal fulfillment, we are charged with a public role.

Jesus knew the hopes of his people and made them his own.

He went at life with a broad ax and ran around the country crying, "If someday the blind will see and the lame leap, then why not now? 

Let God's reign begin!"

It was an intriguing possibility.

But the people had long since opted for secure, normal lives.

They had to repress this outburst of the miraculous in their mundane world.

So they pulled and stretched his body and tacked him to a crossbeam.

That is when it fell on Jesus that, if goodness does not prevail and love does not persuade and God does not rule,

the life on that level does not work.

He had to find a higher plane , so he exploded in the miracle of resurrection.

Like Jesus, all of us have to integrate evil.

Christmas is a good time to regain our lost innocence.

The miraculous mood of the feast helps us enter into a second naivete in which childish trust is laced with adult reality.

That is why the one who ended as a suffering savior began as a cuddly babe:

because God wanted to lure us to herself.

She knew that people are more moved by a crying baby than by a crucified redeemer,

that people are more attracted by human touch than by divine presence.

And, on Christmas, who's to say that we the people are wrong?