Christmas Eve/Christmas Day
What are the odds? What are the odds that the UVA men’s basketball team will win the NCAA tournament? Well, right now, the bookies in Las Vegas are saying that UVA has a 1 in 12 chance. Those may be good or bad odds, I suppose: it depends on your perspective. They are certainly better odds than, say, the odds of winning the Powerball lottery, which are about 1 in 292 million. But even those aren’t terrible odds compared to some things. For example, what are the odds that random chemical processes on the primordial Earth would somehow produce a single small protein consisting of 150 amino acids, the basic building block of life? Current science tells us that the odds of that happening were in 1 in 10 the 164th power. That means that the odds of a single correctly sequenced protein forming by chance were one in a million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. It was . . . unlikely.
But we live in a universe where unlikely things happen. Now, please stay with me for a minute: I’m going to get to Jesus. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French scientist and priest. He was a paleontologist who studied evolution, and became increasingly awed by what he learned. He was amazed that, after the Big Bang, all these particles didn’t just float away into infinite solitude. Instead, stuff formed. Quarks combined to form atoms; atoms combined to form molecules; clouds of gas and clumps of matter came together to form galaxies, stars, and planets. Increasingly large and complex molecules took shape, leading to organic molecules and the beginning of cellular life; plants and animals developed, coming together in ecosystems and forming intricate communities, including human civilization. Despite the law of entropy, matter keeps coming together in ever more complicated and incredible ways. It was Teilhard de Chardin who said that everything that rises must converge: it’s the law of the universe. And he had a name for that law, that fundamental power of attraction: he called it love, and believed it is hardwired into the the very nature of matter itself, into everything that exists. And he believed it was ultimately unstoppable. All of which makes perfect sense if, like him, we truly believe that God created the universe, and that God is love.
As I have prayed about this day, it’s the unstoppable power of love that keeps coming to my mind. Through all the vicissitudes of human history, through all the triumphs and all the horrors, love keeps emerging. That is certainly evident in the history of Israel. Through wars and exiles, through periods of bondage and strife, in the midst of bad kings and corrupt priests, love still kept coming, prophets and inspired people and miraculous moments still kept happening. I think of that as I imagine an unwed, teenage girl — a virgin, no less — stumbling to give birth to her baby in a dirty stable in an obscure town. Against all odds, love finds a way.
The birth of Jesus Christ, the Feast of the Incarnation, necessarily makes us rethink all of our notions of divine power. If we think God is almighty because God can do anything God likes and can smite anyone God dislikes, we need to think again. For sure, there are passages in Scripture which seem to imply such a view, but the Bible is an amazing, self-correcting book, and the story we celebrate tonight reminds us that God’s almighty power really is the power of love. It is not coercive or violent, even though we human beings have often projected that onto God. No, God is love, and so God’s power is the power of gentle, infinite perseverance. God is relentless and just won’t give up: love keeps coming and coming and coming, no matter what. It may seem quiet and weak and ineffective, and yet it is the strongest of forces. It is the great force at the heart of the universe. And we see it fully expressed in the life of Jesus, this peasant born to a poor mother, who has no formal education, possesses no wealth or social status, writes no books, and holds no office. He is executed as a common criminal at a young age, seemingly a total failure. In the few short years he has on this Earth, he just loves — and the sick are healed, the hungry are fed, the outcasts are included, the poor are blessed, and the sinful are forgiven. And when they kill him, he just rises to new life, and the world is changed. Against all odds, love finds a way. That’s what makes God almighty: God always finds a way.
We celebrate that love and that power tonight, but we would be missing the boat if we treated this occasion merely as a history lesson, an act of nostalgia. Because if love found a way for billions of years to create billions of galaxies, and if love found a way to be enfleshed in the person of Jesus Christ, then we can be certain that love didn’t just stop when the last book of the Bible was written: God’s love continues to find ways to express itself down to this very moment, and it will forever. In our reading from Titus, we hear that the Holy Spirit has been poured out on us. The very energy of God’s love at work in the universe is right now at work in our lives, all of our lives, without exception. It doesn’t matter whether we’ve been naughty or nice; it doesn’t matter how badly we’ve screwed up or how little we believe. God’s love is looking to find a way to reveal itself in your life and in mine. Not, as the letter to Titus assures us, because of any works of righteousness that we have done, but because God is love and that is what love does.
You want to worship Christ tonight? Let him love you. And if for any reason you think it is unlikely you can experience such love, if it seems impossible for you to know that love as you stress out at work or struggle through family crises or suffer from chronic illness or grieve the death of someone you loved with all your heart . . . well, think again. I think of a woman I knew earlier in my ministry, who showed up at our church broken, battling alcoholism and a terrible marriage. She didn’t think God could help her, and told me that repeatedly. Years later, after singing in the choir and sinking into the life of that parish community, she wrote me a simple letter. It said, “Before I came to this church, I did not believe Jesus is alive. Now I do.” I think of a senior member of this parish, a man who has gone to church his whole life, for decades, coming up to me after a Sunday Eucharist within the last twelve months with tears in his eyes and saying, “I never really knew God loved me until today.” God just never gives up — on any of us. The One who beat the odds by becoming human in Jesus is not fazed by any odds. There is something even bigger than a million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion, and that something is the love of God Almighty. It is pulsing around us right now. It is flowing through us at this very moment. It never grows tired. It never gets discouraged. It will not be stopped. It will always find a way. Always. Thank God . . . Thank God!
No comments:
Post a Comment