Luke 2:1-20
In 2006, a young Englishman named David
Ditchfield died. It was a freak accident: while saying good-bye to a friend on
a railway platform when his coat got caught in a closing door and he was pulled
under a moving train. First responders were actually able to get him to the
hospital alive, but they lost him in the ER. Surprisingly, however, even
miraculously, a team of doctors and nurses managed after some time to revive
him. The thing is, the person they restored to life was not the same person who
had died. In those long minutes of death or near death or whatever we want to
call it, David Ditchfield had an amazing experience which forever changed him.
Let me read just a brief passage from the account he later wrote about it. He
says:
Now
I see it, and in all my life, I never dreamt I would see such a beautiful sight
with my own eyes. A swirling, three-dimensional tunnel of radiant light, with a
glowing luminosity and intensity that is blindingly brilliant, and yet I can
look straight into it. . . . Towards the center, flames of yellow become flames
of cream, then transform themselves into white light. And at the very center of
this radiant tunnel is the purity of white light itself.
Perfection.
In
the presence of this luminous and wondrous Light, I become aware of every
single cell of my body as they begin to vibrate with its love. And I feel more
alive than I have ever done so before, because this is the Light of all Light.
The Light of pure, unconditional Love.
“I become aware of every single cell of
my body as they begin to vibrate with its love.” I don’t know what kind of body
he is inhabiting when he has this experience, but I am moved by the sheer
physicality of what happens. His body trembles in the presence of complete and
unconditional love. And, you know, I imagine many of us here have felt
something like that. When we fall in love, for example, our faces can blush and
our bodies can tingle when we are with our beloved. And it’s not just a sexual
or romantic phenomenon. Parents can physically ache to hold their children;
friends can yearn to hug those they feel closest to. There are moments when our
whole being really can vibrate with love.
And yes, that can happen when we feel
close to God. Many saints and mystics, and many ordinary people down through
the centuries have experienced this, have experienced moments of ecstasy and
delight when their souls and bodies thrilled in the presence of the divine. But
stories of such moments can seem one-sided: they describe how the human person
feels. But what does that look like from God’s perspective? Is God indifferent
or somehow above it all? Does God feel anything? We can only resort to metaphor
when speaking of God, of course, but prophets like Isaiah and Hosea describe a
God who passionately longs for us. We get a glimpse of that in our Christmas
Gospel, when the angels praise God and proclaim peace among those whom he
favors — and he favors all of us. That language of favoring, however, doesn’t
go far enough for John’s Gospel, which says For
God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten son. Years ago, as a
young man, I subscribed to the idea of the Incarnation as a kind of “Plan B,” a
necessary rescue effort God undertakes after God’s original plan fails and
humans fall into sin. God would do whatever is necessary, even to the point of
becoming human, to save us. But I have long since stopped thinking that way.
Instead I agree with all those in our tradition who have believed that the
Incarnation was bound to happen no matter what, that God would join us in the
flesh even if we had never sinned. Why? Because that’s what lovers do: they get
as close as they possibly can to the beloved. The Incarnation of God in Jesus
Christ is not just a tale of God fixing a problem, not merely an account of heroic
self-sacrifice on God’s part. It’s a love story. In the Old Testament, the Song
of Solomon begins with that great verse: Let
him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. Dear people, tonight, in the
birth of Jesus, God kisses us on the mouth.
Our bodies may not be vibrating with love
for God right now, but that’s okay. The crucial thing is that God’s being is
radiating with love for each one of us. And Jesus shows us the nature of that
love. Christ doesn’t hold his nose and reluctantly associate with us as he
tries to avert his eyes from our many sins and failings. No, he embraces us
fully as we are. As David Ditchfield and countless others have discovered,
God’s love is infinite and it is unconditional. God loves us with all our petty
thoughts and hurtful actions, with all our vanity, selfishness, and greed, with
all failures and addictions. God sees everything about us — and adores us: we
are precious to her. I can stand up here and say that with full assurance
because the Bible teaches it, because so many human beings have experienced it,
and because I have felt it in my own life in ways that have made my body tingle
and my spirit sing.
But of course we can’t make ourselves
feel any certain way, nor should we try. What we can do is consent to God’s
love, to deliberately open ourselves up to that reality. And that can be as
simple as saying, “God, I choose to trust that you love me as I am. Help me to
experience your love.” The life of faith inevitably leads us to change and
grow, and calls us to become ever more like Christ. But everything, everything, depends on that crucial
first step, which is accepting the fact that God happily meets us where we are
and loves us completely as we are. The beauty of this liturgy, the music, the
decorations, the story of the Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the angels, and the
Christ child, all of it, is there to help us let down our guard and lower our
defenses and allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough to see the truth revealed
in the birth of Jesus: like any lover, God desires to be as close as possible
to the beloved, and we — you and I, in all our messy, embodied humanity — are
God’s beloved. And, more than anything, God longs for us to know that.
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