Not Our Doing

Christmas 1 • Holy Covenant Episcopal Church, Baltimore 

When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.

One occasionally hears of somebody called a “self-made” man or woman. You may be familiar with Horatio Alger and his tales of rags to riches; or perhaps Madame C. J. Walker and the story of how she built up a cosmetic firm by the sweat of her brow and the work of her hands. Perhaps it is some poor immigrant who managed to scrape together the money to start a small business, and the business grew and prospered and he or she ended up a millionaire. And while not wanting to diminish admiration for such a person’s industry, inventiveness, skill and hard work — such a person is not self-made.

Before, behind, and along with every such successful person, there is a cloud of investors, clients, collaborators, and customers. The inventor who comes up with a clever new device needs an attorney to help file a patent, a manufacturer to produce the item, marketers to advertise and merchants to sell it, investors to pay for all of this, and — most importantly — customers to buy it.

So it is that none of us become who we are on our own. Whatever else we may make of our lives,there is at least one unavoidable point at which we cannot and do not  do it for ourselves: at our birth. We come into being because of something our parents did before we were born. We simply did not exist at the point at which we came into existence. In this earthly birth we are born of blood, of flesh, and of the will of a man and a woman. We do not make ourselves.
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And, as our Scripture texts for this Sunday after Christmas remind us, we also do not redeem ourselves. Just as we had no say in our first birth, so it is that we have little say in our second birth — though that second birth is something in which we may cooperate and be aware of as it happens. For in our second birth, through receiving Jesus Christ into our hearts and believing in his name, through baptism in water and the Holy Spirit, we become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man — or of woman, for that matter — but of God.

Saint Paul uses the image of adoption for this wonderful transformation — and just as children do not conceive or bear themselves neither do adopted children achieve adoption on their own — both birth and adoption are something that happen to us. We become ourselves through others. No one is self-made.
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In this, as in so much else, the Son of God is utterly different. Even his “beginning” is different from ours. We are not aware of our own beginnings, conceived by actions of our mother and father, when we as yet were not — but the Son of God had no beginning, no “was not”: when the beginning was, he was. He was in the beginning, and had no beginning himself.

And as Son of God, unlike any of us — who do not even exist at the moment of our conception, since that is when we come into existence — unlike any of us, the Son of God knew what was to happen, and what was happening when, as Saint Paul says, “God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.” He was and is, as the Creed says, “God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God.” If there ever was a self-made man, it was and is Jesus Christ — and only him. As the great old hymn says, “No man works like him,” and no man is like him.

What is truly wonderful, however, is that the Son of God, in an act of great humility, also makes use of human beings to cooperate with him in this grand invention of salvation. God sent the prophets to prepare the way for his coming. God sent his angel to Mary of Nazareth, and her obedient consent to the angel’s greeting, her choice and consent to do as God asked and become the mother of the holy Child, realized the Incarnation itself. In this, and in this alone, Jesus in his human nature, is not a self-made man — he is made of the substance of his mother Mary.

God also sent that man named John, the last and greatest of the prophets, as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. And so it is that Jesus Christ, the self-made man, as God the Word made flesh, came to live among us and to save us.

This, my friends, is the Christmas gift, the greatest gift ever given — for he gave us himself in order that we might give ourselves to him and become his brothers and sisters by adoption. He sent his Spirit into our hearts crying out “Abba, Father,” to God our Father — our Creator by our birth, our master through his Lordship, but “our Father” by adoption through his Son. This is no more our doing than any adoption of a child is the child’s doing; this new birth in the Spirit is no more our doing than our first birth in the flesh — we do not make ourselves, and we do not redeem ourselves; and we cannot save ourselves.

But we can cooperate in the work of salvation when we give praise and thanks to the one who saved us, who adopted us as his own children, and sent his Spirit — the Spirit of his Son — into our hearts, leading us by his light, and from whose fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. We cooperate with God by our celebration of praise and thanksgiving, for the greatest gift ever given, the grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.

And so may this grace of ✠ God the Father, the love of God the Son, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with us now this Christmastide and abide with us for ever more.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

The True Cost of Christmas

There is a trivial observation that "Christmas comes but once a year" but the truth of the matter is that Christmas came but once; all the rest is a commemoration of that once and for all Incarnation.

While families scrimping to be able to purchase some temporary happiness for the kiddies populate the bulky end of the range of economic percentiles, and profligate spendthrifts spending unthriftfully enjoy their narrow one or two percent by buying objects of desire that will ultimately be no more satisfying to them than the toys are to the tots — while all this goes on, this is not the cost of Christmas of which I write. All of this exchange of goods and services is to the cost of Christmas what all those commemorations are to the initial and unique event itself. These are but shadows of the Thing That Was.

For it was on that night some twenty centuries ago that He Who Is became submissive to human nature, to become the child who was born in an ironic exile in his own ancestral home town. This marked the beginning of a life too short by human standards, but long enough by God's to accomplish the great work God intended: to reclaim the whole humanity and to raise it up.

And cost it did. It cost a young woman the chance at an otherwise happy but prosaic marriage; it cost her virtuous virtual husband the joys of an ordinary home. It cost them both their reputations, as the tongues would wag for thirty years about a boy known by his mother's name, rather than her husband's. In the end it cost the boy his life, in a death not easy by any standard, and hard even by the standards of those days, by which time he had come to be known by the name of his ancient ancestor, the singer of songs and slayer of giants, David. And it cost God the act of condescension. I cannot quite accept C S Lewis' strained analogy that this was to God what it would be like for one of us to become a dog, though I take his point to a point. But costly it was for God to become human, for the Word of Life to be made flesh, the deathless subject to unavoidable death.

This son of Mary, son of David, son of God, born in exile and dying on a cross, who lay in his mother's arms at the beginning and the end — he who is beginning and end — he paid the cost of Christmas, and presents it to us as a gift: the one great Christmas gift purchased once for all.

Consider that cost as you worship this Christmas eve and day. Give thanks for the perfect gift, so exquisitely suited to you, to me, a gift we could never afford to purchase for ourselves, but given freely by the only one who could.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

The image is a vision I had of Mary with the infant Jesus and the deposed Christ, a vision of joy and sorrow for Christmas 2015.

Christ Child's Play

We are called to welcome Christ, yet how often is he left out, outside in the cold in the feed-trough?

SJF • Christmas Eve 2013• Tobias Haller BSG
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.+

And so we come once again to this holy night, as the old song says, the night when the Savior was born. We hear the story as the historian Luke tells it, fixing the date by means of names of the rulers — that’s how people kept track of things in those days before we had B.C. and A.D., they referred to the politicians in office at the time, emperor and governor. Luke fixes the place by naming the towns and the regions: from Nazareth in Galilee on down to Bethlehem of Judea. And he pins down the people on the basis of their heritage — descended from the house and family of David. Nowadays we would call them Davidsons, of which this parish had its share in its early days, and for whom Davidson Avenue just a block to the east is named. History can teach you some unusual lessons!

So we gather here, in the first year of the second term of the presidency of Barack I, during the governorship of Cuomo son of Cuomo, in the church of Saint James on the road named for Jerome of Brooklyn and the Bronx, nigh unto Davidson Avenue. We, like the shepherds of old, are gathered to welcome a child; a promised child, who had been spoken of hundreds of years before he was born, and has been spoken of every Christmas since. This is the child of whom Isaiah spoke, the child who has been born for us, the son given to us; upon whose shoulders rests the authority of God, and to whom is given that powerful, wonderful, mighty, everlasting and royal name.

But let us not forget he is still a child — a newborn child; born in the cold season, in an uncomfortable place; wrapped to keep him as warm as possible, but placed in a feeding trough instead of a cradle, because there was no room for them in the inn. A child has been born to us; but where do we put him?

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I spoke this past Sunday about how we ought to welcome Christ and the grace he brings. As the hymn says, we are to “fling wide the portals of our hearts” to welcome Jesus in, to welcome his gracious entry into our hearts. And yet how often is he left out, outside in the cold in the feed-trough? We might hope to say, well we would never do that! But remember how he said, as you have done to the least of these you have done it unto me?

I could remind you that just the other day a man threw his three-year-old son of the roof of a building, and then jumped to his death himself. I could tell you that earlier today in the fantastic slums built upon and around the city dump in São Paulo Brazil, a little boy was picking over the few items he rescued from that stinking, dangerous, poisonous garbage pile, those few torn and tattered things which he can trade for a few cents. I could tell you that earlier today somewhere in Soweto there was a young girl, 9years old, moaning quietly and weeping on her cot as she tried to fall asleep and forget the pain and hurt and abuse she suffered when her uncle raped her, because he believed the fable that sleeping with a virgin would cure him of AIDS. I could tell you that even as I speak a 12-year-old boy in the suburbs of Denver Colorado holds his father’s unguarded handgun in his hands, ready in a moment to end the interminable bullying he has suffered by putting an end to his short, miserable life. I could tell you countless such stories; stories that show what this world too often does to children. After all, it is so terribly easy to say, “We would never send a newborn child off to sleep in a feed-trough.”

Nor was it different back then — not only was this special child Jesus born in a barn and laid in a feed-trough, but in short order the king sent shock troops to the town to kill him; and just to be sure they killed all the little boys in the village. Some things haven’t changed. Syria and the Sudan have taught us nothing new about genocide. There is nothing new about horror and abuse and poverty and tyranny.

It has been said that you can judge a society on the basis of how it treats its children — well, maybe other people’s children. How would our world be judged against the world into which Christ was born? Is it really any better, for all our advances? Will it stand well in the judgment? For believe you me, it will be judged, and by that same Christ! He will have all the experience he needs to judge just how well this world has done in welcoming him, compared to how well he was welcomed in the days of Augustus and Quirinius in the city of David called Bethlehem. Beware the judgment of this child; beware the wrath of the Lamb.

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But my! What a heavy message for Christmas! And it would be if I left us there; but there is good news in all of this, even if we have to hear those unpleasant truths first to get there. The good news is that the child born in the stable and laid in the manger is still with us. And he is mighty, he is wonderful, he is everlasting, and he is the Prince of peace. He is our Savior — and if we have failed to open the portals of our hearts to invite him in, he will not give up on us yet. Christ the Child will stand outside and knock, and call us to come out to him. He has the unparalleled patience of a child and a voice just as piercing! And remember that he not only said “as you have done to the least of these you have done to me” — he also said, “anyone who does not come to the kingdom of heaven as a child cannot enter it” and “You must be born again.”

He comes to us as a child, and calls us forth as children — and if we cannot open our adult hearts to let him in, he will help us to open our hearts so that we can go out and be born again, so that we can come out to be with him as children once again, out into the world where we can join with all of our brothers and sisters.

Jesus the Christ Child stands at the doors of our hearts and calls out in the bright voice of the child, “Can you come out to play?” His voice is so strong and clear he can call even to those who have been laid low by the sleep of death itself, a voice so powerful that it can not only wake the dead but call them forth, “Can Lazarus come out to play? Can Monica come out to play? Can Rosetta come out to play? Can Russell? Can Charles, and Sarah, and Diamond and Raquel? He is calling us, calling us all forth, this wonderful, mighty child! He is calling us forth to be born again, to be rejuvenated and restored to the innocence of children, to play with him, tonight, and every night and day.

But, be warned, this is no ordinary child’s play — this is the serious and earnest play that children play when they are most intent. They play with strict rules, children do: and among the most important is that the game can not begin until all of God’s children are gathered together. And the children will come streaming from the city dumps of São Paulo and Mexico City; they will come in procession from the South Bronx and Newark and Appalachia and Darfur; they will come in solemn procession from Newtown and Damascus; they will come running as fast as their little feet can carry them from the smokey toil of factories, from the backbreaking work of the pit-mines, from the slums, and from the cemeteries. And only when all of God’s children are gathered together — all of God’s children, from every family under heaven and on earth; from every place and every time — only then will the great game begin. Then, and only then, will the song the angels sang come true in earnest — true peace on earth, to all united in Godly wills.

So harken, my sisters and brothers, to the voice of the Christ Child when he knocks at the doors of your heart. Be born again, become a child, accept his invitation. Turn not that Child away, but join him in that newborn world; go forth and join him in his gracious play.+

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