The Closeness of God

St. Mary’s Episcopal Church

Merry Christmas! I am on something of a mission. It is a simple mission, and the mission is this: I want you to keep celebrating. Christmas is not over. Christmas is twelve days long. Today is only the second day of Christmas. We have eleven glorious days still to celebrate.

I love to find some way to intentionally celebrate Christmas every day of the Christmas season. That doesn't have to mean more presents or more stuff. Sometimes I celebrate by making a special meal, or having a Christmas tea with some of the Christmas cookies that we were given. Sometimes I celebrate by going on a hike with friends. One year we took a lot of chocolate with us and we handed it out to strangers on the trail. Some turned us down, understandably I think, but many were thrilled and grateful. This year I hope to celebrate by spending some time out in the snow. I have to prerecord this sermon, so perhaps by now it has started snowing. The weather report says it might be coming. But whatever it is, every day I try to spend some time, having fun, delighting in this holiday and celebrating.

Celebrating. What is it that we are celebrating at Christmas? The birth of Jesus, certainly, but even more so we are celebrating the Incarnation of God in this world. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day we heard Luke tell us about Jesus's birth. He told us the how. Today we hear John tell us the why. "In the beginning," John says. With those words we should immediately hear echoes of the first Creation story in the first chapter of Genesis: In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth. Those echoes continue in John's Gospel as we learn about the Word and the Light, two themes that have strong parallels to the Creation story. God spoke a word, and the first word that God spoke was "let there be light." John tells us that the true Light is the Word, the Word Jesus Christ, and this Word is the true Light of the world.

What is a word? A word is an embodiment of a thought. Jesus is the Word of God, so in Jesus we have the embodiment of God's thoughts. In the Incarnation when the Word became Flesh, those thoughts came oh so very close to humanity. They literally entered into humanity, born in a manger in Bethlehem. In the Incarnation, God's thoughts came close to us and we found ourselves the closest we have ever been to them, our best chance to understand them.

In Jesus, we learn what God is thinking. As we remember Jesus's story, we remember that God cares about justice, and God cares about mercy and compassion, and God cares about grace. We learned that God isn't just interested with the rich and the powerful, but God is close to those that we sinfully dispose of and push to the margins. God cares about them and God gets close to them. We learn that God loves us more than we can ask for or imagine. So much, in fact, that God is willing to go to the cross for us. In the Word made Flesh we get closer to God and we get a better sense of what God is thinking.

The reverse is also true. In the Incarnation God gets closer to us and God learns more about humanity. For instance, God experiences first hand about life's joy. Jesus likes a good party. He liked it so much that his opponents accused him of being a glutton. We'll talk about this more in a few weeks in the reading on the 2nd Sunday of Epiphany. Remember Jesus's first miracle was in a wedding in Cana at Galilee, and at that wedding his miracle was to keep the party going. He created the wine so everyone could keep celebrating. In the Incarnation, God learned all about human joy.

God also learned in the Incarnation about human grief as he wept with Mary and Martha at the grave of Lazarus, their brother and his friend. God learned in the Incarnation about human suffering as God experienced rejection, humiliation, and pain as Jesus went to the cross.

In the Incarnation we get closer to God, and God gets closer to us. The Incarnation is a bridge that allows us to draw near to each other. The Incarnation is not just an event about the past, it is a truth about today. In our joys and in our sorrows, the Incarnation reminds us of the closeness of God.

In this time in which we joyfully celebrate Christmas, and in this time in which we anxiously await the likelihood of the worst surge of Covid 19 that we have yet experienced, God is close to us. God came close to us in the Incarnation, and God remains close to us today.

Celebrate that reality, my friends. Keep celebrating Christmas.

AMEN