January 2, 2011 (2nd Sunday after Christmas Day)
1. An assignment that teachers sometimes give to their students is to produce a family tree. Lots of kids have to do this at some point in their education—I had to do it for an introduction to anthropology class. The idea, I guess, is that the student learns not only about his or her relatives but also about the different ways that we might think about kinship and family.
The easiest, Beaver Cleaver-type of family tree has a mom and a dad and kids. The mom and dad have their own moms and dads and brothers and sisters. So it’s a simple diagram of a few generations of immediate family as well as aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents.
But making your family tree is normally a lot trickier than this. There are all sorts of circumstances that can complicate a family tree. What if your parents get divorced? Does your step-parent’s extended family belong? What if you are adopted? What if there are people you call grandma or grandpa or auntie that are not biologically related to you? Do really close friends belong on your family tree if they treat you like family? Do blood relatives deserve a place on your family tree even if they don’t act like family ought to act? Sure, so and so is my biological father, but someone else actually treats me like his child. Or, I love Auntie So and So, but she’s not my mother’s actual sister, just an old friend. Who is in your family? Who has a place on your family tree? How do you imagine the web of relationships that surrounds you?
2. The incredibly beautiful passage we heard this morning from the gospel of John suggests that we are part of God’s family now because of Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh. Verses 12 and 13 read: “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.” The gist of the passage from John’s gospel is that we become God’s family when we get to know God in Jesus Christ. What I was suggesting with the whole discussion of family trees was just that: human biological connection does not guarantee loving relationships. Instead, the people we know best and care most about as well as those who know us best and care most about us; those people are our family. So when God so loved the world to send God’s only begotten Son to us, we received indelible knowledge of God. A knowledge that opened up a relationship. And true and gracious relationship creates family.
The story of Christmas that we hear again in John is precisely this: When God came to us in the human flesh of Jesus Christ, we learned something radically new and more intimate about God.
3. The story of the Bible and the story of our faith is basically the story of God wanting us to know God better and better. As the gospel reading indicated, this goes back even to Moses. Moses went up onto Mt. Sinai into God’s very presence where he received God’s law. Of course, Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from that mountain, but he also brought back many other laws that guided the Israelites—and these laws still guide the Jewish and Christian communities. Knowing God’s law, that is, God’s requirements for our behavior, is certainly one way of knowing God. When we consider the Ten Commandments, which advise us to hold God above all else and to be good to our fellow human beings, we can know that our God is a God who wants to be worshiped and revered and is also a God who wants us to live as a mutually supportive and just community. Another way to think about this is that the Bible itself is a gateway onto knowledge of God. The words of the Bible are words of description and introduction to the person and character of God.
4. Besides the law and the Bible, we also know God by what God gives us. In our Old Testament reading from the prophet Jeremiah, God promises to give the people bounty and joyfulness. “They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again.” God gives us life, God gives us strength and intelligence. God gives us the beautiful world to live in. And as John’s gospel reminds us, God gives us grace upon grace as well as truth. We know God then by the good gifts that God gives us even as we know God by the laws and stories that God places on our lives and society.
5. But above, all, and this is the gospel of Christmas, we know God because God came to us in human form in the person of Jesus Christ. A paraphrase of our gospel reading today says, “The Word was made flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, generous inside and out, true from start to finish.” That’s it right there. When God came to our neighborhood to live beside us, we became a family. We received the power to become children of the will of God. We can see God and know God so much more fully now that before when all we had was the Bible. In Christmas, we also have Jesus to be with us and show us what God is like—what God’s eternal love is like.
The great Dutch master Rembrandt painted a scene called the “Holy Family” in which Mary is seen with a well-read Bible in one hand and her other hand gently rocking a cradle in which the baby Jesus lies. She has evidently been reading the Bible but is now gazing lovingly into our Savior’s beatific little face. Professor Thomas Troeger, writing about this painting, says, “[Mary] does not ponder the page alone. She also ponders the infant beside her, ‘the Word made flesh,’ rather than the Word made paper and ink. The Word is a blood-warmed, breath-enlivened creature sleeping beside his mother. When Mary returns to her reading, she will understand what she reads at greater depth because she has encountered the Word through the Word made flesh. When she tends to the child, she will understand the child at greater depth because she has encountered the Word through the Words in the book.”
And, says the gospel writer John, when we know God, through Word in book and Word in flesh, we become part of God’s family.
6. To make it more explicitly clear, we can turn to the letter to the Ephesians. In that letter, which we heard earlier, we find this: “God destined us for adoption as God’s children through Jesus Christ.” We have been adopted into a family of faith and of care that will never falter. The exercise of writing out our family tree, on the one hand, becomes exponentially more difficult when we consider that all of us who know Jesus Christ are related in the bond of God’s love. On the other hand, the whole idea of family becomes easier, more pure, more profound when we embrace this adoption. Through God’s free gift of Jesus, we are brothers and sisters. Ethicist Gilbert Meilander writes, “Has it occurred to you that every Christian is adopted?...Because we have become God’s children by adoption, he has ‘sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”’ Each one of us has been rescued from our natural state; each has experienced the love of a new and better father; each has become part of a new and better family.”
No comments:
Post a Comment