Christmas
Christmas is the favorite day of every child. It’s also the favorite of the child that inhabits the center of every adult. So instead of a sermon, let’s play a Christmas adventure game, a game of pretend.
Imagine yourself as Adam or Eve. The first Adam, the first Eve. Alive in the dawn of a new earth, your first awareness was the presence of your Creator, the one who put you in a pleasant garden, who gave you to your spouse. This gardener God set up three rules for your life: cling to one another, make lots of babies with Him, and avoid doing just one thing. That last command was very clear: if you do it, you will die.
You enjoyed that existence, strolling with God in the cool of the evening, learning how to be human from the mouth of God, awaiting the divine embrace that would at the end of your days make you totally one with Him. You were perfectly content until the talking serpent came around and through the first great marketing campaign sold you a short-cut. “You can have it all,” he said. “You can be just like God, knowing good and evil. Just do that one thing he told you not to. Go ahead–he’s jealous of you, that’s why he told you not to do it. It’s good for you. Go ahead, just do it.”
And you did it.
Immediately you stood in shame, realizing that the snake was right. You realized you had already known the good, because you knew God. Now you got to know evil–sin, rebellion, sickness, alienation, disappointment and finally death. You’ll be just like God, huh? You and all your descendants are condemned to live in the fouled-up world you have recreated.
God could have written you off as a bad experiment. But your divine friend, now your divine judge, has a plan “B.” He won’t leave you to the nasty existence you chose. He promises another new woman, another new man, one who will battle the serpent, be fatally wounded for you, and yet triumph. Now in a hostile world of extreme heat and cold, you take refuge with your spouse in a cave. You scratch into the wall crude pictures of the animals you named, many of which are now your adversaries, and in that cave try to call on the God you rejected, the God who refused to reject you. The first two children you co-create grow up to become fratricidal enemies. You learn sorrow and despair at the grave of your youngest, as your eldest son becomes a hated wanderer on the earth which your own decision condemned to futility. And in your own death you know you failed not only yourself, not only your spouse, but every son and daughter of Adam and Eve.
For thousands of years the ever-patient God calls your descendants to turn to Him, to become individuals and a people who will do His will. For thousands of years they tell Him, “No, I don’t like your plan. I’ll do it my way.” And, over and over, they persist in the ways of violence, pride, selfishness.
They shape their new gods in their own image and likeness, violent, proud, selfish. Their gods treat humans as humans treat humans, as disposable objects, as cheap toys for their own amusement, targets for earthquakes, thunderbolts, murder. When a human dares to rise up in rebellion, even in their myths he is made to push a rock up a hill forever, or he falls from the sky as the sun’s heat melts his wings. Unable to accept responsibility for their own misery, your offspring imagine divine powers who spend eternity devising new ways to make humans miserable.
No wonder some Greek philosophers began to pretend that matter itself was eternal, that random variations of atoms are responsible for all they saw. This rule of randomness validates a kind of atheism. Who wants to live in a universe thick with all-powerful tyrants, fickle taskmasters who occupy every hill and valley and cloud, who treat humans as beasts of burdens, as amusements? It seems to these philosophers that to accept a superior being is the same as surrendering one’s human dignity. Better to turn your back on the divine than to live as a sheep, fearing the future planned by a vindictive or arbitrary god.
But a remnant in Israel understands that the gods of the nations are nothing, are human inventions, even demons. This remnant delights in doing the will of God. These faithful, poor in material goods but rich in faith, strive to keep His law, loving God and serving their neighbor. From that people God creates one more woman exactly like the first one. She is very much like the first woman, beautiful in form, ever seeking the Truth, and full of grace in her heart. When God puts this woman, Mary, to the test, when He asks her to do His will, she says “yes.” She says “be it done to me according to Your will.” Her act of obedience reversed your disobedience and set in motion God’s own Plan B.
The son she bears in a cave, in a borrowed stable, is the second perfect man. The one God promised thousands of years before in your hearing. Animals whose pictographs adorned the walls of your cave now bay and low around the Creator’s cradle, a feed-trough for farm animals. The fulfillment of God’s promise to you is like nothing you would have imagined, not in your most pleasant dream before the fall, not in your wildest nightmare after it. The little boy nursing at Mary’s breast is more than a human male. He is the One who formed you from the clay of the swamp, who breathed His own spirit into you and made you one with your spouse. The little one crying when He wet his swaddling clothes is the very God you spurned. He has become human, sharing every part of human existence except sin. God’s Son has become your son so that one man could finally get it right, could finally have the strength and determination, the moral courage, to seek and do God’s will always.
Now come back with me to this place, to our own time.
It was in a stable hewn from the rock, as Chesterton once wrote, that Adam and Eve and all the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve achieved their true human dignity. Our first parents had turned creation upside down by their rebellion, had tried to become gods by insurrection against God. They had wanted to be divine, but made themselves less than human, scratching a meager existence from a hard-pack soil, seeking refuge in a musty cave. But God still loved them. God still loves us after all the times we’ve griped and kicked and done exactly what He told us not to do. He loves us beyond any sanity, past all logic. He loves us even to the point of letting us reject Him one last time, letting us kill Him and put Him in back in a cave. He loves us so much that He by His divine power conquered the death that had conquered us. He loves us so much that He became man so that in His death we could finally embrace Him, and in that divine embrace, we ourselves become divine.
So today we participate in the anticipation of that divine embrace, this Mass. Our prayer together is a sacrifice of praise. So praise God, the divine lover, in full voice, and become a blessing yourself by letting yourself be formed into Christ’s image through the graces of this Eucharist, this Christ-Mass.
