Christmas Morning 2011, John 1.1-14
Karen and I live near the crossing of Federal and Broadway in Shawnee. Not many people in our parish know this, but we bought our house from Rob Autrey. BUT the house wasn't known as the Autrey house. No. When describing where it is we live, people still, to this day, say, "That's the Breedlove home."
Apparently, I live in someone else’s house. Dave and Mary Lee Breedlove raised their kids in that house. OUR house. They NOW live on Independence, but somehow, Karen, Noah and I still live in their house. How longs a guy gotta live in a place you before it becomes the Youmans House.
Most of us know that Jesus was likely NOT born in the Wintertime, that our 4th Century Roman Church set the celebration of Christmas to compete with the Pagan Winter festivals that were already happening around the Solstice. So if he wasn’t born in December, when was he born?
There is a physicist from Hertfordshire England named Gary Turner who is among a small group of folks who study these sorts of things. Dr. Turner makes a compelling case for why Jesus was born in the autumn--late September, early October, around the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles. He makes a couple of salient points. And the main point he makes is based on something John wrote in our Gospel lesson today, in verse 14:
And the Word became flesh and lived among us.
So here’s what Dr. Turner says about this:
A more literal translation, but less understandable to modern readers, of the word “lived” is the word “tabernacled,” a word that describes a simple, make-shift dwelling—a tent or a barrio. These “tabernacles” serve as a kind of symbolic liturgical action in the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, also known as Sukkoth, when for seven days an observant Jew would construct and live in such a flimsy tent called a Succah, or tabernacle. The sukkah is intended as a remembrance of the fragile dwellings in which the Israelites lived during their 40 years they wandered in the wilderness after the Exodus from slavery in Egypt.
In the religious ceremony of Sukkoth, Jews welcome God’s Shekinah, or God’s glory and presence, AND in the ceremony, they welcome the seven faithful shepherds (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, David).
So Dr. Turner asks, “Could this be the reason why the angels appeared to a group of shepherds? God’s GLORY was shown to shepherds, who visited Jesus in a flimsy shelter, what the story calls a stable, but what could have been a Succah. In fact, Turner says that the Greek word for "manger" was probably the closest translation Luke could find for "Succah." Have I lost you yet?
And the WORD became flesh and tabernacled among us.
Maybe, right? Oh, believe me, there’s more, but we don’t have time here. I’ll post a link to his essay on my website if you are interested in his full treatment. But suffice it to say that significant events in the life of Jesus OFTEN were interwoven with Jewish religious mythology, pulling from the symbolism of the Hebrew story.
A few years ago Karen and I received a call from the Breedloves. You know those people whose house that we live in? Their daughter was visiting for Christmas and she wanted to drop by and see the home where she had grown up. Have you ever done that? Or wanted to?
She walked through our house and talked about the changes that we had made to it. But when she got to the pantry, she stopped. She opened the pantry door and closed it. Opened it and closed. She said, “That sound, it brings back memories.”
I think the sound of the pantry doors stirs up all kinds of feelings for a lot of us, but that’s another sermon, am I right?
But it’s so peculiar that something so subtle, so specific, the sound of a door, would be the thing that would stir her affections for that place.
As Anglican Christians, we hold the idea that God interacts with us through physical means, that the temporal and the spiritual are interwoven, even interdependent: water, bread, wine, oil. God shows up extraordinarily in these physical things. It is the idea, the reality even, of sacrament.
We also have a theology of sacred space. We act differently in the Parish Hall, than in the porch, than in the narthex, than in the Nave, than in the chancel, than in the sanctuary, than in the apse (did you know it was called an apse?).
Last night we invited the children to gather around the Altar as Fr Gary consecrated the host, as he invited the Holy Ghost to inhabit bread, wine, something physical. It was a kind of reward. The children know they aren’t supposed to go back there. It’s sacred. And so last night the got to go.
So what about your home? There is that old cliche, “anybody can build a house, but it takes love to build a home,” what we mean by that is that something of deep meaning and significance happens in that physical space, and in the doing of that, makes it holy. Consecrates it.
All that God was, all that God is, all that God ever will be, inhabited a physical space when Jesus was born. Something intangible drew within our grasp. God, who is love and who is Spirit, inhabited the temporal, by taking up residence in our human form. God lived, in a sukkoth, a flimsy, make-shift shelter. And in doing so, married the holy to the mundane.
In that same way, God can inhabit you. You, a common, temporal, physical you, and in doing so, marry the holy to the mundane. You can be consecrated. Mary Oliver writes in her poem “Wild Geese:”
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
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. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.
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