Midnight Mass – 2016
Marian Free
In the name of God who longs to be in relationship with us and who willingly forsake power, glory and dominion to try to make that clear. Amen.
During the week I happened upon a movie titled: “Anywhere but here.” It tells the story of how two grown sons cope with the fact that their father is dying. The sons have been brought up in the Jewish faith, but have not been able to embrace its practices and beliefs. One son, Aidan, still has a connection with the synagogue because his father will pay his grandchildren’s school fees if they attend a Jewish school. As with many families there are unresolved issues and tensions that make the grieving process more complicated. At one point Aidan is compelled to go the synagogue and speak to a Rabbi. Aidan is confused because events in his life are leading him to the conclusion that God is trying to tell him something, but he doesn’t believe in God. Thankfully, the young Rabbi is wise. He asks Aidan if he ever feels “a spiritual presence”. Aidan replies that when he is showing his children the stars and trying to explain that the universe goes on forever and ever, that yes, he does get a sense of the spiritual.
The Rabbi responds: “Then think of that spirit leading and guiding you.” The Rabbi knows that Aidan has rejected the traditional ways of thinking about God and he is wise enough not to impose those ideas on him. Instead he asks Aidan to name how he knows and experiences God and runs with that.
Rejecting the God of one’s youth and yet having a yearning to connect with something deeper than the material is not unique to a person who has grown up in the Jewish faith. One of the problems that the church faces today is that there are many people who have walked away from the faith and yet have a sense of something other. There are many long to make contact with their spirituality but their search is blocked by language, dogma or ideas that offend or that no longer work or make sense to them.
If truth be told most of the ideas of God that people reject are ideas that we too reject, but it is possible for some to hear only one thing and a selective reading of the bible (by a preacher or by the reader) can give the impression of an angry, demanding, interventionist God, a selective God who expects conformity at least and obedience at best. It is relatively easy for to abandon this false idea of God, especially if that idea of God has been used to manipulate and control or to appear be remote from human affairs and indifferent to suffering and pain.
Christmas exposes that God for who and what it is – a false God based on a misunderstanding of both the Old Testament and the New.
At Christmas we are confronted, year after year with the God who is not strong or powerful, but who enters the world as a baby – vulnerable, helpless and utterly dependent. When God could not get through to us, when we had turned away from God or turned God into something that God is not, when we lost sight that God’s primary desire is to be in relationship with us, God in Christ came to us. God came among us not with lighting and thunder, waving a sword to condemn and destroy, but as a new-born child a child whom God hoped would demonstrate once and for all God’s love for all humankind – the good, the bad, the engaged and the indifferent, the kind and the unkind. That first Christmas God became powerless and impotent so that we would at last understand the depth and passion of God’s love and that we would see for ourselves God’s complete and total engagement with humanity and God’s participation in both our sorrows and our joys.
This is why we are here this and every Christmas. Our presence is not simply a result of habit or sentimentality. We are here, because we know that the child in the manger is God, that God chooses not to be remote, but to be an integral part of all that this life has to offer. The child in the manger and the man on the cross expose God for who and what God really is – an expression of the deepest love, the utmost compassion and the greatest longing to be in relationship, to be one with all creation.
Tags: Christmas, compassion, identification, Love, rejection, vulnerable
Swallowsrest 