9:30am Westfield
Isaiah 62:6-12 : Titus 3:4-8a : Luke 2:1-20
To love is not just to do something for others, but to reveal to them their own
uniqueness, to tell them that they are special and worthy of attention. We can
express this through our open and gentle presence.
Jean Vanier
Jean Vanier was the founder of the L’Arche communities, which are faith-based communities centered on people with learning or developmental disabilities. Now an international phenomenon, the first Western Australian L’Arche – the French for “Ark”, as in Noah’s Ark – is due to open in the near future.
Vanier’s words speak eloquently of the rationale and guiding principles of L’Arche. That the profound, abiding basis for their actions comes from the Living God is clear because Vanier could just as easily be speaking about God’s love for humankind and in particular God’s basis for deciding on the Incarnation as the means for bringing salvation to the earth.
Hear the words again:
To love is not just to do something for others, but to reveal to them their own
uniqueness, to tell them that they are special and worthy of attention. We can
express this through our open and gentle presence.
I don’t know whether Vanier had such thoughts in mind or whether the Incarnation – the birth of Jesus – held any inspiration for them but we truly see in his words the action of the Living God in engineering and executing Jesus’ coming to be among us.
First, God’s loving initiative in sending Jesus is not “doing something for us”, as if it were some kind of über-magnanimous gesture on the part of the Being who wrote the manual on generosity. God is not doing us a favour, a superior being rescuing a bunch of hopeless losers – yet again.
Rather, God is using the divine generosity to extend the riskiest invitation of all time – an invitation into relationship, as equals. Remember the last supper in John’s gospel? Jesus sez, “I do not call you servants any longer … but I have called you friends …”
What Jesus comes to do is to lead us back to God. Again, this is not some kind of physical journey, but a journey of the spirit, towards a discovery of the kingdom within and among us.
That discovery is one we have to move towards ourselves. God cannot do it for us while we continue to possess the grace of free will. Out of the same self-imposed constraint, God encourages us to recover a lost confidence in our ability to tap into the inner resources that will enable us to advance in this journey.
To do otherwise would be to treat us with contempt and, at the very least, disrespect. God knows that we are capable of embarking on this journey – because God gave us those inner resources in the first place.
The second point would be that the birth of Jesus is itself a powerful sign of God’s deep love and respect for humanity. The Word – Jesus – did not become a single-cell organism, an amoeba, and insinuate itself into our bodies via our nasal passages as we went for a dip in Lake Galilee. The Word did not become a dolphin or a chimpanzee even though they are among the most intelligent creatures on the planet.
No, the Word became FLESH. A human being, an act that shows us how valued and esteemed and worthy we are in God’s sight. Jesus then shows us what humans are capable of doing – and better, being. He shows us that we CAN be human AND have a valuable and authentic spiritual life, one that enjoys a close relationship with the Living God.
This why the Christian scriptures exhort us to become Christ-like. Not so that we can impress the gullible, win friends or influence our uncles, but in order to experience the fullness of relationship with the Living God. If only we realised that the only qualification for such an experience is one we already possess – being human!
And so the incarnation tells us this: that precisely because we are human, which in biblical terms means created in the image and likeness of the Living God – precisely because we are human, we are “special and worthy of attention”.
Again, we need no extraordinary qualifications for being, in God’s eyes, special and worthy of attention. We ALREADY have everything it could possibly take, simply by being human.
The third thing is the unobtrusive manner in which incarnation unfolds. Maybe with twenty-twenty hindsight, we might think or ordinarily expect that momentous events should attract a great deal of publicity and attention.
But it doesn’t happen that way. At least, the publicity machine is a bunch of shepherds, in those days considered ratbags and unreliable. Hardly the sort of respected dignitaries to convey news of an event so momentous.
Instead God and scripture treat us to the open and gentle presence of a baby born in a stable. The paradox is that God’s power resides in such a vulnerable being – a baby who is defenceless, unable to repel an aggressor, totally dependent on the love and good will of others, primarily his mother.
It’s as if God wants us to know that from the very beginning this is what it’s about – openness and gentleness, presence, quietly “being there”. No self-serving, self-seeking fuss. Just being, attentive to what’s around us.
The good news is that this open and gentle presence doesn’t have to leave us when, as or just because we happen to grow up! For what I suspect is the majority of us, though, by the time we’re physically and emotionally adults, we’ve receive so many blows, experienced such trauma, become so wounded and scarred that we have a huge task ahead of us to return to life as an open and gentle presence.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t recover or heal. It’s difficult work. Fortunately, “difficult” isn’t “impossible”. And as we heal and recover, we find ourselves drawing closer once again to the open and gentle presence of the baby born in Bethlehem so many centuries ago.
So here we are again, making time to spend with God, expressing the desire to allow God to shape, re-shape and transform us into open and gentle people whose presence speaks again of God’s love and respect.
This is where the submerged meaning of the incarnation speaks with the Spirit within us. This perhaps is the inner work Mary was doing when Luke tells us she twice “pondered” the meaning of the great events of which she had allowed herself to be a part.
Her head had all sorts of logical or seemingly-logical answers thrust into it. But her heart needed more. And wisely she permitted the process to claim her attention. We see the fruit of that work when she stands at the foot of her son’s cross, open and gentle, a presence of love bearing witness to the worst of human actions at the same time as she exemplifies the Christ-like qualities that emerge in the incarnation, available to all of us, simply because we are human beings.
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