A Reflection for I Christmas All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC December 29, 2013 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Welcome to the 5th
day of these 12 days of Christmas. I have been reading a lot of
explanations for the symbols for the 12 days of Christmas and you pays
your money and you take your choice. So many ways to explain things which we experience each day!
The Jesus movement tried to figure out what happened when they looked back at their experience.
This Jesus was fully human who walked, talked, worked, sweated, belched, and bled like them,
but there was something special about him, almost like a connection to God as if God were living
inside him. He was indeed different when, on the third day after he died, he showed up in the space
between them, nail holes and all. How does anyone explain that? Sometimes when you can’t
explain things with regular words, you use poetry and images. John tried that tack in the preface of
his Gospel when he started off with these images:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and
without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life,
and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness
did not overcome it. . . . He was in the world, and the world came into being through him;
yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did
not accept him. 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. From his
fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses;
grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son,
who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.
John sees his experience with Jesus as if he is entering a new creation, using echoes of the creation
story in Genesis where God speaks and there is light - the beginning of creation in that explosion of
sound. John echoes that the Spirit of Christ is what God spoke and became flesh as Jesus and became
light for all people.
I love those images, but I also have this other side of my brain that likes things to have some sort of
logical pattern. Through those images and what I know about science, I am drawn to the Big Bang
theory of creation - almost 14 Billion years ago, the explosion of the will of God to create a thing of
joy, this universe of which we are a part. In this explosion, a tightly coiled ball of energy containing
the core of all matter and spirit is unleashed to be what it is created to be. Galaxies, planets, rocks,
gases, light, dark, animals, plants all evolve out of these building blocks. One human person's DNA
is 7% similar to bacteria, 15% to mustard greens, 36% to a fruit fly, 50% to bananas, 85% to a Zebra
Fish, 98% similar to Chimpanzees, 99+% with other humans. Doesn't that explode your mind?
We are so connected, one to another, at the basic level and to the world, the universe, the dream
of God, in which we live and move and have our being.
We spend so much of our time trying to find the differences between people - things like color, religion,
national origin, social and economic status - but God sees us all connected. I think what God does in
the incarnation is to show us how interconnected we are with the rest of the creation. The divine comes
and lives with us. John uses the Greek word SKENOO which means literally “Cast his tent among us”
.
Here John is echoing the idea of the Hebrew Testament image of the “Tent of Meeting” the
Tabernacle, where God lives with us in the Exodus of our lives. Imagine that God lives with us in the
sacred space between us.
Do you remember what it was like when we first started to host “Room at the Inn” for the homeless
at our church? Some people were scared, but when we sat down together across a table for dinner or
breakfast, we found people just like us. They may have had more bad luck or made some bad
decisions, but we were connected as fellow journeyers on our shared Exodus.
One time I was talking with a friend in jail, and he said that he never thought that he would end up
with people like those with whom he was sharing cells. He told me that he had come to see them as
people to watch out for, but they were full human beings, and he was learning what it meant to love
the enemy as yourself. If you see the fact that God loves the other as God loves you, then it seems
appropriate to see them as connected to you. This is true on the level of depth psychology. We reach
healing when we understand that everything we find difficult in others exists within our very selves.
The more passion with which we “dislike”, the greater we are trying to distance ourselves from the
thing we want to deny in us. When we deny the wholeness of who we are, the good and the bad, the
light and the shadow, then we stop fully living and we just go about existing.
In my Dream Group Training, we have been reading a lot of books. Last month's book was by C. G.
Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Jung was a Protestant Pastor's son and, for that reason, he
saw more than enough of the shallowness of religion, and one quote from the book stands out: “As
far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the
darkness of mere being.” Jesus showed us what it is to fully live a human life and, as John says he
was the light which the darkness could not overcome.
But Jesus did not just come to connect us to each other; his ministry is connect us to the divine, the
numinous, that which is beyond our ability to define. It is not our creeds (which divide us) that save
us; it is the relationship to the mystery which Jesus lived into which he called us to follow. Again to
steal from Jung, (actually from James Hollis' quote from Jung):
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling
question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we
avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real
importance… The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has
for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. … If we understand and feel that here in this
life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis,
we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody
that, life is wasted….
This Christmas Season, let us go beyond the story of the baby in the manger and start living into a
world in which we are interconnected to the infinite and the finite in ourselves and in others, and
the Other.
Here John is echoing the idea of the Hebrew Testament image of the “Tent of Meeting” the 
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