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The Second Sunday after Christmas, January 2, 2005 Texts: Ephesians 1:3-14 and John 1:1-18 St. Paul Lutheran Church, Albuquerque Pastor Harold Nilsson The days after Christmas usually allow us to ease into the new year. Football and parties and shopping and perhaps vacation time normally divert us a little longer from the realities that we inevitably face in January. But not this year. All the world has been stunned by the tragedy of inconceivable proportions that has struck south Asia. Our sensibilities are battered as we hear the stories and watch the graphic images from places we scarcely were aware of. The earthquake and tsunamis of December 2004 will undoubtedly rank as one of the greatest catastrophes in recorded human history. Seismic scientists noted that the “entire earth vibrated” from the intensity of the shocks that exploded from the grinding tectonic plates. The earth’s human population is now vibrating to bring relief to the millions whose livelihoods and very lives have been ripped apart. Christmas seems far removed from unimaginable realities of burying the dead, caring for the injured, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless and rebuilding the infrastructures of shattered communities and societies. For many people, faith itself has been battered by this event. The question has come as a primal scream from those who hold to varied religious traditions or none at all: How could God let this happen? What kind of God creates a world where the innocent are at the mercy of malevolent forces? It is not surprising that some early believers we’ve been studying in the Lost Christianities class here on Sunday mornings concluded that creation is not the product of the One True God but rather the result of a cosmic disaster or at minimum the spin-off from a lesser god. These ancients were unable to construct a bridge in their minds or hearts between a loving Creator God and a suffering humanity. Maybe most of us have struggled at some point to construct this bridge. My own father was 13 when his mother died after being ill only a couple of days during the flu epidemic that cut a wide swath through Europe in 1918. He cried and cried, he said, at the unfairness of it all, and wondered what kind of God could take from him someone he desperately needed. Unlike those early Gnostics who rejected God as the Creator, we have cast our lot with a faith that affirms the God of Christmas, that is, the God of love, is also the cause of creation. In fact, the New Testament readings for today take that affirmation a step further. Jesus Christ, God come among us as a child, himself took part in the creation: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being,” says John’s gospel. And in poetic language almost impossible to penetrate, Ephesians testifies that a plan to bring together everything on earth and in heaven in the cosmic Christ still is unfolding. Both readings strongly assert that we are intended to be God’s children, presumably precious children that a parent will do anything to protect from harm. Last Sunday’s earthquake and the claims of these Bible readings prolong the doubt or even provoke an argument with God. Why, God, if you love your children, must they suffer so? Sometimes, yes, they bring it on themselves, like the ancient Israelites who went into exile because of foolish decisions made by their leaders. Yes, some of our suffering is self-inflicted. But what kind of world have you put us in if we cannot trust your creation? How much death must there be? (Christians have often thought and taught that arguing with God is irreverent. Our Jewish sisters and brothers have not been so reticent to do so. Read the Psalms and see how often their writers got in God’s face with their blunt, agonizing questions. On a recent episode of the TV show Joan of Arcadia, Grace underwent her Bat Mitzvah. She said the Torah is more about asking questions than giving answers.) Yet, last week Reuters news service collected answers from global leaders of various religious traditions about God’s role in the disaster. I found some of their answers hardly faithful or helpful, so I won’t identify those sources. But they said things like this: “This is an expression of God’s great ire with the world. The world is being punished for wrongdoing…” Another said the disaster was caused by a “huge amount of pent-up man-made evil on earth.” Yet another commented, “We believe that God has ultimate controlling power over his entire creation. We have a responsibility to try and attract god’s kindness and mercy and not do anything that would attract his anger.” Not surprising, some saw fulfillment of the visions in Revelation. On the other hand, a rabbi from Portland spoke in a way that resonates with our faith: “This is not something that God has done. God hasn’t picked out a certain group of people in a certain area of the world and said, ‘I am going to punish them.’ The world has certain imperfections built into the natural order, and we have to live with them. This issue isn’t ‘Why did God do this to us?’ but ‘How do we human beings care for one another?’” When we have cried out our questions and confessed our confusion about God and human suffering, what remains is the announcement of today’s gospel: “The Word has become flesh and lives among us, full of grace and truth.” The God of creation does not stand at a distance from the pain of the world, but has come to share it and heal it. Earlier in Psalm 147 that we sang part of is this clear assertion: God heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. If we accept the truth of Christmas, that is precisely what we must say Christ is doing now in our hurting world. God is there in Christ in beach towns of Sumatra and Sri Lanka, with parents whose children have been torn from their arms by ruthless waves, and with children, now bereft of their parents. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not, has not, and will not overcome it. Our forebear Martin Luther conceived of the whole Christian faith under what he called the “theology of the cross.” The issue is where we are to discern the presence of God. Are tsunamis or military victories the best places to look for the true power and nature of God? No, said Luther. The “true theology” is one that sees God not in manifestations of power and glory, whether in nature or history, but in the midst of peril and uncertainty and suffering. In short, where God seems altogether absent. Somehow God hides in the opposite of what our world recognizes as omnipotence. Among the beleaguered in south Asia, for instance. In all this Luther was, of course, picking up on St. Paul’s words that Christ crucified is the power of God and the wisdom of God. Some of you know that my hobby is bicycling. That’s one reason I wear this yellow bracelet from the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Lance has raised millions for cancer research by selling these bands. You probably also know that prior to winning the Tour de France six times in a row that he nearly died from cancer. Now Lance is not a person of faith, at least in any traditional sense. He had some bad experiences with organized religion growing up, and remains a skeptic about God. He attributes his survival to good scientific medicine. But Lance wears a crucifix. (I’ve noticed it in video clips of him on the Tour when he’s hammered up a mountain with his jersey unzipped.) The cross around his neck, he says, “is an expression of kinship with those who’ve suffered.” To which Luther would say, that is exactly what God is doing by coming to us in Christ. The word of our faith this weekend is that God has not abandoned those who have suffered so much. To the contrary, God is there moving in and through all those working around the clock to bring healing and hope in the form of bottled water and food and clothing and shelter and medicine. For the Word has become flesh and lives among us. Another person in our tradition who viscerally understood the theology of the cross was the 19th century Dane Søren Kierkegaard. For him, faith belongs to the dark; it can only be given in the dark; it is only useful in the dark. The darkness is where faith lives. On a Christmas Day Kierkegaard wrote in his journal: “Unto you is born this day a Saviour—yet it was night when he was born. That is an eternal illustration: it must be night—and becomes day in the middle of the night when the Saviour is born.” A faith that is accessible only in the dark is perhaps not an attractive faith, probably not the kind of faith that we want. Yet the only light worth having is one that illuminates the darkness. Darkness has descended upon a significant segment of the world. Our call is to bring light in the name of the Christ who is the light of the world. We’re invited to show once again that, as horrendous as the devastation has been, that God’s children will help each other and move together into God’s good future. May God keep us and the world in a faith like that of the writer of this ancient Psalm:
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