Christmas Morning by The Rev. Bennett Brockman
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Homily for Christmas Morning
Dec. 25, 2014
Trinity Episcopal Church
Hartford, CT
The Rev. Bennett A. Brockman
What an amazing gift, light. Biologists suppose that it was the attraction of light that drew the earliest life forms out of the ocean depths and onto dry land. We human beings need light to orient ourselves in space. Total darkness is very disconcerting, and disablingly so when prolonged.
When we get an idea, we say the light turns on. When we really like someone, they light up our life.
And we say about someone who has been converted from a disastrous life to a constructive and productive one, that they’ve seen the light.
An old word for seeing the light, one that occurs over and over in the translations of Scripture that we use, is ‘salvation.’ It literally means ‘health, wholeness.’ Down through the centuries, though, we’ve taken ‘salvation’ to mean ‘saving from’ something. Being saved came to mean mostly saved from eternal death, or in our most conservative traditions, from the punishment of hell. Even when we thought of salvation as giving us eternal life, we imagined that as life with the blessed in heaven.
Following Bishop N. T. Wright, I want to suggest this Christmas morning that when Jesus as God Incarnate entered our world bearing light and life, God became King of all creation with a completeness God had not asserted before. The result is that in the reign of Christ his followers are empowered to engage in creative, constructive ways to make the whole creation new, as the book of Revelation says. In Christ, this world we inhabit now becomes God’s world and all creation rings out that truth with joy.
The result is that salvation means more accurately that we are saved TO something, not from something. “All the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God,” Isaiah declares. Now, to be sure, even the great prophets like Isaiah sometimes did not see clearly enough just what God’s salvation looks like. They mixed up in it promises about the doom and destruction of other nations, as if salvation involved payback and the very human satisfaction that payback seem—unless we look at it more closely and notice the cycle of revenge that payback always guarantees.
Instead, seeing the light of Christ and living in the Way of the Cross delivers us precisely from the way of bondage to the default attitudes of our culture—power imposed, the threat of retaliation as the guarantee of peace—and liberates us to a new life as agents of God’s reconciling grace.
The new king, God incarnate in the infant Jesus, delivers us from bondage to our culture’s assumptions about power. What appears weakest is in fact the creative power of the universe. What appears fragile and doomed is in fact the ultimate gift of love that is transforming creation and creatures.
Because we can see the light in the message of Jesus’ living and dying and rising again, we have grace to be saved to a new way of life, as instruments of the Messiah’s grace and truth in our time and place. We make the reign of God visible.
Amen.