You Can Go Home Again:
A Christmas Message,
without Angels, Manger, and Swaddling Clothes
Rev. Douglas Olds
24 December 2013
Galatians 4.1 (NRSV) My
point is this: heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves,
though they are the owners of all the property; 2 but they remain under
guardians and trustees until the date set by the father. 3 So with us; while we
were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world. 4 But when the fullness of time had come,
God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 in order to redeem
those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. 6
And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our
hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” 7 So you are no longer a slave but a child, and
if a child then also an heir, through God.
8 Formerly, when you
did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods. 9
Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how
can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits? How can you
want to be enslaved to them again? 10 You are observing special days, and
months, and seasons, and years. 11 I am afraid that my work for you may have
been wasted.
When it was time to go to college, I returned to my home
state from the east coast where my family was living. While there, I would make rowdy weekend trips
up to my hometown. Even now, I return to
western Michigan every summer, and when I do, I feel the call of the old. Something in me reverts, regresses even, to
my memory of what it was like to be young and anxiety free in my home
town. Even now, when I return, I find
myself driving a bit too fast on the back roads. My laughter is freer, tinged by the broad
nasal accent toward burlesque stories shared with longtime friends. I feel the comfort of the familiar, and it’s
not just that I feel younger, it’s that those who know me treat me as I once
was. Louder, less inhibited, more
teasing given and taken.
Jesus comments on this phenomenon in Mark 6.4 (Luke 4.24)
when he notes that no prophet goes without honor except in his home town. It’s not only that our “homies” know us from
way back, it’s that we slip into the comforts of those way back times. My alma mater’s ditty, “I Want to Go Back to
Michigan (to old Ann Arbor town)” sings of this nostalgia for home. Our memories of our youthful home, if our
childhood was pleasant, are souvenirs of experience. I cherish these souvenirs—the memory of snowy
Christmas eves, of apple cider in the dampness and rage of autumn color, of the
gleaming turquoise through the trees of my great-grandfather’s lake as we
turned the last corner from the antique cornfield-- I burnish memories by turning
them over and over in my memory, searching for new perspectives. Then I assemble to act out with my friends
from the old neighborhood. But of
course, they know me too well to take my changed life in ordained ministry too
seriously, and that is both a relief and at times an offense, as I know that I
have changed, but I am not so appreciated by them for it.
I try to play it down the middle: I am the same old guy when
it suits closeness with my friends, and I am a changed man when my moral
commitments demand separation. Yet today’s
Christmas message is that I have to choose one or the other, and that the one
role of a gentle and mature separation from my tyrannical and sacrilegious
inner child is called for even in the midst of the familiar and nostalgic.
To that end, today’s scripture reading incorporates the
Apostle Paul’s minimalist birth narrative of Jesus. Unlike the birth narratives
in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, there are no angels, shepherds, wise men, miraculous
stars, or apparitions or annunciations in the temple. There is no celebrity mom
named Mary. There is no Joseph or manger or inn with animals. There are no swaddling clothes, or
frankincense, gold, and myrrh. There is
no census of Quirinius, or Herod, or slaughter of the innocents. All of these colorful particulars of the
infancy narratives of Jesus are omitted in Paul’s account of the Gospel. Whether he was aware of these infancy traditions is irrelevant, for Paul’s message has always been the salvific meaning of
Christ’s death on the Cross and the liberation of the Holy Spirit for the
creation of a worldwide church. In
Galatians 4, Paul suggests the merest outline of an earliest creedal statement
regarding what Christians call “the incarnation”: “when the fullness of time had come, God sent
his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were
under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.” This is certainly the earliest textual
evidence we have that contextualizes Jesus’ birth, and it predates all the birth
legends in Luke and Matthew.
If we compare the earliest Christian hymn documented by Paul
in Philippians 2 (6-11), we note that for Paul the incarnation was a means of
freedom from slavery. God comes into the
world by sending his son to lead the people from slavery. That slavery was to the elemental spirits of
the world that had to be kept at bay by the Law. When freed—redeemed—by adoption into God’s
family, we are freed from the Law, which was the proscribed customs and rituals of the Israelite people. By taking human form God is leading the
New Exodus promised by Isaiah (Is 40.3).
500 some years prior to Jesus, the Judahite exiles leaving Babylon
thought they were living Isaiah’s new exodus when they submitted to the call to
leave their comforts and business affairs there to make a straight way through
the 700 mile desert back to Jerusalem and Judah. Hadn’t the new exodus been accomplished in
that move? By the time of Jesus, the
majority of people who weren’t in league with Herod and the Romans were
concerned that something was seriously lacking with that exodus. The people were physically returned to Judah,
but there was no Davidic king as promised in their scriptures (2 Sa 7), and God
had neither returned to the Temple nor had God spoken to a prophet since
Malachi just after the return. They were under brutal Roman rule. Instead,
following their return from exile, Ezra and Nehemiah had led the people to
restore the Law and to rebuild the ruined temple and city. The people saw God speaking less through the
prophets and more through the decrees of foreign emperors who enabled the
projects of Ezra and Nehemiah.
So the first aspect of Paul’s creedal affirmation of the
Christmas incarnation is God acting in the fullness, τὸ πλήρωμα, of time. This image is one of pregnancy, whereupon
time had begun counting down to some signal, novel event. Thus there was a time from whence the
countdown started, and a time of fulfillment when time enters into a new
phase. I’m fairly convinced that there
were people who read the prophet Daniel (9. 25-27) in this context of a
countdown to a new age, to an age of the anointed one:
Dan 9.25 (NIV) “Know and
understand this: From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild
Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven
‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’ It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench,
but in times of trouble.26 After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One
will be put to death and will have nothing...”
The
religious authorities read these numbers as years. Artaxerxes, in the seventh year of his reign (Ezra 7.8), allows Ezra not
only to continue with the restoration and rebuilding of the temple, but
Artaxerxes decrees that Ezra, situated in Jerusalem, “possess, appoint magistrates
and judges to administer justice to all the people of Trans-Euphrates“ (Ezra 7.25).
This required a newly functional metropolitan structure, augmented by Nehemiah who rebuilt
Jerusalem’s walls and gates.
483 years (69 sevens) elapsed from Artaxerxes’ 7th year is 26 A.D., about our best
idea of the time of Jesus’ baptism by John, when our textual witnesses report a messianic
fervor (cf. Luke 3.1-7; Mark 1.3-8) amidst both the people and the religious
scholars. The people had almost
certainly understood the prophetic scriptures of Daniel’s 69 weeks of years,
and likely Jesus did too. Hence Jesus applied to himself Daniel’s appellation
“Son of Man.”
This “fullness of time” that Paul situates the incarnation
likely refers to this tradition that Jerusalem’s restoration counted down to a
new age of the anointed one. This
pregnant time of the run up to incarnation of the anointed one thus
demonstrates how Israel’s God controlled the history and destiny of God’s
people. God enters into the history of a
people’s struggle between faith and faithlessness in the form of the incarnated
Son of God. Unlike for Matthew and for
Luke, where faithfulness was found among various people surrounding Jesus’s
birth—Mary, Joseph, Anna, Simeon, Elizabeth, John the Baptist, the common folk
and Pharisees going forth to be baptized—for Paul, the faithfulness that
matters is solely Jesus’. Whereas for Luke
and Matthew’s story of the incarnation, the fact that time was pregnant
suggested an optimum moment for God
to bear forth in the struggle between faith and faithfulness. Yet for Paul—concerned with God’s glory and
absolute freedom-- the struggle of faithfulness is one lonely man’s against a maximum of faithlessness, whereby Jesus
takes on the total incarnated task through his ministry, crucifixion, and
resurrection as the Son of God.
The second creedal statement of Paul regarding the
incarnation of God’s son is the statement, “born of a woman.” Unlike in Mark and Luke (and in later
developments of the institutionalized church), this early creedal statement
shows no interest in the particulars of that woman. There is no exaltation or even identification
of Mary, the mother of God. Paul notes that God is changing time, not creating time anew. There is no “creation ex nihilo” involved in
this change or in this incarnation. The
birth of the anointed Son of God involves the old creation into which God
steps. Yet this involves God in history
in a way that God wasn’t prior. The
theological implications of this are enormous.
If the people of faith see prophecy as operating in the old time, then God
in that old time--at least for Israel--determined history in some strongly
deterministic sense. By stepping into
history, God participates in historical contingency and gives up deterministic
control. Providence is changed by this divine participation in time. God through deterministic control of the countdown
toward the incarnated Son of God could thus be seen as manipulating history,
hardening Pharaohs and other historical actors (Romans 9) to bring about God’s will
in history, for God’s purposes. Yet once
God’s enters history in the form of the woman’s offspring, God I believe moves
toward the cession of strong historical determination and will become in some
sense a participant in the contingency of historical time and human freedom. Jesus was fated, thus determined, but after
God dies on the Cross, the determination of history undergoes a change. Time changes, and so does God’s providential
action in soft power. God leaves the Aristotelian role of "unmoved mover" and becomes an actor both influenced and influencing. God through the
Resurrected Jesus now acts providentially to optimize flourishing and justice
within the constructs of an “open, non-determined” history. God through Jesus, by being born and then by
dying, takes on the fate of all God’s human creation through the woman and cannot
now absolutely predict or precisely determine the future of God's liberated creatures.
This is the insight of “open theology.” God’s action in
Israel was historically deterministic—or at least seen so by the Israelite
writers of the Hebrew Scriptures--paying disobedience and sin back with just
punishment and the mercy that served God’s purposes. But this action changed, and has been
mistaken by some for the absolute death of God. For the witness of post-Easter
humanity has been that the battle between faithfulness and faithlessness has
entered a new phase, one where war is more calamitous and justice more postponed.
God’s incarnation was costly. Yet at the same time, beauty and peace break out
in a new ways that would have startled, I believe, the ancients--and convinces
me of God’s continued and active existence.
If God through the resurrected Jesus has died to the old way of being
God so to create a new way of being human, then this might not surprise
us. We should expect that God allows
freedom for both sin and faith, and that God’s Spirit liberated in the new
exodus over the Jordan in baptism would be non-deterministic and open to
contingency. God in Jesus has ceased
being the tyrant experienced by the ancients.
So to explore this incarnation into a change of being God by
becoming God and human at the same time (as Paul is suggesting in this creedal
statement in Galatians 4), Jesus we must note initiates the age of the spirit that
is a time of contingency, soft power, and persuasion, not of coercion and
force. The latter is not-god. We who
have found adoption into God’s loving household are citizens in that age of the
Spirit because of Christmas. The age of
the Spirit is one where mercy takes precedence over justice. And that is where I find my hope, for myself
and for others. God in Jesus being born
of a woman in the fullness of time in order to redeem us by his Word and Spirit
is a gentler God than the YHWH of the Hebrew Scriptures. This is also to God’s glory. God in Jesus does not give up beckoning and
calling gently to our adoption into the Spirit. For those who refuse there is
Law--and the awful prospect of judgment.
It is meaningful that Paul contextualizes this early creedal
statement about the Son of God’s changing time and becoming human in the form
of adoption into a family of prayer. “And because you are children, God has
sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ’Abba! Father!’” (Gal. 4. 6).
The incarnation into time is thus the era of Spirit-filled prayer. This also suggests the contingency of God’s
providential action. In open theology,
God chooses to act in history by intervening elegantly (parsimoniously and
beautifully) among alternative futures, in the process not violating the
integrity of covenanted human free will.
This choice of God as open to historical contingency thus necessitates
prayer as an input for God’s decision making. If we pray for a certain
alternative (say sustenance for a poor family which we assist the best we can),
we in God’s family add to the desire for a certain kind of future. Sustaining charity is necessary, but prayer
in addition brings God’s mysterious and universal suasion of conscience and soft power into
that particular situation for future relief.
The prayer may not be answered according to the time frame that we hope
for, but I believe that is because God’s providence is optimizing justice and
flourishing amidst a huge number of alternative futures. Such is the glory of God, and such is the
associated necessity of prayer by God’s redeemed family. This I believe Paul is affirming for us at
Christmas.
Jesus during his ministry is leading the descendants of the
Israelites away from the old history and into the new history of the spirit. It
is the spiritual new exodus. You can go home again, like the Babylonian exiles,
but you can’t take up your old life. You
can’t, as Ezra had it, recreate Israelite history in the festivals and the
rituals. We can go home again for
Christmas, but we must come home transformed, both ourselves and our
understanding of God. We have been liberated by the Spirit from the Law. In my
illustration at the beginning of this sermon, I may go to my home town with joy
and levity but with separation (which is holiness) from my old way of being
when I was under the Law. I go home
again not the person I was when I was a child, but I go home as one who puts
away childish things for the sake of the Spirit that dwells within me. It matters not whether my friends and family
accept my transformation or Spirit, but it matters to myself to live with the
integrity and the calling of my transformed self. I may indeed go dishonored in the eyes of my
hometown friends, but I look forward to the unfolding grace, flourishing, and
productivity of the Spirit in the history of those I touch and pray for. For me, God has ceased being a tyrant and a
bringer of retribution. I try to live
that new history out in all my prayerful deeds. I am adopted into God’s family outside of the
Law, in which there is freedom, peace, and joyous relief from the bondage of
sin.
May it be so for all of us this Christmas.
.
