Christmas is all about hope. In Christian hearts it is all about the intertwined revelation and realization of Emmanuel “God with us.” The idea of God with us is all about hope, trust, faith and relief. At Christmas we are reminded of the revelation of God’s eternal presence with and within us, but we also are reminded of the revelation of the humanity of God in the Christ child. The realization that God has the experience of breath and hurt and hunger and sleep and growth and work and of all of life is the understanding that God always is with us. Even in a pandemic.
On the eve of Christmas we “gather” around our symbolic offerings of gifts and candles and we sing the carols that tell the story of the child born in a manger—divinity born in humility. On Christmas we “gather” around tables laden with the special gifts of sustenance and nourishment. At some time or other we give each other gifts as we act out the ritual of the revelation of goodness and mercy that comes in the loving act of giving. Even in this 21st century pandemic we have managed to gather online, on the phone, through social media—we have gathered because the essence of Christmas is the shared revelation of the arrival of full-blown love among and within us.
On the First Sunday after Christmas the lectionary leads us to more spiritually metaphorical insights. The scripture points to light in the darkness. We remember in prayer the new light enkindled in our hearts. We listen to Isaiah (62:1) prophesy Jerusalem’s “vindication shines out like the dawn, and her salvation like a burning torch.” The imagery of light covers the panoply of metaphor from the slow emergence of enlightenment to the consuming fire of love. In the opening passage of John’s Gospel (1:1-18) we are treated to the image of “the light of all people” that “shines in the darkness” and yet “the darkness did not overcome it.” We learn that the prophet John the baptizer “came as a witness to testify to the light,” the “true light, which enlightens everyone.” We are reminded of the eternity of God’s love that both “shines” right now and yet was not ever past present or future overcome by the absence of light. We are reminded in the epistle to the Galatians (4:4) that it is forever now “when the fullness of time had come” that God reminds us that we are children of love.
The metaphor of light as love is powerful precisely because as humans we have daily and constantly the experience of the revelation of light emerging and growing and shining and bringing warmth, indeed as the sunlight in Western Oregon has today brought comfort into the midst of the string of winter rain. We are reminded that this new love that we experience each year at Christmas, like light, is the realization of a promise of eternity in our hearts. In households everywhere as we hang up our new shirts and move the furniture to make way for something new, as we smile and say “thank you” over and over for our new gifts, we demonstrate how much our lives are enhanced by the sudden understanding that it was love in action that acquired that gift that now changes our daily life in simple and yet profound ways. Love enters in and once in, like the light, grows.
The metaphor for Christmas is that the truth, the now, the revelation and the realization is the moment to embrace love. Now the fullness of time has come, now we see that as children of God, created in the image of God, which is love, we must open our hearts to reveal and realize that in this love we have seen a glory full of grace and truth (John 1:14); and that “we have all received, grace upon grace” (1:16).
The light, the grace, these are love.
First Sunday after Christmas all years (Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Psalm 147 or 147:13-21; Galatians 3:23-25;4:4-7; John 1:1-18)
©2020 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved
Dimensions of Reality: glbt Christian spirituality 