The Gospel texts for these two sermons was John 1:1-14 and John 1:1-18, respectively.
Sermon preached on Christmas Day
You don’t have to be a parent to understand the power of children. You do not have to have held your newborn nephew, or godchild, or daughter to know how precious – how miraculous – new life is. If you’ve ever encountered an infant, or if you’ve even given birth yourself, you can attest to the truth that some sort of incredible power is contained in a baby.
Infants are innocent, of course; they’re also beautiful, and I’ve been told that humans are biologically hard-wired to respond to “cute” things. That’s why baby animals have appealing, exaggerated features: it’s sort of a protective device. The idea that we’re hard-wired to respond to babies isn’t too far off, I think, though what I have in mind isn’t strictly biological, and it’s not got to do with innocence or beauty simply. Babies, I think – children in general, we should say – are such powerful creatures because they represent, better than any living thing, the gift of Hope. There’s nothing more hopeful than new life. There’s no more profound “yes,” no more positive affirmation of the possibility of the goodness of being alive, of being a human, than our welcome of new souls into the world. This doesn’t mean that all births are happy; it doesn’t suggest that childrearing or childhood are always happy things. It does mean, however, that children are real symbols – they participate deeply, deeply in what they express to us. And what they express to us is hope. They convey hope, and they are hope.
It’s significant then, that when God became a person – when God’s eternal Word became flesh, became people, just like us – God became a baby. God chose to be born the same way that you and I were born. If you think about it (and you may have) this didn’t have to happen. God could have just walked onto the scene as a full-grown man or woman. Jesus didn’t live at a time when children were particularly revered, as they are for us. The scrolls and letters that make up our Bible weren’t written during a time when children were celebrated. And yet, God chose to be with us in just the way that we come into being. Jesus grew in his mother’s womb and when the time was right, he was born just as you were born, just as you have given birth, just as you have seen or heard about babies being born. He couldn’t hold up his own head; he couldn’t walk; he had to learn how to drink from a cup, and how to listen; he touched things that he wasn’t supposed to touch and said embarrassing things to strangers.
And he approached the world with an open heart, just as children do. He was a beacon of hope because he was a child. He looked outward with non-discriminating wonder: the world was completely new and completely alive to him. He looked outward and saw what was best. And he drew to himself the love and help of the people around him. He solicited what was best from the adults who cared for him: Joseph, whose life was upended in marrying Jesus’ mother and becoming a refugee to save her child, and Mary, who gave her body and her heart to a person who had the power to break them, just as all mothers do. These are all of the ways that children really are hope: we welcome them into the world and they welcome the world. We give them what is best and they point, again and again, to what is best. If we love them – and the fact that we can’t always help loving them is another sign of hope – they can be the most redemptive thing imaginable.
And Jesus was hope incarnate because he remained a child. He learned how to walk and talk and read and eat, but his open heart never contracted; his wondering eyes never closed – his seeking sight was never diminished. He learned how to repel people, of course, but he never forgot how to attract people. People who loved him, who died for him and in him, and who are the reason that we are here this morning.
I knew about this connection between children and hope before I became a parent, but I thought that it had a lot to do with an individual parent’s hopes for their child or for themselves: we want Julie to be a doctor; I want Henry to go to college because I couldn’t. What I didn’t realize was that it has so much more to do with something we can all relate to. Children are recipients of, the site of, all of our hopes for the world. Everything that we hope for each other and for people who we do not know now and people who are yet to be born. Everything we hope about war, poverty, violence, death, loneliness, exile, alienation, you name it. Everything a savior could possibly need to save us from, this is what we hold in our hearts when we look at children, especially new babies, and think, “Your world could be better. You could make this better. I want to make it better for you.”
And once a baby was born who was better. And who made things better, and who makes us better. More than better – he makes us children. As John says, he gives us power to become children of God, who are born not of blood or of human will, but of God. Which means we are children always. We are real symbols of hope, born to witness to the hope that was in the beginning with God, and the hope that will be forever.
Sermon preached on the First Sunday after Christmas
Children don’t always sleep well. That’s kind of an obvious thing to say around Christmastime, when kids of all ages make a habit of not sleeping. It’s kind of an obvious thing to say to the families of new babies. But even after new babies learn how to sleep, they can unlearn it for a time. Children begin to notice more and more about their world, and they develop vivid imaginations, so they play over the events of today and they imagine the events of tomorrow, and they worry about what they’re missing – we grown-ups can probably understand this.
My child sleeps, and I don’t want to tempt fate by talking about children and sleep this morning. But I was a childhood insomniac, and I vividly remember lying in bed long after my family had turned off all the lights, and long after the sounds of television and dishes and conversation were gone. It was lonely – anybody who can’t sleep for any reason knows how hard it is to feel that you’re the only person awake in the world. And it was frightening. Because if you combine the imagination of a child with the very dark darkness of an empty house, you come up with monsters, aliens, and thieves. Leave a person alone with her thoughts, and dark enough shadows, and fear will not be far away.
It was as a sleepless child that I began to count lights. When I was afraid, I would get out of bed, go to the window, and look for lights. Most often, no matter what time of the night it was, I could find another person out there who was awake, or some sort of a structure that was kept lit all night. Just seeing a light out there was enough to dispel some of my fear. Even now, if I wake up and can’t get back to sleep, I open the curtains to see how many other people are awake – how many pinpoints of light can I find in the darkness.
There’s a reason why sleepless children fear the dark, and why darkness does it work on adults, too. Nighttime, darkness, is another one of these real symbols. Yesterday I preached on this very same Gospel text from John, and in the same way: we talked about children. I said that children are ‘real symbols’ of hope because of how deeply they participate in the reality of hopefulness. Well, there’s a similar thing going on with darkness and fear. The connection between the two is primal. Scary things happen under the cover of darkness. Especially in Jesus’ time, when there was no electricity, no easy access to light to create day for oneself after dark; when there was no way, other than being able to clearly see your surroundings, to protect yourself against something that wanted to hurt you. Night was serious business, and it still is in many parts of our world. It still is here in Chicago, in fact. That’s why John’s words about light and darkness in our Gospel reading ring so true: “What has come into being in [Jesus] is life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
This isn’t a philosopher making ethereal or merely analogous statements about what the experience of Jesus can be related to. This is an actual, physical statement about what light and darkness mean for us, and what Jesus has come into the world to do. Light is safety, all things being visible, having one’s bearings, seeing clearly the outlines of the things that make up life. Light is truth: something illuminating shining onto something else, letting it be known for what it is. Darkness is fear, everything obscured, being disoriented, losing the outlines and shapes of things and losing meaningful perspective on things. Light is those points of light outside of your window – other people, out there, you not being alone. Darkness is isolation, loneliness; being the only person awake.
There’s a long stream of tradition in Christian thought that would view this opposition between light and darkness as having to do with some sort of elite knowledge about God, some disembodied spirituality that makes one closer to God, more “enlightened.” I’m more convinced that one’s feelings about dark and light are about as down-to-earth, as basically human as you can get. And that looking to children helps us see this, because kids still know how to be basically human, and are less shielded from their fears, their desires, and their hopes. A child creating monsters out of shadows, and searching for light in the night sky is right in the middle of what it means to be alive, and what it means to need a Savior. Jesus is the light out there. Jesus is the window of that apartment building across the street that is never dimmed, that never turns its Christmas tree off or shuts its curtains. Jesus is the star that hangs overheard in the middle of winter, visible to every person who gets up and looks for him. Jesus is another person awake with you, out there and in here, in you, the light of all people.
We’re not children anymore – even the kids here aren’t simply children. We are children of God; in Christ we are given power to become children of God. We stand before God without fear. We sleep in peace, under God’s waking eye. We cannot imagine anything in the dark that cannot be overcome by the light of Christ.
(Sermons preached by the Reverend Danielle Thompson at St. Chrysostom's Church in Chicago, IL at 11:00am on Saturday, Dec. 25 and Sunday, Dec. 26, 2010)
