Everything a You - Ps. 147, John 1:1-18
“Well, so that is that,” so begins the final section of W. H. Auden’s poem, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. He goes on to describe dismantling the tree, the leftovers in the fridge, going back to school and work, and our failure “to love all our relatives” having “Grossly overestimated our powers.” I always think of Auden’s poem this time of year because it expresses what many of us feel today or will be feeling soon enough, as the last celebrations of Christmas sputter out. If you’re like my family, the tree that has been up since the beginning of Advent is starting to lose its needles, soon to be thrown into a brush pile for the birds. The trash can is fuller than I’d like to admit, despite my best efforts. And though I still have New Years to look forward to (along with the birthday of my daughter Lucia), I know that soon there won’t be any celebrations on the near horizon. What will occupy that special aisle of Walgreens now? Valentines, I guess.
We love anticipation. Maybe it is something hardwired in us, a constant looking toward the future, but it seems to me that our love has turned to an obsession in recent years. I can remember when Christmas wasn’t on our lips until November and yet stores are now ready with their displays well before that. In my own life and the lives of many I know, anticipation seems to be a strategy to keep ourselves going, like a trail of cookies slowly luring the spirit of happiness along the path. It could be vacations, or a holiday, the next Marvel movie or the release of another season of the Great British Baking Show? The forms vary but the structure is the same—we want something to look forward to. And that makes days like today a little hard.
I’ve begun to wonder if part of the reason we love anticipation so much is that we fear that our lives are meaningless without it. When we are still and silent doubts begin to creep in. We live in a world where so often we are treated as objects—quantified and calculated. People like Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize winning scientist, say that “you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” What if Crick is right? What if what we feel at the amazing discoveries of science and the beauty of creation are nothing more than synapses and chance, reducible to mere molecules and nothing more. If that’s the case, then meaning is just a convention and value is a strategy for nothing more than survival. That’s a hard burden to carry, so we distract ourselves with entertainment, and replace hope with anticipation, longing for the next thing to keep us going.
But Christmas, the actual event of Christ’s coming into the world in flesh and blood, offers a different story. In a world categorized and calculated, manipulated and exploited, God came to be with us and alongside us. And in that coming Christ did not simply arrive to offer us some new thing to look forward to, an ultimate expectation in the heavenly realm. No, Christ came into a world objectified by power and greed and said “you.” Not the “you” of Francis Crick in which every subject is made an object. What Christ brings, Auden reminds us in his poem, is that moment in “the stable where for once in our lives/ Everything became a You and nothing was an It.”
In Christ’s coming into the world, he shines a light on a cosmos infused with God’s love, filled with God’s life. This world is a place, as our Psalm puts it, where each star has a name by which God calls her. C.S. Lewis describes this reality in his Narnian novel The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In one episode the character Eustace, an English boy transported to Narnia, meets a personified star. Surprised, he says, “In our world…a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” To which he is answered, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” God is the one who calls us by name because God knows that neurons and molecules, are only the things we are made of, not what we are. God’s world, born of love and relationship, is a world not of it, but of you and you and you.
This world, John’s Gospel tells us, is not in the end a place,
….where Euclid's geometry
And Newton's mechanics would account for our experience,
as Auden puts it in his poem. It is instead a world that hangs together through the reality of God’s living Word, a Word that is a person, a Word that becomes flesh and blood and pitches his tent right down among us. This is a Word that says yes and you to all creation, an affirmation of the mundane realities that are always at play around us from the trail of ants running across the sidewalk to the song of robins on a sunny December day. This Word is also a yes to the everyday mysteries of doing laundry and taking out the trash, caring for children and being available to neighbors. With this Word our lives do not need anticipation to make them meaningful, they are already valuable by simply existing. And as a result, “Living a good life might just be unspectacular, and it might just be the way to redemption,” as the writer Jeff Reimer recently put it.
The tree with all its lights will be coming down soon. And with it the ornaments, the wreaths and collected cards. We will enjoy our gifts for a while, but soon enough they will fade into the normal mix of stuff. But in all of this, if we open ourselves in silence, if we can stay still long enough, resisting the draw of the world rushing on, then we will hear the intimate whisper of our name, spoken by the Word of God made present and personal in our midst. And we will know, that Christmas has come and is not over, even in twelve days. Christ is here, with us, and our lives with him will only grow in depth and goodness. That is something worth looking forward to. Amen.