The Star Was The Father’s Stare Christmas 1 C 2021
I was driving up the Jarrettsville Pike on my way to Christ
Church Forest Hill, Rock Spring Parish for my first Christmas morning there.
Just past Hess Road and Royal Farms, in a field on my left, sitting on the
ground and facing me – watching as if somehow expecting me to drive by at just
that instants – was an American Bald Eagle. I slowed down. We sized one another
up.
The Eagle is the sign, the symbol, for John the Evangelist,
he of the Fourth Gospel – a story of Jesus unlike the other three in so many
ways. I will be reading the opening cadences of John in just a short while, I
thought. And he seems to be asking, in the surprise appearance of this majestic
bird, if I am up to the task. It was intimidating and exhilarating all at once.
The eagle in the field seemed to possess an ancient wisdom. Just like the
storyteller of the Fourth Gospel who means to take us back to a time before
time itself. “In the beginning…”
We have heard this before. They are the opening words of
Hebrew Scripture, and thus of the Bible itself: In the beginning when God
created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness
covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the
waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
John is a poet, and is pointing us all the way back to the
time before time, a place before there was space. There was formlessness,
emptiness, a void, lurking in the darkness that covered everything, when all of
a sudden, the breath, the wind, the spirit from God hovered, swept, was
brooding over the face of the deep waters of chaos.
John’s first audience recognizes this. Their world was factions
against factions; a foreign presence of brutality sucking all the resources and
money out of the local economy; Roman crosses lining the sides of the famous
Roman roadways, via Romana, as reminders of what happens to anyone who
challenges the Imperial God Caesar and his bureaucratic and military minions.
The world as it had been was broken. Formless. Without sense. So utterly unlike
the resulting world God had imagined and created “in the beginning.” A world of
light.
This is poetry. John imagines it is time to begin again. To
start over. To go back to the beginning. John imagines that Jesus is the new
beginning. Jesus is the light. That Jesus sets out on a mission of what the
Jewish people would call tikkun olam – repair of the world. It is at
times like those which John inhabited, and times like these which we inhabit,
that the world needs the poetic imagination – which is why enormous swaths of
Hebrew and Christian scriptures are written in poetry. It is why the entire
Quran is one long poem. All this sacred poetry is meant to be recited in
public, often sung, in the original languages so that it sounds like poetry
once again.
We need not understand the original Hebrew, Koine Greek and
Arabic – for just the sound is enough to work on our imaginations; to inspire
us to find new ways, better ways to repair the world. As we heard on Christmas
Eve, Jesus leaves us with only one job to repair the world: Love. Love God.
Love Neighbors. Love Ourselves.
Poets, poetry, and repair of the world. Joseph Brodsky,
self-exiled from the Soviet Union, the first U.S. poet to become a Nobel
Laureate in Literature, and then Poet Laureate of the United States, used to
write a Christmas poem every year:
In the cold season, in a locality
accustomed to heat more than
to cold, to horizontality more than
to a mountain,
a child was born in a cave in order
to save the world;
it blew as only in deserts in
winter it blows, athwart.
To Him, all things seemed enormous:
His mother’s breast,
the
steam
out of the ox’s nostrils, Caspar,
Balthazar, Melchior – the team
of Magi, their presents heaped by
the door, ajar.
He was but a dot, and a dot was the
star.
Keenly without blinking, through
pallid stray
Clouds, upon the child in the
manger, from far away –
From the depth of the universe,
from its opposite end – the star
was looking into the cave. And the
star was the Father’s stare.
December
24, 1987/translated by the author
Somehow Brodsky captures what John is urging us to imagine:
before there was anything at all, Jesus, the word become flesh was always there
– the strange way in which God the Father from 14 billion light years across
the universe looking into the cave as the star. Stars – from which we are all
made – we are stardust. The starlight travels from the source of all creation
to see its story begin again as a baby. A story of setting out to repair the
world with one singular strategy: Love.
When sentenced to five years in a Siberian labor camp, Brodsky
was asked by a judge what his profession was? Brodsky responded: a poet. Who
recognizes you as a poet? No one. Did you study this? This? How did you become
a poet? You didn’t even finish high school? I didn’t think you could get this
from school. How then? Brodsky: I think that it…comes from God.
This is what John was saying nearly 2000 years ago: it all
comes from the Word, from God, from the Word become flesh to dwell among us.
It’s not a matter of how this happens, but rather what does it mean. It means
to repair the world we have only one singular job: Love.
“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have
seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth. …
From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” From the depths of
the universe, from its opposite end, the star looks into the cave of our
hearts. The star is the Father’s stare. Does it find the Love God’s Son gave us
to tend? To share?
To give away with abandon? John imagined this is what we
would all be doing by now. Perhaps that’s what the Eagle I saw that first
Christmas morning wanted to know: Where’s the love John and the Word become
flesh came to announce? The eagle seems to know: like poetry, Love comes from
God. It only needs to be accepted into our hearts. Amen.
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