Sunday, December 26, 2021

The Star Was the Father's Stare Christmas 1C 2021

 

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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