1 January 2012

So here we are, gathered around the altar at St Thomas on the first day of a new year of grace.  The date is arbitrary, of course:  who really knows when one year ends and another begins?  It is a lovely thing that, as we have come to arrange the months and years, the first day of the new calendar year falls squarely within Christmastide, and we name the New Year for Jesus by celebrating on the first day of the year the day of his naming.  The festival of the joining together of things earthly with things heavenly gives us a framework for thinking of what to conclude about last year and what to hope for the one upcoming.  We are those who carry within our fellowship the glory of this mystery, hidden for so many generations of men and women: it is Christ amongst us, the hope of glory.  So we enter into the new year resolutely pursuing the full understanding and complete knowledge of this mystery, in which all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden, and, as St Paul endeavoured, so do we proclaim and instruct “everyone in all wisdom, in order to present all perfect in Christ.”

To say this so directly is to risk sounding grandiose and departing from the realm of our ordinary experience, I know.  But it is our ordinary experience that is to be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.  The collect that I used this morning is not really the one appointed for either the first Sunday after Christmas or the feast of the Holy Name.  It is the one for the second Sunday of Christmas, which we scarcely get to use, yet which sums up the season and is widely used amongst other Anglican Churches for this day.  Our prayer book version goes like this:  “O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.”  The English worship book reads slightly differently:  “Almighty God, who wonderfully created us in your image and yet more wonderfully restored us through your Son Jesus Christ; Grant that as he came to share our humanity, so we may share the life of his divinity, who is alive and reigns,. . . now and forever.”  But I think my favorite version is that found in the old Anglican Missal.  I memorized it a long time ago as the prayer to say while mingling the water and wine at the offertory: “O God who didst lay the foundation of man’s being in wonder and honour, and in greater wonder and honor didst renew the same;  Grant by the mystery of this water and wine that he who became partaker of our humanity may make us joint-heirs of his very godhead; who liveth and reigneth, world without end.” 

The message is the same, though the manner of its saying differs.  We were made by God for intimacy with the divine.  And when we had brought upon ourselves the failure of this project, God intervened to restore and renew us, not merely at the level of our original  creation, but at a new and exalted level—the level of actual sharing in the divine life—Christ in us, the hope of Glory!  What can this possibly mean?  At first glance it might seem as if we are called to live a heavenly life in the midst of our earthly existence, and that is not wrong.  But it is easily misunderstood.  We are meant to live a human life that reflects the image of God and shares in his divine life, which is to say, we undertake to manage our lives in such a way that Jesus Himself is reflected in us, because He dwells within us.  This does not make us less human, but more human than we normally are.

There is a little paragraph I found in Merton recently which gives us an insight, I think, into the process of sharing the divine life while living as human beings.  “Whatever is done naturally may be either sacred or profane, according to the degree of our awareness, but whatever is done unnaturally is essentially and irrevocably profane!” 

Perhaps I ought to take a moment and look at that word, profane.  It means essentially to have no awareness of or respect for what is sacred.  A profane person ignores the realm of the sacred or sets himself against it.  To be profane is to be totally restricted to the secular—by intent or by default.  So, then, to do something naturally, that is, to act in a human fashion, can be a sacred act if it is done in the awareness of the presence of God and for his glory and according to his will, or profane if God is left completely out of account.

Of course, deciding what is natural might take some effort, but it means that acts of honest work, caring for ones friends and neighbors and family, eating and drinking and love-making, caring for the earth out of which we were made, and things like that, can be done according to God’s will and in full awareness of doing them in his presence.  He intended such things when we were created and such continue to be ways of expressing our humanity even when restored and renewed—until the new conditions of the age to come are reached. 

It is also possible to do such things without attention to or awareness of God—even natural things can be done in a profane way.  But unnatural things are always profane—that is, they are done without reverence for the sacred.  This also takes some reflection, but perhaps we might say this: things are unnatural which break the bonds of human affection, that destroy community, that alienate one person from another, that exalt one person or one race or one economic group over against another, leaving in their wake grief and poverty and ruin and loss and, perhaps, even death.  Such things cannot be redeemed—they are essentially profane.

So that is it, then.  As it always has been, our task in the new year is to take the “stuff” of our ordinary lives and do it in such a way that this stuff becomes sacred.  That was always our purpose here, but now we have been lifted from the status of mere nature to the status of children of God and heirs of Christ—God has translated us out of the realm of darkness into his own marvelous light, wonderfully renewing and restoring our human nature.  Such renewal comes with a mission attached to it: as Paul put it, “so then, as you received Jesus as Lord and Christ, now live your lives in him, be rooted in him and built up on him, held firm by the faith you have been taught and overflowing with thanksgiving.”