Photo: Walter Chávez
Dear East Tennessee Friends,
Greetings!
As I write to you, just after the longest night of the year, we are in the last days as Advent gives way to Christmas. As altar guild members prepare and choir members tend their throats with lozenges and hot tea and honey, those who are to preach in our parish churches in East Tennessee are once again challenged to proclaim what cannot ever be completely conveyed with words: God is with us.
Looking over my Christmas Eve sermons from years gone by in Asheville, Lexington, and now in East Tennessee, I often turn to poets and hymn writers and lyricists to add to the sacred wisdom from Isaiah and the Gospels which we read as Christmas arrives one more time. Now, it seems kind of silly. Find as many words as possible to say as many times as you can what is most clearly said with four words: God is with us.
God is with us. That is the whole point. The Incarnation is God’s greatest gift to humanity and to all things created by God. With Mary’s consent, the Holy Spirit moved through her life to bring Jesus into this broken and beautiful world. In Jesus, we see the human face of God. In Jesus, we see God’s promise to be with us and remain with us always.
From now on, there is no Godforsaken place. Because God chose to enter the world through Jesus, everywhere you and I go is a place where God is present, too.
While there are no Godforsaken places, there are places where we have done great harm. From Wendell Berry’s poem, “How to Be A Poet”, Berry writes, “There are no unsacred places;/ there are only sacred places/ and desecrated places.”
Through the Incarnation, God chose to become involved in every place and every person. There are no insignificant people. There are no places in the middle of nowhere. Through the Incarnation, God says everything counts and matters and has value.
So, when you see fellow humans dehumanized through political speech or cruel immigration practices, when you hear neighbors spoken of as less-than-human, I would invite you to offer a Gospel no to that way.
Choose another path which reconsecrates the places in our world where the truth of the Incarnation has been marred by the times when we have mistreated each other, disfigured each other, and failed to see each other as persons worthy of dignity and respect. In saying yes to the Incarnation, feed the hungry, house the unhoused, welcome the stranger, visit the prisoner. Go the places where others believe God is not present.
God is with us. In the Incarnation, God chooses to be with us here in this world. God also chooses to make us all a people together. The Incarnation disrupts our tendency towards tribalism, towards us versus them thinking. We are not simply called to love the enemy. Over time, through the grace of God, we can come to believe that the enemy becomes friend.
As you gather to worship on Christmas Eve, please know how grateful I am for the preachers in our diocese, both clergy and lay, who proclaim the Good News, telling again the joy and mystery of the Incarnation. I am confident you will hear many an edifying and challenging and inspiring and renewing word from our pulpits.
In all that you will hear, remember this: God is with us.
Peace,
+ Brian