This is no time for a child to be born,
With the Earth betrayed by war and hate
And a comet slashing the sky to warn
That time runs out and the sun burns late.
That was no time for a child to be born
In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;
Honor and truth were trampled by scorn—
Yet here did the Saviour make his home.
When is the time for love to be born?
The inn is full on planet earth,
And by a comet the sky is torn—
Yet Love still takes the risk of birth.
This tiny baby
Whoever is the baby?
Nothing but a little lamb
who says God is and that I am.
Who is this tiny baby?
Just an infant, meek and mild,
just a feeble, mortal child.
Who is this tiny baby?
The Lord strong and mighty
even the Lord mighty in battle.
The king of glory’s coming
who is this
even the Lord of Hosts
This is the tiny baby!
Falling into Sentimentality
I love the Christmas tree with the family gathering together to decorate it, but I wish that we were like the French (and many others) who do their gift-giving on Epiphany, with the coming of the Wise Men, and keep Christmas Day itself as a holy day. We forget the holiness and fall into sentimentality over the tiny baby in the stable. Who is that tiny baby? Even the Creator, almighty and terrible and incomprehensible!
January: With My Own Eyes
New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day come not out of the church year but out of the dawn of human life. To our ancient forebears, many thousands of years before the birth of Jesus, the stretching nights of early winter and the shortening days were terrifying. Was the night going to swallow up the day? Was the life-giving sun going to slide down the western horizon and be lost forever? It must have seemed a real possibility to those dwellers in caves or tree houses, who knew nothing they could not see with their own eyes about the movements of the suns and the stars.
So, when it slowly became apparent that the sun was staying in the sky a minute longer than it had the day before, and then a minute longer, there was great rejoicing, and feasting and fun, and very likely (as today) too much fun. But it was more than fun. It was spontaneous gratitude that the world was not coming to an end.
In the story of the life of Jesus, the first day of January is marked as the feast of his circumcision. All good Jewish boys were ritually circumcised in the first ten days of their lives. So Joseph and Mary carried the eight-day-old baby to the temple and made the required offerings, according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, a pair of turtle-doves or two young pigeons. You might have thought that they would have had family and friends with them for this great event, but even in babyhood it seemed that Jesus turned things upside down. As far as we know there were only three witnesses: the high priest, a very old man named Simeon, and an equally old woman named Anna. Simeon believed that he would not die until he had seen the promised Messiah, and when the baby was put in his arms, he said words which for centuries have been part of evening prayer:
Lord, now let your servant depart in peace as you have
promised,
For with my own eyes I have seen the Saviour
which you prepared in the sight of all people
To be a light to give light to the Gentiles,
and to be the glory of your people, Israel.
An old man and an old woman were the first to acknowledge that this baby was the one they had spent their lives hoping for, the Saviour that all Jews hoped for. Simeon, after his own joyous recognition of the infant, promised Mary nothing easy; a sword would go through her own heart, he prophesied. And Mary must have turned cold inwardly.
But she was young enough to be able to accept difficult demands with courage, and to know that the way of the world is not always the way of the Lord.
The Lord is King, and hath put on glorious apparel;
The Lord hath put on his apparel,
And girded himself with strength.
But not the kind of glorious apparel or worldly power that might have been expected.
Like every newborn, he has come from very far.
His eyes are blinded by the brilliance of the star.
So glorious is he, he goes to this immoderate length
To show his love for us, discarding power and strength.
Girded for war, humility his mighty dress,
He moves into the battle wholly weaponless.
We don’t know much about Jesus’ early life. It’s likely his father taught him carpentry, and this would have developed his muscles and helped to make him a strong man. His mother must have marveled at him, wondered about the angel who came to her to announce his birth, and then the birth itself, with the shepherds coming to bring their humble gifts, and the kings their magnificent ones.
O Simplicitas
An angel came to me
and I was unprepared
to be what God was using.
Mother I was to be.
A moment I despaired,
thought briefly of refusing.
The angel knew I heard.
According to God’s Word
I bowed to this strange choosing.
A palace should have been
the birthplace of a king
(I had no way of knowing).
We went to Bethlehem;
it was so strange a thing.
The wind was cold, and blowing,
my cloak was old, and thin.
They turned us from the inn;
the town was overflowing.
God’s Word, a child so small
who still must learn to speak
lay in humiliation.
Joseph stood, strong and tall.
The beasts were warm and meek
and moved with hesitation.
The Child born in a stall?
I understood it: all.
Kings came in adoration.
Perhaps it was absurd;
a stable set apart,
the sleepy cattle lowing;
and the incarnate Word
resting against my heart.
My joy was overflowing.
The shepherds came, adored
the folly of the Lord,
wiser than all men’s knowing.
The promise of his birth
In the beginning I was confused and dazzled,
a plain girl, unused to talking with angels.
Then there was the hard journey to Bethlehem,
and the desperate search for a place to stay,
my distended belly ripe and ready for deliverance.
In the dark of the cave, night air sweet with the moist breath
of the domestic beasts, I laughed, despite my pains,
at their concern. Joseph feared that they would frighten me
with their anxious stampings and snortings,
but their fear was only for me, and not because of me.
One old cow, udders permanently drooping,
lowed so with my every contraction
that my own birthing cries could not be heard,
and so my baby came with pain and tears and much hilarity.
Afterwards, swaddled and clean, he was so small and tender
that I could not think beyond my present loving
to all this strange night pointed. The shepherds came,
clumsy and
gruff, and knelt and brought their gifts,
and, later on, the Kings; and all I knew was marvel.
His childhood was sheer joy to me. He was merry and loving,
moved swiftly from laughters to long, unchildlike silences.
The years before his death were bitter to taste.
I did not understand, and sometimes thought that it was he
who had lost sight of the promise of his birth.
Mary speaks
O you who bear the pain of the whole earth,
I bore you.
O you whose tears give human tears their worth,
I laughed with you.
You, who, when your hem is touched, give power,
I nourished you.
Who turn the day to night in this dark hour,
light comes from you.
O you who hold the world in your embrace,
I carried you.
Whose arms encircled the world with your grace,
I once held you.
O you who laughed and ate and walked the shore,
I played with you.
And I, who with all others, you died for,
now I hold you.
May I be faithful to this final test:
in this last time I hold my child, my son,
his body close enfolded to my breast,
the holder held: the bearer borne.
Mourning to joy: darkness to morn.
Open, my arms: your work is done.
More Than We Can Do
We are all asked to do more than we can do. Every hero and heroine of the Bible does more than he would have thought it possible to do, from Gideon to Esther to Mary.
The Furthest Reaches of Time and Space
My apartment faces west, and when I go to bed at night and turn out the lights I can see across the great Hudson River to the lights of New Jersey. I can often see the planes coming in, en route to La Guardia Airport, looking like moving stars, though even when the sky is clear there are few real stars visible because of the city lights that burn all night. I think of the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, about four light years away—about twenty-three million million miles. The rare stars I see may be three hundred light years away, and three thousand light years away, and three million. When we human creatures look up at the night sky we are able to see into the furthest reaches of time.
Not only time, but space—vast distances. Galaxies trillions of light years across. Suns so enormous that they make our own sun a mere pinprick.
Atomic Furnaces
The morning star is low on the horizon. There are three more stars pulsing faintly in the city sky. But even if I can’t see a skyful of stars they are there above me nevertheless; the Milky Way, our own galaxy, swings somewhere in the vast dark above the city lights.
All those stars. Suns. More suns than can be imagined. Great flaming brilliant atomic furnaces, the bursting of their atoms providing life. Providing life for their planets. Perhaps there are planets where that which was created by love returns love, and there is joy and worship and praise, and man sings with the angels.
Soaring
When I think of the incredible, incomprehensible sweep of creation above me, I have the strange reaction of feeling fully alive. Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, set against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this—and out of nothing—can still count the hairs of my head.
Wonderful Mix of Creation
Christ, the second Person of the Trinity, has always been, is always, and always will be available to all people and at all times. We are so focused on the Incarnation, on Jesus of Nazareth, that sometimes we forget that the Second Person of the Trinity didn’t just arrive two thousand years ago, but has always been. Christ was the Word that shouted all of Creation into being, all the galaxies and solar systems, all the subatomic particles, and the wonderful mix of Creation that is what makes up each one of us.
Jesus said, to the horror of the establishment people, “Before Abraham was, I am.”
This Extraordinary Birth
The Nativity is a time to take courage. How brave am I? Can I bear, without breaking apart, this extraordinary birth?
After annunciation
This is the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
There’d have been no room for the child.
The Bethlehem explosion
And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed….And Joseph also went up from Galilee…to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.
—Gospel of Luke
The chemistry lab at school
was in an old greenhouse
surrounded by ancient live oaks
garnished with Spanish moss.
The experiment I remember best
was pouring a quart of clear fluid
into a glass jar, and dropping into it,
grain by grain, salt-sized crystals,
until they layered
like white sand on the floor of the jar.
One more grain—and suddenly—
water and crystal burst
into a living, moving pattern,
a silent, quietly violent explosion.
The teacher told us that only when
we supersaturated the solution,
would come the precipitation.
The little town
was like the glass jar in our lab.
One by one they came, grain by grain,
all those of the house of David,
like grains of sand to be counted.
The inn was full. When Joseph knocked,
his wife was already in labor; there was no room
even for compassion. Until the barn was offered.
That was the precipitating factor. A child was born,
and the pattern changed forever, the cosmos
shaken with that silent explosion.
The Other Side of Reason
To paint a picture or to write a story or to compose a song is an incarnational activity. The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary, who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command.
Obedience is an unpopular word nowadays, but the artist must be obedient to the work, whether it be a symphony, a painting, or a story for a small child. I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, “Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me.” And the artist either says, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.
As for Mary, she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child’s creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss.
God, through the angel Gabriel, called on Mary to do what, in the world’s eyes, is impossible, and instead of saying, “I can’t,” she replied immediately, “Be it unto me according to thy Word.”
How difficult we find the Annunciation. How could one young, untried girl contain within her womb the power which created the galaxies? How could that power be found in the helplessness of an infant? It is more than we, in our limited
, literal-mindedness, can cope with, and so we hear, “I can’t be a Christian because I can’t believe in the virgin birth,” as though faith were something which lay within the realm of verification. If it can be verified, we don’t need faith.
I don’t need faith to know that if a poem has fourteen lines, a specific rhyme scheme, and is in iambic pentameter, it is a sonnet; it may not be a good sonnet, but it will be a sonnet. I don’t need faith to know that if I take flour and butter and milk and seasonings and heat them in a double boiler, the mix will thicken and become white sauce. Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys. Surely it wasn’t reasonable of the Lord of the Universe to come down and walk this earth with us and love us enough to die for us and then show us everlasting life? We will all grow old, and sooner or later we will die, like the old trees in the orchard. But we have been promised that this is not the end. We have been promised life.
What would have happened to Mary (and to all the rest of us) if she had said No to the angel? She was free to do so. But she said Yes. She was obedient, and the artist, too, must be obedient to the command of the work, knowing that this involves long hours of research, of throwing out a month’s work, of going back to the beginning, or, sometimes, scrapping the whole thing. The artist, like Mary, is free to say No. When a shoddy novel is published, the writer is rejecting the obedient response, taking the easy way out. But when the words mean even more than the writer knew they meant, then the writer has been listening. And sometimes when we listen, we are led into places we do not expect, into adventures we do not always understand.
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