Isaiah 52:7-10; Psalm 98
Hebrews 1:1-4; John 1:1-14
The Rev. Cameron Partridge
December 25, 2024
I will not cease from honoring that matter which works my salvation. – John of Damascus
Good Morning, St. Aidan’s friends, and Christmas blessings to you. Finally we have arrived at Christmas morning. Our Advent journey has carried us through so much change, as David Mealy preached on Sunday: our extended observance helped us to hold all that was happening in our country, in our world, and in our lives. Through that season, the theme of the Second Advent shifted, turned in what might have seemed a backward-seeming way, to bring us to the first. The end of all things with the coming of the Son of Humanity rewound, in a sense, to bring us to the first arrival of that Son as a newborn in a manger in Bethlehem. Book analogies come easily – reading the last chapters, then skipping the middle, and ending with the first. But what if we thought of this process as like a cassette tape, child of the eighties that I am? Imagine kneeling in front that relic known as a tape deck after the last song on the side has ended. Don’t flip the tape. Instead, press stop. Then reverse. Listen to the tape spooling back through what you just heard plus a song further. Then stop. (You’ll have to guess how far to go, how long to wait.) Then press play. Listen. When the song ends, before it can repeat what you heard the previous week, do it all again: stop; reverse through the song plus one; play. Then reverse all the way to the beginning of the tape. This will take longer. Sit there listening to it unspool from the right side and respool on the left. Finally – click – it has stopped. You have reached the beginning. Hopefully the tape has not gotten caught on something in its rewinding, becoming a tangled mess. In which case, you will need to get out a pencil and prepare to painstakingly rotate it all back onto the cassette again…
In the beginning was the Word, we heard in our iconic gospel passage from John this morning. In the beginning was the story, I preached last night. We could also say, in the beginning was the song. The image of a tape resonates for me this morning not simply for nostalgia’s sake (and God knows I’m susceptible), but because of how materially it renders the sonic unfolding of music, of word. I think of receiving recorded music as a child and teen, including on Christmas morning – for me it was mostly in the form of cassettes. A Best of the Beatles two-tape set given to me by a beloved babysitter who had so often played her family’s albums for me on the turntable. In college, mix tapes painstakingly made for friends and my beloved. None of them sounded best on cassette, of course – records, CDs, even digital are so much better. Live and in person best of all. But something about the play and reverse, the winding and rewinding, the vulnerability to entanglement, dramatizes the materiality of music, of sound, of sacred story told backwards and forwards. The Word becoming flesh and unspooled among us. And we have perceived its glory. We were given the gift not only of that divine solidarity, the among us, the Creator coming to live among, redeem, recreate the creatures. We were also enabled to perceive the glory of that solidarity, that joining, that transformation– the glory as of a beloved child truly seen by the parent divine, beholding and being beheld, full of grace and truth. However much our lives unspool, we are joined, we are beheld, we are being repaired in all our beloved materiality.
The flesh of the Word is at the heart of the joyous restoration that today’s Feast, the Mass of Christ, celebrates. Our opening prayers reflect this emphasis: the Word was made flesh, alleluia, alleluia! And dwelt among us, alleluia, alleluia![1] Embodiment is good, my friends. It is good in its givenness and in its changeability, its vulnerability and its possibility. Through our enfleshment we are connected to all of creation, wound and bound up with the vast variety of the earth’s features and creatures: with mountains and snow, with deserts and cacti, with oceans, lakes, and streams, with micro-organisms and whales. Our flesh connects us. The fragility of that shared enfleshment has long caused us to stumble, has inspired us not to embrace our embodiment in all its variety, has dislocated us from our deep belonging to the earth. And so God the Creator, the parent of us all, came among us in God the child, hallowing and redeeming our embodiment, our creaturely enfleshment, joining us so that we might join God. As the fourth century theologian and bishop Athanasius wrote, God “assumed our humanity so that we might become God.”[2] The collect for the Second Sunday of Christmas renders the mystery in this way: “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.”[3]
That sharing of human and divine life hinges upon the hallowing of flesh. The flesh of a fragile baby, the wounds of a vulnerable adult. The flesh that is of the earth itself, formed from the dust of the ground, spirit- breathed. “I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, and accepted to dwell in matter, and through matter worked my salvation,” wrote the eighth century theologian John of Damascus. “I will not cease from honoring matter, through which my salvation was worked.”[4] I will not cease from giving thanks for the gift of enfleshment, however much it may vex me. I will not cease from celebrating the joining of God the Creator with this unruly creation. On this Christmas, may we rejoice in the Word made flesh, unspooled among us, redeeming and healing us, winding and binding us up in our deep belovedness. May we open our eyes, our ears, our very pores to perceive the goodness of our creation, the gladness of our redemption, the wonder of our invitation to join the divine life of the One who poured themself out, to uplift humanity and all creation, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, spirit of our spirit. May we answer that invitation in all its mystery with a resounding, joyous yes.
[1] The Book of Occasional Services (New York: Church Publishing, 2003), 12.
[2] Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977), Ch. 54, p. 93.
[3] The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing, 1979), 214.
[4] John of Damascus, trans. Andrew Louth, Three Treatises on the Divine Images (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977), Ch. 16, p. 29.
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