First Sunday After Christmas

1 Samuel 1:1-2, 7b-28; Colossians 1:9-20; Luke 2:22-40

Christmas is a season where the wings of diverse Christologies fold together.  (By “Christology” I mean theories about who Jesus was and is.  “Low” Christologies view Jesus as a human like others, a rabbi, a healer, but no more divine than anyone else; “high” Christologies emphasize Jesus’ divinity.  Mark has a “lower” Christology than John, for example.  Go check it out, and see if you can see the signs!)

Today we have a high Christological reading in Colossians (and at the Eucharist, in John 1:1-14).  Jesus is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and earth were created.”  This is the vision of Jesus as “the fullness of God,” not as you and I might be signs of God, but completely and totally, before time and beyond space.

And the low Christology?  Well, look at that stable.  I’ve been pondering the pull of the stable story on us.  Matthew doesn’t mention a stable or a manger, and Mark and John don’t say anything about Jesus’ birth.  But people everywhere see great significance and meaning in that stable.  We flock to mangers and creches, even tacky plastic ones.  

The stable, the manger, is as human as we can get.  That stable is not even where humans live; it’s where animals live.  Jesus is passing through the animal kingdom on his way to humanity, uniting all of creation.

The sacrament of Christmas lies in this polarity between the high and the low, the fullness and the emptiness, the cosmic power and the helpless human infant.  If sacraments are visible signs of invisible grace, the stable and the manger are exhibit A.

This polarity is not only true of Jesus.  We, through adoption and grace, are shot through with divinity in the midst of our “stable” lives.  Millions of people live in conditions that we would not tolerate for farm animals, but even so they shine.  The stable is where we hide our divinity; the stable is where the light shines and calls others to honor it.

As you are “filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding,” may you claim and know your own beloved divinity.  May you honor it in others, especially those closest to the stable.  God is reconciling all things: heaven and earth, creatures and creator.  

Simeon saw the divinity in the child; Anna saw it and praised God.  Do you see the divinity around you?  Within you?