Winter's God

Advent Vespers, Week One

Psalm 19
The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.

Romans 1
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Nature proclaims her Maker’s glory.

I am often reminded of this during long walks, beneath trees, or on crisp and snowy winter nights. For all its brokenness, our world is full of goodness and truth and beauty. As Christians, we believe that this goodness and truth and beauty reflect the ultimate and absolute Goodness and Truth and Beauty of God. Everything good and true and beautiful is a gift. That’s why our natural response, our natural instinct, in response to such wonders, is gratitude, deep and spiritual.

Nature is not God. Yet God is hidden behind nature, the Creator reflected in His Creation. Over and again the Bible insists that everything in the world, above and upon and beneath the earth, worships and praises God in voices we cannot hear. That’s why God is so close to us in the wilderness, so quiet and thrilling and raw. We fish because it brings us closer to God. We hunt because it brings us closer to God. We gaze into the fire, into the snowfall, into the starry-decked heavens, because on some level, which we can barely perceive, we see the ripples of God moving just behind it all.

Sometimes we mix up the relationship between God and nature. Pagans and skeptics alike claim that the stories of sacred Scripture are just metaphors for natural cycles. Puritans and fundamentalists react to this by treating nature as if she were purely mechanical, severed from the life of the divine. Both extremes are wrong. When we find ourselves in the deep places of nature—where the veil betwixt this world and the next seems at its most diaphanous—there we can scent, like woodsmoke on the wind, that original edenic harmony once shared between God and Man and the world. Then is life most as it ought to be. Then do we gather up some broken shards of our intended peace.

Christmas, some say, falls when it does because of nature. The old Romans, as the story goes, celebrated the rebirth of the sun at the winter solstice. Before the solstice, the days waned ever shorter, yet after the solstice the sun rose renewed and unconquerable, Sol Invictus. Christians took over this date, they claim, so that the rebirth of the sun might mark the birth of the Son of God. It’s a cute little fable, to be sure—a good nursery rhyme, perhaps. But the historical truth is a bit more complex.

You see, long ago, pagan Greeks attempted to exterminate God’s people Israel. They tried to eliminate anything that marked Jews as Jewish. So the Greeks desecrated the holy Temple in Jerusalem and rededicated it to Zeus—at the winter solstice. The Israelites, by grace of God, rallied and repulsed these sadistic interlopers, and they rededicated the Temple to the One True God on the anniversary of its abominable desecration—on the solstice, the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev. The remembrance of this victory became Hanukkah, the winter festival of lights.

So beloved was Hanukkah by God’s people that a prophecy arose, a prophecy claiming that God’s promised Messiah—the Christ for whom faithful Israelites had prepared themselves now for centuries—would be born on Hanukkah. That is, on the 25th day of the winter month of Kislev, the Hebrew equivalent of December. And so it came to pass, that the Virgin Mary gave birth to a Son and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths and laid Him in a manger. For indeed, the Advent of Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of all prophecy.

Thus, in a way, we do celebrate Jesus’ birth when we do because of the winter solstice. But we didn’t steal it from Sol Invictus. In fact, that Roman solar holiday was invented by the Emperor Aurelian in the Third Century specifically to counteract the growing celebration of Christmas. And it never seems to have caught on. Nobody likes a knock-off.

Does it matter whether Jesus was really born on December 25th? Not particularly. Does it matter that we inherited a promise from the Jews rather than co-opted a practice from the pagans? I think it does. But regardless of how we got here, how pleasant it is, in our darkest hour, to witness the growing light of the sun heralding to all the earth the birth of our true Light, the Son of God, in a little cave in Bethlehem. Nature proclaims her Maker’s glory, and the goodness of the world points us to the goodness of God. During this Advent time of preparation and watchful waiting, seek out the beauty of nature, of winter, of all the world around us. Seek it out most diligently in hearts of women and men.

There you shall see, as through a glass and darkly, the ripples of the living God reflected in the works of His hands.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.