Imperial

Propers: The Nativity of Our Lord (Christmas III), AD 2022 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

One of the most remarkable things about the Christian vision of the world is its cosmopolitanism. Christ is not born to a single people, a single nation, a single culture, but to all peoples, all nations, all cultures—the entirety of the cosmos!

So often scholars attempt to portray the early Church as a ragtag band of desert fanatics, wild-eyed fundamentalists, reactionaries against the foreign occupation of their land. But I don’t see any of that in the writings of the New Testament.

Luke’s Gospel, from which we read every Christmas Eve, is at great pains to situate the Nativity of Our Lord within the context of the Roman Empire. He stresses Jesus’ descent not only from Abraham but from Adam, indeed from God. Luke is writing for the world, offering Jesus up not only as a rival Emperor but as an anti-Emperor, the one true King of kings and Savior of the world.

Paul, meanwhile, who wrote so very many Epistles which have come down to us, is perfectly happy living as an imperial subject and citizen of the world. His biography is really quite remarkable. Paul is a devout Jew and committed Pharisee, who is most fluent and comfortable speaking Greek, debating philosophy; while also very proud of his Roman citizenship, which he inherited from his Jewish father. That’s quite a mix.

He spends his time jet-setting about the Mediterranean: the Middle East, Asia Minor, the Balkans, Italy, Spain, some of those lovely islands to which we wish we could cruise. And he serves and teaches and works with Macedonians, Celts, Greeks. If he were alive today, he’d likely be splitting his time between London, Tel Aviv, and New York. And he’s not horrified by what all he sees; he quite enjoys the blend of races, religions, languages, cuisines. Are they not all people of God?

And John—John might be the most cosmopolitan and universalist of them all. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That’s how John begins his Gospel. That’s his Christmas story. The Word, the Logos, is a Greek philosophical concept: it’s the mind of God, the reason of God, the faculty by which God interacts with His Creation.

And that’s what Jesus is, John says. That’s who Jesus is. He is the very mind of God, the logic and the reason and the wisdom of God. And everything that exists, exists through the mind of God, doesn’t it? Everything that is created, or ever will be or ever was, comes through Him, through the Logos, through the Word. Jesus isn’t just some Judean desert Rabbi. He is God on earth. He is the Word of God who is God. All reason, all intelligibility, derives from Him, through Him.

Thus there is nowhere that we can go, says John, no-one we can meet, nothing we can think, that isn’t already in Jesus. It all comes together in Him. He is the reason. And so all truth is God’s Truth; all beauty is God’s Beauty; all good is God’s Good. It could be no other way. That’s why Paul can say things like, “Test all things and keep the good.” That’s why he quotes pagan poets in Christian Scriptures.

The early Christians, to a one, were not afraid of people who looked different, who sounded different, who thought differently. They were radically open to all. And this wasn’t because they were libertines; the Church was not “anything goes.” But it was because they could see God in everything that was good, and beautiful, and true. And they rejoiced at it. They rejoiced to see Christ in it all. Christians are in the world but not of it, aliens everywhere so that nothing human is alien to us.

Other languages gave us entire vocabularies with which to sing the love of Christ. Other religions gave us richer perspectives, forever revealing more of the infinite wonder of Christ. Borders, customs, wars—these had no place among Christians. We were from the start an imperial people; not in the sense of conquest or violence, for in truth those early Christians had no power, had no weapons. But we were imperial in that we moved freely, learned freely, loved freely.

Indeed, the violence of Empire—the tramping boots of the Legions and the blood-soaked sands of the Colosseum floor—these we outright rejected. Christians were considered radical, even dangerous, in the sheer scope of our love. And that’s because Caesar was but a shadow, a broken and pale reflection, of the true reign of Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of our God. We are citizens of Heaven. Augustus brought peace by the sword; Jesus brings peace through love, by suffering at our hands and for our sake, forgiving us even as we murdered Him.

For some centuries, we in the West thought that we could build a Christian culture. We thought, in our arrogance, that Europe was the faith and the faith was Europe—ignoring the inconvenient fact that many of the oldest Christian communities on the planet exist in India, Ethiopia, Egypt, Persia, and Mesopotamia. We attempted to ally the throne and the Cross, and we called the result Christendom. But all it ended up being was the nationalism of old, the tribalism of old, now with a sanctified sword. And people rebelled. Ends up, no-one likes a boot on their neck.

There’s a reason why the Reformation occurred, and the Enlightenment soon thereafter. And then the whole thing, the whole experiment of European Christendom, collapsed catastrophically in a suicidal orgy of violence that Isaac Asimov called the European Civil War, but which we call the First and Second World Wars. All those boys, marching off to war, convinced that God was with the Germans, or God was with the English, or that the Communist Party was God. And they died in such numbers that to this day we call that section of the Continent the Bloodlands.

That’s not Christianity. Christians did it, by and large, but that’s not Christianity.

If there is to be a revival of faith in the Western world, it will not come through fundamentalism or traditionalism or the reëstablishment of some mythical Christian culture. It will come as Christmas did, with openness and vulnerability: when the Holy Family were sojourners without a home; when shepherds and kings, pagans and Jews, came together to bear witness to this wonder God hath wrought.

It has always been my experience that going beyond the bounds of faith, learning beyond the bounds of faith, enriches and deepens and strengthens that faith. Philosophy and science are not opposed to Christianity, whatever the reactionaries might say; rather, they bring treasures, gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh. Learning about other religions does not threaten our own, but makes us naturally more curious about our own. The more I learned as a child of Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, the more I loved each of them, and the more Christian I became.

And best of all is to find the love of Jesus Christ in other cultures, in Asian and African and Latin American churches, because the scales fall away from our eyes, we dodge the dragons of the imagination, and we can see Him afresh once again. We can meet Jesus on the Way as though for the very first time. And it is glorious.

There are countries in Europe today, regimes in Europe today, under which “Christian” simply means “white.” There’s no religion there, no faith, just the old idolatries of blood and of soil. And I’m afraid that there are rather a lot of people in our own country who would very much like to see that here. Nothing could be farther from Christianity. Nothing could be farther from the Christ.

Just the other day I was hip-deep in one of the fouler cesspools of social media, and some strident fanatic, some Jack Chick nutjob hurling insults and damnation, started to tell everyone that we’re all going to hell. And that, I’m afraid, is what Americans think of when they think of Christians. God help us. What have we done to the Name of Jesus Christ?

So much better the words of Madeleine L’Engle, who wrote that: “We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.” That’s John’s Gospel! That’s John’s Christmas: “The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

So it is in the spirit of Christmas that I leave you with a parting gift, the words of my favorite erudite and irascible theologian, David Bentley Hart, who put it thusly:

To hell with culture. Civilization is a higher good. Civilization is what’s worth preserving and seeking. Local cultures—yeah, we want to preserve things that are delicate and fragile. But that can be done without becoming jealous, bigoted, racist, and authoritarian. You can preserve them by loving them and sharing them.

It's amazing, actually. Things that are worth preserving will preserve themselves, if you perceive with charity. You don't actually have to create structures of arbitrary authority in order to preserve them. If you do, they weren't worth preserving in the first place.

The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

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