Terrible Whiteness

Lections: The Nativity of Our Lord (Christmas I), AD 2025 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.

“Call me Ishmael.”

So begins the greatest of all American novels, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Right out the gate, we have here a biblical reference: Ishmael, Abraham’s discarded son. This sets the tone for the entire narrative endeavor. All of us have heard of Moby-Dick; many of us, I’m sure, have read it. It’s about a whale, a great white whale with a hump like a snowhill, as well as the vengeance of Captain Ahab—another biblical character—who is hellbent on hunting him down.

Now, if that were all that the book is about, we might have ourselves a mildly interesting look at 19th-century American whaling. Just what every kid wants to read about in school, right? But of course it isn’t about a whale. It’s about God, and our half-crazed quest to find Him.

Melville grew up in a large and prosperous New York City family—prosperous, that is, until his father died and his mother took refuge in the strict Dutch Reformed Calvinism of her upbringing. Hers was a faith in which God was distant, unknowable, and frankly rather frightening: a wrathful God, an alien God. One’s salvation could never be assured. This left quite an impression on her son. How could it not? And for the rest of his life he would swing between the titanic tides of faith and unbelief. Either way, Melville found himself driven by the divine.

Then he discovered Shakespeare, and the miracle of metaphor. Moby-Dick, his masterwork, is saturated with it. In its pages one finds every conceivable analogy, images within images, all striving to express the inexpressible, the finite grasping at the infinite. It’s as though every idea were the shard of a mirror, and if he could simply compile enough of them, he might then catch a glimpse of God. Yet underlying the entire literary project is this fear that if God is found in everything, then God is found in nothing; that a plurality of images is really no image at all—the terrible whiteness of the whale.

Melville wanted what all of us want, deep down in the foundations of our souls. He wanted the Good, and the True, and the Beautiful: He wanted to know God. And so he hunted for Him, like a mad captain wounded by a faceless deity, pursuing Him around the world, ever seeking on the surface of an obfuscating ocean that unique and elusive living light, even if so doing meant his death.

Because it all meant something to Melville. But damned if he knew what.

Tonight, Christians the world over celebrate the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ: Christ, the great Light, born in darkness; Christ, the grace of God, bringing salvation to all. And I want to be clear on exactly what we mean by that. Jesus Christ, for us, is not just another king, another priest, another prophet. He isn’t simply a good man come to teach us about our God. Nor is He merely our scapegoat, entrusted with a limitless credit card on which we may charge all our sins.

No, Christ is who God is.

There are many good things in this world, which point to God: reason, intuition, beauty, love. But to truly understand the divine, to encounter the holy, to experience the transcendent, that requires revelation. That requires God to stoop down to us when we cannot reach up unto Him. Thus it must always be grace, always be mercy, always be gift. Revelations come in many forms: personal, communal, miraculous, artistic.

Yet we believe that the ultimate, the final, the full revelation of who and what God is, has been born unto us this night in Bethlehem of Judea. Many texts claim to be the Word of God, yet here for us, in this Child, is the Word made flesh. God has spoken one eternal Word, which expresses forever His innermost being, His deepest reality, who God is for us. And this Word is neither text nor speech but the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus.

When we want to know who God is, we look to Jesus Christ. When we want to know what God wants, we look to Jesus Christ. When we want to know whether God loves us, we look to Jesus Christ. It is Christ, and not the Bible, who is the Word of God. The purpose of our Scriptures is to point us all to Jesus. With Him, in His Spirit, the Bible comes to life! Yet without Him as our lodestone, as our lens, and as our goal, this book then is dead. The letter kills, but the Spirit makes alive.

Christ is born. Alleluia! Unto us a Child is born, a Son is given. He is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Tonight, the Creator is made one with His Creation. Tonight, His eternity breaks into our time. What God gives to us at Christmas is His very self, God-With-Us, God made flesh. Jesus is the visible Image of our invisible Father. And He offers unto us all that He has and all that He is.

He offers to us His teachings. He offers to us forgiveness. He offers to us His Name, His Spirit, His Body, and His Blood. He offers His own death, already died for us, that we need never fear death again, and His own eternal life already here begun. That is the purpose of everything here tonight, all that we do in the Church: the readings, the preaching, the songs, the Sacraments. All of this exists to give us Christ, to make us Christ. For when we are one in Jesus, then we are one with God.

That, my dear Christians, is the promise, and the truth, and the mystical heart of Christmas.

We have seen Him. We have followed His Star. We have knelt before His manger. And He is anything but alien or inscrutable or cruel. He is a Child at His mother’s breast. He is homeless amongst the beasts. He is a poor baby living under foreign occupation. He is one of us, all of us, the only truly human being. And He comes to us in weakness, and in need, and in love; down here in the mud and the blood, God through the guts of a girl.

We now know Him face to face. This is no terrible white whale, no harsh and fickle judge. This is our Savior; who has laid aside His crown; who will love us all the way to the Cross, all the way to hell and back. That’s who our God is, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

For many, this world remains a dark and violent ocean, on which we sail perilously, ever seeking meaning. God to them seems terrible, a leviathan under the waves. We who have seen the Christ, we who celebrate His Nativity, have been entrusted with the Good News of who and what God is: God is love. He has made us members of His Body. He has breathed into us His own Spirit. He has raised each one of us up from the grave that is our sin. And now He sends us out to be little Christs, to be Jesus, for a world in need of Him.

You are the Resurrection now. You, together, are the Word of God made flesh. And if we want an unbelieving world to know our God, they must see how He is born tonight in you.

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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