Falling in Love
Christmas 1
Isa. 61:10-62:3; John 1:1-18
12/28/2008
Jim Melnyk

Christmas is about falling in love all over again. It's about music and lights, wonder and magic, mystery and awe. Christmas is about opening one's heart once again to the presence of God in our world and in our lives – and it's about the heart of God being held wide-open for us. Christmas is about falling in love all over again.
        
Christmas asks us to put aside for at least a few moments our best scientific-critical mindsets and revel in the mystery of the Word made flesh. That is, allow ourselves to revel in what it might mean to believe in a God who can and does love us into existence and love us throughout our existence. Author Thomas Moore, writing about the spiritual life, tells us, “We live in a society that sees a mystery as a challenge, and you are successful only if you dispel the mystery and replace it with an explanation. Religion,” explains Moore, “takes a different approach to the mysterious. Rather than try to explain it away, [religion] creates ritual and song and story around the mystery, holding it and revering it. Religion,” Moore goes on to say, “assumes that a mystery is valuable in itself…. It is a powerful, unfathomable truth that is to be honored and lived. The mystery of love, the mystery of the universe, the mystery of marriage and children…the mysteries of birth and death – all of these give human life its infinite depth. Without them,” Moore concludes, “without them we end up with mere explanations, which may be satisfying on one level but is not humanizing” (Thomas Moore in A Life at Work, quoted in Synthesis 12/28/2008).
        
And so, each year we tell the same story – the same old, old story of Jesus and of God's love. Because it is a story that touches our hearts and our souls – because it is a story surrounded by and enfolded in mystery – because it is a story that helps us fall in love once again – even if only for a few moments or a few short days.
        
I was struck by this sense of falling in love during the 10:30 service last Sunday (Advent 4) as we sang a portion of Psalm 89. As we sang the refrain I could almost taste the Psalmist's words – I could feel the Psalmist's desire for God! “I will sing, I will sing, I will sing forever of your love, O Lord; I will sing, I will sing, I will sing forever of your love!” (paraphrase by David Ogden, 1997) I tossed and turned in bed late that night – the words from Psalm 89 echoing in my mind and in my heart. It seemed as if God was asking me, “Do you really believe that, Jim? Do you really love me that much?” And so, in the middle of the night I woke up, grabbed a pen and a pad of scratch paper and wrote “Christmas is about falling in love all over again!” And I wrote the questions, “Have you ever fallen in love with God? Have you ever wanted to fall in love with God? Have you ever considered that God has fallen in love with you?” And I thought “Yes! Yes this has been true for me!” And I realized how easy it is to forget that love.
        
I also realized that apart from mystery, these questions make no sense. And in a world where so many call for an understanding of a totally non-theistic God (a concept which I find hard to understand), the idea of a God who falls in love with us and who desires more than anything else in this world that we fall in love in return – well, absent the mystery – absent a belief that God can and does desire to be in relationship with us – it makes no sense. For too many folks the idea of falling in love with God makes no sense.
        
But I need and want a God who falls in love with us. I need and want a God who dreams in God's heart of a creation that finds its purpose for being wrapped up in the wonder and the mystery of love. I need and want a God who embraces my humanness – our humanness – who embraces our frailty – embraces our needs – embraces our hopes – embraces our dreams – a God who chooses to be identified with us in the most tangible of ways – in our very flesh and blood. For if God isn't a God who is so intimately connected with us and with the whole of creation, what's the point?
        
Throughout time humanity has fallen in love with God – the real sort of love – the kind with all the bumps and bruises along the way. We – God and humanity – speak poetic words of love to each other. We fight with one another. We forgive one another and we make up with one another. We are transformed by one another's hopes, by one another's dreams, by one another's fears. We are transformed by one another's love. This is the God of Christmas – this is the God who calls to us across time and space – who calls to us in the very depths of our human hearts.
        
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:1, 3b-5). “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,” writes Isaiah. “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God” … (Isaiah 61:10). “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory”… (John 1:14).
        
Christmas and the love of God are mysteries we are called to revel in rather than puzzles we are challenged to unravel. Earlier this month Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said that Advent “is the season when Christians are called to live with more hope than the world thinks is reasonable.” Episcopal priest and blogger Susan Russell reminds us that Christmas is the moment in which we experience the incarnation of that hope – more hope than the world thinks is reasonable.
        
Christmas, Russell reminds us, is about “a God who loved us enough to become one of us in order to show us how to love one another.” In her Christmas blog Russell writes, “We wonder again at the power of a love great enough to triumph over death and we claim a Christmas Truth greater than any of the traditions it inspires: the mystical longing of the creature for the creator – the finite for the infinite – the human for the divine – all wrapped up in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.” And just perhaps, I believe, as we revel in the mystery that is Christmas, we might catch a glimpse of the mystical longing of the creator for the creature – a longing of the infinite for the finite – the divine for the human – a longing for love returned – a longing for us to fall in love one more time – and perhaps this is the most outrageous hope of all. Amen.
        

©2008 Jim Melnyk