Christmas Eve, December 24, 2012; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O great Light and abundant Love,, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

I wish you could see how amazing you all look! Thank you for coming to Emmanuel Church on this holy night. I always imagine that some of you have been looking forward to being here and could not wait to get to this beautiful sanctuary tonight, to hear the extraordinary music and the lessons and the prayers of Christmas. And I imagine that for others of you, this was not your first choice, maybe you are here because it matters to someone you love, or maybe for a sadder reason, or maybe you don’t even quite know the reason – and I’m especially grateful that you’re here too.

Anne Lamott has a new book about her essential prayers – which are Help, Thanks, and Wow. I want you to know that by your very presence here tonight you have already been an answer to those prayers for someone else – just by showing up. And I pray that you will experience some answer to your own deepest prayers of help, thanks and wow. My Christmas hope for each of us is , however we’re feeling – thrilled or deeply ambivalent, glad or grieving, or downright stressed and cranky, that we all leave here tonight feeling a little better than when we walked in the door.

We have arrived at the poetry and prayer of the prologue to the Gospel of John, which at Christmas, seems to me to be so counter cultural. It’s even counter to the popular culture of Christmas: it has no baby in a manger or shepherds or angels. It is both particular and cosmic in its address. It is not at all about timelines and deadlines, but about wonder-lines and life-lines, and about ongoing creation, incarnation and inspiration – about our god-given power to become children of God – children of Love. And it’s clear to me that we do need help living into that truth.

And somehow, in my meditative meanderings about this Christmas message, that idea about wonder-lines and life-lines has made me thinking both about tears and about physics – you know, particular and cosmic. First, tears. Some of you have heard me say before that I believe that tears are the sacrament that the Church has never officially recognized, even though theologians in the early Church wrote about the sacramental nature of tears. Tears were said to be the purest form of worship. Tears, whenever they come, are an outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace – which is the very definition of sacrament. Tears are one of the surest signs I know of the nearness of God. And tears are one of the surest signs of life in the midst of death. The salt water of tears and the ocean of Love are one.

There’s an even more ancient idea about tears – a Jewish midrash that teaches that tears are a gift from God. The midrash goes that when the first humans were leaving the garden, God said, “I give you out of my heavenly treasure this priceless pearl. Look! It is a tear! And when grief overtakes you and your heart aches so that you are not able to endure it, and great anguish grips your soul, then there will fall from your eyes this tiny tear. Your burden will grow lighter then.” [1] That seems true to me, whether the tears are springing forth in response to prayers of help, thanks or wow. I have learned to give thanks for tears.

Kimberley Christine Patton writes that tears are a sign of the repentence to which we are called– the turning toward God, which means turning toward Love. The Greek word is  metanoia. She says that “without tears….there can be…no real return to God across the abyss of sin and despair. Tears are more than just symptoms of a changed heart; they are, counter-intuitively, its catalysts.” Tears are often “the only way home.” [2]

And that’s what I think about when I hear the prologue to the Gospel of John, which beckons us home into the land of poetry at Christmas – circular and mysterious. The wonder in the Christmas story of John is beyond any particular place or time. It’s a poetic prayer for every place and all time. It’s about coming home to God (Who is Love), wherever we are on our circular and mysterious spiritual journey.

The poet Yehuda Amichai, who was a mighty god-struggler, once wrote:

I declare with perfect faith
that prayer preceded God.
Prayer created God,
God created human beings,
human beings create prayers
that create the God that creates human beings.

Anne Lamott also says in her book that “poetry is the official palace language of Wow.” [3] This might seem like a raggedy edge in my sermon, but the cosmic nature of John’s prologue has me thinking about the Higgs boson – that mysterious particle that might have been discovered in this past year – although it’s too early to tell whether it’s really been discovered. It’s sometimes called “the god particle” because the theory is that it creates mass from nothing. I know that many serious physicists dislike the moniker of “god particle” but, since I’m not a serious physicist (and I think most of you aren’t either), I have to tell you I rather like it. I like the idea that there is something that we can’t see, but that makes the universe matter. I like the idea of a “view of the universe described by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws – but one in which everything interesting, like ourselves, results from flaws or breaks in that symmetry.” And I like the idea that “the Higgs boson is…[a kind of] cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass.” [4]

Just as I was wondering what any of this might have to do with our Christ Mass (our Christmas), the mail carrier dropped the current issue of The Christian Century magazine through our mail slot. On the cover is a picture taken by the NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope of a nebula in outer space. The lead article attempts to answer the question” Is there still a place for God in a world explained by science – and if so, what is it?” Philosopher J. B. Stump writes that “if God resides in gaps in the natural order that science can’t explain, then modern science gives God an increasingly smaller place to reside.”

So shall we churchy people concede such a shrinking role for the Divine? When people tell me that science has rendered belief in God obsolete, I often respond that I am already an atheist because I do not believe in the kind of god they are talking about. The notion of hairy thunderer or cosmic puppeteer has never made any sense to me. Some of my earliest and most enduring ideas of God have had less to do with entity and more to do with energy; less to do with noun and more to do with verb; less to do with mass and more to do with movement. And really, on my most faith-filled days I am an agnostic priest. But I’m comfortable with not knowing, since at least 95% of the universe seems to be made up of matter and energy that even the most brilliant seekers cannot find. So maybe there’s more elbow room for God than we usually think.

Physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne suggests that when water in a tea kettle is boiling, there are at least two explanations about why that is so. One has to do with physics. The stove conveys heat to the kettle, which causes the water molecules to move rapidly and push the vapor pressure of the water higher than the atmospheric pressure. That is why the water is boiling. Another explanation, which is just as accurate, is that the water in the tea kettle is boiling because someone desired a cup of tea!

It does seem to me that the more we know about the universe – the more facts scientists discover — the deeper the mystery gets. Physics doesn’t even attempt to explain desire, or joy or wonder. And aren’t desire, joy and wonder other ways to say help, thanks and wow? So that brings us back to the deep truth of tears, of poetry, of prayer, and ultimately of Love – a force which cannot be defined by science any more than art or music can be. What we are celebrating on this holy night is the birth of Love. Take this seriously. It is a gift for you from the Desire of Nations. Emmanuel — it is a gift for all of us. Merry Christmas!