All Saints' Episcopal Church, Thomasville

                                                                                  Christmas Eve, 2007

 "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son" (Hebrews 1:1)

            With the Iowa Caucuses just around the corner, there's been a fair amount of debate in both parties (as well as in the op-ed sections of the major newspapers), about what is more important:  wisdom or experience.  In terms of how we might want to choose the next President of the United States, most of us would delight to see a candidate that would bring both wisdom as well as experience to the office.  And yet, can any one political office (or combination of offices) at any level of the government equip a man or woman with the necessary wisdom or experience to make a good president?

In my own experience, as well as in watching others who have been chosen to lead in one way or another, wisdom and experience seem to go hand in hand.  That is, different experiences over time would germinate as well as nurture one's wisdom; and as one's wisdom increases, his or her ability to cope with a variety of experiences would grow as well.

And yet, as far as what came first, (the chicken or the egg) wisdom or experience, choosing one remains difficult if not impossible.

            One of Anglicanism's most revered poets T. S. Eliot, grappled with this question of wisdom vs. experience in some of his greatest works.  "There is, it seems to us," he writes in the Four Quartets:   / At best, only a limited value / In the knowledge derived from experience."  What he means is that what might work for one situation will not necessarily work in another. 

Our knowledge (derived from an experience) "imposes a pattern, and in time falsifies".  The Chrsitmas Carol or hymn that I might love, might be despised by some of you -- something which has happened more than once!

Thus, in the place of wisdom or experience, Eliot pleads to his audience:  "Do not let me hear / Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly, / Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession, / Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.  / The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility:  Humility is endless."  And one way we can sense having acquired some modicum of humility is to be able to say with the poet:  "What I do not know is the only thing I know."

Eliot's compatriot and fellow poet W. H. Auden wrote in similar words:  "The Garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert."  Of course he wasn't writing about the geography of his homeland, but rather the geography of the human heart:  The Garden is the only place there is but you will not find it until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert."

            For Eliot and Auden, the wisest man or the wisest woman is not the one with the most varied experience or the greatest wisdom, but the one with humility:  the one with the ability to gaze inside him or her self, and see that self as it truly is.

When you and I turn our eyes upon our own souls, what is it that we see?  I certainly know what I would hope to see.  I would hope to find that garden --  bursting forth constantly with fresh green foliage.  And yet what I see most of the time (or rather what I see when I actually bother to force myself to see it), is wasteland.

            In the middle of what arguably would become his greatest chapter, St. Paul wrote these words about the human soul:  "Now (at this moment) we see ourselves (know ourselves) through a (mirror) (dimly); but then (at the Second Coming) face to face.  Now I know (myself) in part, but then shall I know (myself), even as also I am known."  One of these days, you and I are going to see ourselves in an entirely new way:  not as we think we see ourselves, but to see ourselves as God sees us.

That is more than a little frightening -- to say the least.  Because it's not too difficult for me to imagine that God is going to see a whole lot more desert in me than I can manage to see for myself at this stage of my life.

            So what has all this to do with Christmas?  First, as we saw earlier this evening, the first humans to be drawn to Jesus were the shepherds.  It's important to remember that these shepherds did not necessarily resemble the innocent and adorable children of the parish. They were pretty rough characters.  Yet they were bright enough to recognize the brokenness not just in their world, but in themselves.  They realized that their world was more desert than garden.

          The same can be said of the Magi.  Like the shepherds, they had enough humility to realize that with all their supposed wisdom and experience, there were still paranoid maniacs like Herod running around ready to slaughter innocent babies so he could keep his throne from literally he knew not what.

            I would hope that had I been one of those shepherds or wise men, that I had had enough wisdom humility to see my own spiritual desert clearly), and thus feel the need to go traipsing across the countryside to pay my respects to this child.  And yet, as DJ sang so beautifully yesterday morning:  "Who in the world would send a baby?"

Who in his right mind would send an infant to do battle with the world, the flesh, and the devil?  It really doesn't make sense.  Who in his right mind would send an infant to take on in all their collective horror our "speckled vanity, Hell, and leprous sin?  And yet, only when the Real (capital R) strikes us as truly absurd, will we begin to garner the humility on such a level as necessary to deal with this miraculous gift as the shepherds and the wisemen were able.

            Once again, we need to get a grip on the absolute absurdity of this entire event:  "God who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son."  How absurd is that?  Or this:  "He was in the world and the world was made by Him and the world knew Him not.  He came unto His own, and His own received Him not.  How absurd is that?  Or this:  But as many as received Him, to them gave He the power to become the sons of God.

But it gets even more unreal.  These new creatures (these sons and daughters of God) were born (came into being) not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.  In other words, their salvation has nothing to do with the work of any man or woman, but solely with God.  The one and only thing they had to do was to believe on His Name.  How easy, how simple, and how absurd!  And yet He told us over and over that "My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

            The wonder of Christmas is not what we come to know about ourselves, although each and every year hopefully each of us re-learns how badly the world needs a Savior.  But even that knowledge cheats us out of so much of the Glory of this Heavenly gift.  I know it's one thing for some of us this evening to think about how badly Congress needs a Savior, or how badly that Mr. Bush needs one, or how badly that Mrs. Clinton needs one, or how badly that Mr. Putin needs one, or that Time Magazine needs one (Last year the computer and this year Mr. Putin?!)

More important though is that each of us ask ourselves:  How badly do I need a Savior?  How often do I really look into my heart and soul hoping to see green foliage, and instead find nothing but desert?  How often do we gaze at our glittering image in the mirror in the morning and sense not wisdom or experience, but pure folly -- or our fear of fear, and frenzy -- or our fear of being possessed by another -- or belonging to another.  If that is what we see, then we need not fear, because God would indeed send a baby to help us draw ourselves out of that quagmire.  It's one thing for us to fear lightening and thunder.  We need not fear a baby.

"Peace to all who have good will!

God, who Heaven and Earth doth fill,

Comes to turn us away from ill

And lies so still within the crib of Mary"

            At the end of his Purgatorio, Dante writes of this wonderful moment when he finally has the opportunity to gaze into the eyes of Beatrice.  Beatrice had been something far more than a school boy crush for the poet.  Essentially she represented for him everything about God in terms of truth, beauty, and goodness. 

That is, Dante related to God, through Beatrice.  Having died young, she saw from Heaven the mess that Dante was getting himself into in terms of the way he was living, and she summoned the poet Virgil to go back to earth to guide Dante through hell so he would know the consequences of a life badly lived.  But he also got to see Purgatory and Paradise.

            At the end of the Purgatory, Dante finally meets Beatrice and as she gazes and smiles on him, the poet records these words:  "O splendor of the living light eternal ...What man were not over-tasked if he attempted to show thee as thou showedst thyself to be?"  That is, there is no way he could describe her beauty in terms of the level at which she was showing her beauty to be.

Since Beatrice virtually represents God, at Christmastide we can say with every confidence that God has allowed us to know Him, as He knows Himself to be.  We may not know ourselves as thoroughly as we ought.  But as of tonight we know God -- just as He knows Himself to be.  How much more wonderful or how absurd can that be?  Let me attempt to tell you. 

            God must wonder at times or shake His head at all the different ways we look at Him and speak about Him:  ways which run from folly and stupidity to pure heresy to ultimate blasphemy.  And yet, if we want to know God in the way He knows Himself to be, we need look no further than Jesus in the manger.  Who would send a baby to deal with the likes of bin Laden and Mr. Putin, not to mention the likes of you and me?  God would!  And if we want to know what God is like, we look to Jesus, because in Jesus, God allows us to know Him --  as He knows Himself to be.

That revelation, staggering as a lightning bolt, God makes new every Christmas for each of us.  I don't pretend to know everything about T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, but I've pondered its final paragraph for years and can't help but think that the poet had Christmas on his mind:  "We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time."

Tonight hopefully, (if even for no more than a few moments), we will end our exploring, arriving once again at the Lord's manger -- from whence we started last year -- and know the place:  really know Jesus, and really know God -- for the first time.

"God who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son."