The Grace of Attentiveness--December 21, 2021

The Grace of Attentiveness--December 21, 2021

For whatever else Christmas means, I think at least it means that God doesn't just love the world in the abstract, as an idea, or (like in the old Bette Midler song), "from a distance."  God's love is also experiential, particular, and comes close enough to touch.

God doesn't just love "the world" as a concept, or from some distant heavenly vantage point from which you can't see the scars we leave on each other. The incarnation of God in Jesus--the news that God takes on our embodied human experience as one of us--means that God knows what it's like to get caught in the rain, or the taste of fresh bread while it's still warm, or the colors of a sunset by the sea.  Sometimes we Respectable Religious Folks can get so laser-like focused on Jesus' mission and on the journey to the cross and resurrection that we forget: in Jesus, God chose to endure our experience of linear time, with decades of life, the passing of seasons, the making of friends, the pain of loss, and all the countless details of life as human beings.  

It's not quite right, in other words, to say, "Jesus was only born so he could die for us," as you sometimes hear TV or radio preachers insist.  I mean, certainly the cross is the climax of the story, but the whole story is there for a reason.  Jesus doesn't just beam down from heaven as a thirty-something man and go straight to a Roman death sentence, nor does the baby die right in the manger.  Part of God's choice to be embodied in the human life of Jesus is to love us, not merely from the "outside" so to speaks, but to love us from within... with our own skin, our touch, our breath, our humanity.  The news of Christmas is that God's love is more than just a mission of divine tasks to be accomplished, "Die for the sins of the world: check.  Redeem creation: check.  Defeat the powers of evil: check..." but God's choice to be among us, loving creation in all the details of who we are.  In Jesus, God knows what it is like to smell fresh spices in the marketplace and feel grains of wheat sifting through your fingers, as well as the way a silence feels on a calm night, or the way tears feel to your fingertips when you are wiping them from someone else's cheek.  My goodness, there are times when I get short-tempered getting one of my kids an ice-pack for a scraped knee if they have been horsing around in the other room--but here God has crossed the infinite barriers of existence to share with us the experience of comforting friends who are grieving and feeling their sorrow along with them.

So let me propose that for this day, a way to embody the message of this season--now just a few days before celebrating Christmas--is to take the time to pay attention to the details of everyday life, and to savor them.  Don't miss the little things of life in this created world.  Take them all in--the smells and the sights, the tastes and the touches, the power of words and of songs... all of it.  And don't just notice them for a moment--maybe even hold a few in your mind to reflect on, to mull over, or to borrow the line from the Christas story in Luke, "to ponder these things in your heart."  

Just the other day, as a group of folks from one of the churches I serve went Christmas caroling down the streets of town, I was struck again at how voices split off into harmonies as we sang old, well-loved carols.  There had been no practices, no decree requiring four-part harmony, and not even any printed notes for our songs.  But enough people knew the notes from years of singing that there was a richness I was not expecting while we sang in the frosty evening.  That is a detail I could have so easily overlooked or taken for granted--and, oh Mercy, how many times before have I taken for granted the sound of voices in harmony.  Or the taste of the first sip of coffee this morning--I was struck as the edge of the mug rose to my lips how rich and complex the flavor was today, even though it's the same beverage I drink every morning, and most of the time in the same mug.  How many times have I just gulped down the ebony liquid as a means of getting caffeine into my system?  Like Dr. Chumley says it in the classic Harvey, "Fly specks!  I've been spending my life among fly specks while miracles have been leaning on lampposts at 18th and Fairfax!"  There is such extraordinary beauty and richness in the details of this life, and part of loving the world that God so loves is to notice them... to roll them over in your minds like turning over a precious stone.  

Maybe that's really the calling of Christmas: to love this world after the way God has loved the world--as embodied beings who can notice and lift up the good in all its tiniest parts.  Maybe the discovery is that the fly-specks are miracles, too, and that loving the world means noticing the world in all its most-overlookable parts.  Like Gustavo Gutierrez put it so powerfully, "So you say you love the poor--name them."  We cannot love what or whom we do not take the time to notice, to recognize, to appreciate, and to honor whatever is good within it all.  We cannot understand how God loves the world if we rush through our own lives so inattentively that we only think of it as an abstract thing, rather than to appreciate it all. If we want to let God's love shape us in new ways, we will have to practice the kind of attentiveness that led God, not just to say, "I read a book about those humans..." but to become one of us.  If we want to get a sense of how deeply joyful God's love for this world is, we need to let ourselves be captivated again by the beauty, complexity, intricacy, and wonder of all this world's tiniest moments and details.

Notice the color in a loved one's eyes.  Smell the coffee.  Listen to the wind rustling the tree branches.  Take it all in.  Be attentive to it all--and maybe you and I will discover a bit more fully how God's love attends to this world in all its particularity.

Lord God, we give you such thanks for this world in all its richness.  Let us not miss it today, but rather, as we attend to it all, allow it to understand more fully the way you love this world, and us within it, as well.