Lectionary 15:

Isa 62:11-12

Ps 97:1, 6, 11-12

Titus 3:4-7

Luke 2:15-20

Possible preaching themes:

• The immensity of God vs. the smallness of a baby.
• God is “growing” both in ways that exceed the expansion of the universe, as well as – literally – growing as a baby.
• The love of God revealed in the Incarnation.

Scientific Resources:

• The Universe is immense and expanding and it is difficult for people to grasp its size. God fills all of this and more, yet comes as a tiny baby in the Incarnation. It echoes the words of poet Richard Crashaw “…eternity shut in a span.”  On the ever expanding universe, see these short articles and videos :
  • https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/webscope/activities/pdfs/galaxiesT.pdf
  • https://nineplanets.org/questions/how-big-is-the-universe/
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7yFDb1zOA
  • https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-universe-is-expanding-faster-than-it-should-be
  • https://indiana.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/nviu-sci-hubbleexpansion/hubble-and-the-expanding-universe/

• Love – in human terms – entails some physiological reactions in the brain. Is God’s love like this, or beyond it?  These articles and one short video give a glimpse of what science says about love:
  • https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/02/scientists-find-a-few-surprises-in-their-study-of-love/
  • https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/how-love-changes-your-brain/
  • https://www.brainfacts.org/thinking-sensing-and-behaving/emotions-stress-and-anxiety/2021/i-love-you-with-my-whole-brain-the-neuroscience-of-love-101321

Homily outline combining sources:

The immensity of God’s universal love:

• The universe is huge, but God is yet larger, filling all things.
• How and why does such immensity become located in the person of a baby? There can be but one theological answer:
• Love is the binding agent that ties the events (shepherds, angel choirs, pregnancy) to its meaning (incarnation, redemption, salvation).
• Science is discovering that “love” includes a host of brain functions for human beings.
• God’s love may include such physiological phenomena, but God’s love cannot be reduced to such things. God’s love must be more than human/scientific understandings of “love.”

An Expansive yet Intimate God:

• Science informs us that the universe is expanding.
• Ironically, in the incarnation, God quite literally becomes
• Two things can be true at once:
  • God is always larger than the expanding universe.
  • In the incarnation, God’s historical presence in Jesus is physically smaller than the universe.
  • This condescension is an act of love and enables divine intimacy at a very human level.

We form meaning one bite of information at a time:

• Such large expanses of space cannot be comprehended by the human mind.
• We have to perceive certain “chunks” of information and then relate them to other stimuli.
• Similarly, God – who is yet larger – cannot be comprehended by the human mind.
• For the Incarnation to mean anything to us, it has to be digested in small pieces.
• The things of earth fill the Christmas story in order to help us digest it:
  • Pregnancy (“…eternity shut in a span”);
  • Mary, who has to make sense of all of this one step at a time;
  • Shepherds who are given a specific task: go find the child;
  • Later, the Magi witness the immensity of the heavens reorganizing itself to point to the Incarnation.
• Did the vastness of space reorganize itself to pay homage to the Incarnation? Christians say yes.

Light reaching forward and backwards

• Many of the readings today deal with the concept of light or seeing (First Reading, Psalm, Second Reading, and Gospel).
• Light from stars that we see in the universe today is the physical record of something that has already happened.
• This means that what we understand as “cosmic history” is not linear, since the images we receive through the Hubble and James Webb telescopes – like an exploding nova – are records of events that have already happened. Light is actually a kind of cosmic time machine.
• Similarly, the yearly celebrations of Christmas are a religious way of “seeing” an event that has happened, yet an event that is being experienced right now.
• The medieval Church understood this well in its celebrations of the Annunciation: salvation was as good as “done” the moment that Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary;
  • The grace of the historical birth of Jesus thus reaches forward (to now),
  • and backward, clearly to the Annunciation, but one could argue even farther
  • for in the beginning was the Word (John 1:1).
• Science is learning to speak of time reversing itself.
  • The Christmas story is full of reversals as well:
    • the angels go back into heaven;
    • the shepherds change the course of a normal evening (tending the sheep) to go to Bethlehem;
    • God comes extra nos from divine omnipotence to condescended smallness;
  • Easter is the same: saving what comes after it, as well as saving what came before it.
    • In this way, Easter and Christmas are two sides of the same coin: salvation. Do not forget that they are related!
  • God is only God in self-disclosure: we would know nothing of God were God not interested in letting us know something.
    • The shepherds themselves say this (“…which the Lord has made known to us.”)
  • To “know” anything about God is, like light, an illumination of understanding: an understanding of what has happened and an understanding of what is happening!

The Incarnational Mission

• A key way that the gift of incarnation shines forward is through the baptized.
• We are the embodiment of the Christ light, so needed to shatter the darkness of prejudice and violence in our own time.
• As we celebrate the expanding mystery of God’s presence, that fills all of the cosmos,
• We also recognize that that same illuminating presence fills each of us, as tiny as we might appear in the history of salvation.
• Thus this holy morning we not only celebrate this immense gift of cosmic light that still engulfs us,
• But also commit ourselves to its expansion in our communities and in the world.

Poetic musing: so with the poet we give thanks:

“Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span;
Summer in winter; day in night;
Heaven in earth, and God in man.
Great little one, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav’n to earth.”