On being too at home in the world

By Bill Carroll

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. 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.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.'”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

John 1:1-18

In the aftermath of our celebrations sacred and profane, I’ll like to begin with some words from W.H. Auden’s Christmas Oratorio:

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes —

Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic.

The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,

And the children got ready for school. There are enough

Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week —

Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,

Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully —

To love all of our relatives, and in general

Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again

As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed

To do more than entertain it as an agreeable

Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,

Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,

The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,

And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware

Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought

Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now

Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are,

Back in the moderate Aristotelian city

Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen, where Euclid’s geometry

And Newton’s mechanics would account for our experience,

And the kitchen table exists because I scrub it.

It seems to have shrunk during the holidays. The streets

Are much narrower than we remembered; we had forgotten

The office was as depressing as this. To those who have seen

The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,

The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.

If there’s a critique of the Episcopal Church that ought to worry us a bit, it’s that we are far too at home in the moderate Aristotelian city of which Auden speaks. Auden writes as a Roman Catholic, but he is also an Englishman, and his words cut deep for any who espouse an earthy Incarnationalism with a strong dose of common sense. Later in the same poem, he even says that we are tempted to pray that God would “Lead us into temptation and evil for our sake.”

Too often, our ethics and worldview are determined by the surrounding culture, from which we borrow uncritically. Worldliness is both the glory and the shame of our tradition. We do believe–and ought to believe–that the Gospel is relevant to our workaday world. We rightly want to bring the whole of who we are into church, and we don’t want ever to settle for the duplicity of believing one thing on Sunday and quite another the rest of the week. But do we really believe that the Word became flesh, simply to leave us as we are?

The Archbishop of Canterbury, reflecting on this very problem, insists that “There is in the Anglican identity a strong element of the tragic, of the dark night and the frustration of theory and order by the strangeness of God’s work.” [Rowan Williams, Anglican Identities (Cowley, 2003), p. 6.]

Since the Second World War at least but beginning earlier (on the Continent this began earlier, in response to the First World War, but it arguably seeped into English-language theology more slowly), our theologians have struggled to come to terms with the darkness afoot in the world–to develop a theology of the Cross that complements our basic optimism about human nature grounded in the doctrine of the imago dei and the related mystery of the Incarnation. [See Arthur Michael Ramsey, An Era in Anglican Theology: From Gore to Temple (Scribner’s, 1960)].

In more recent years, this has walked hand in hand with postmodern critiques of the easy optimism of the Enlightenment. No longer is it possible to believe that “we” stand at the summit of a long period of cultural evolution. Even those of us who refuse to buy in to the nihilism and relativism of some forms of the postmodern project are chastened by its critique. We are caught up short by an awareness of suppressed voices–women, minorities, the poor–that are only recently beginning to claim their rightful place in the conversation. And we have a much more complex relationship to the pre-modern past and forms of knowing and doing bound up with story, tradition, and ritual than seemed possible to many of us in so-called modern times.

And so we cannot assume–Could we ever?–that an easy harmony exists between Christ and culture. Or that culture itself is a harmonious whole [see Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture, Fortress Press, 1997]. The Logos may be one and the same wherever he is found, but we are called to have a more difficult and critical conversation [see David Tracy, especially The Analogical Imagination, Crossroad, 1981], to see what truth is being disclosed where.

This leaves open the possibility that the Word may come to us, as he did to our ancestors, as a prophetic and confrontational Word–or as a Word of promise we could never have anticipated or prepared for. We may participate fully in the joys and problems of the Aristotelian City but never on its own terms. For whatever provisional value the earthly City may have, and whatever truths our life there may reveal, our true home lies in Jerusalem. For the sake of the world, we have been called out as God’s Covenant People.

And so today, we rejoice with the prophet. For we too have been clothed with the robes of righteousness and garments of salvation. And the dwelling of God is with mortals–indeed, it is in our very flesh.

From the beginning, God has been preparing creation for this joy. We were created for communion with God. And, though our constant disobedience and persistent rejection of God’s mercy led us deeper and deeper into sin, God never abandoned his intention to dwell in our midst.

God did not, as with the angels and the prophets who came before, send a messenger. But God sent his own Son–God from God, light from light, true God from true God. God sent one and the same Word who lives forever in the bosom of the Father, to be born for us of Mary. And though the world he made did not receive him, to those who received him he gave power to become God’s children.

In so doing, God took up the cause of lost and fallen humanity. [See Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV.1]. No longer does God present us with an impossible demand from the outside. Rather, God keeps the Covenant from within.

As we engage with the earthly City, having seen his glory and still aglow with his reflected light, we are “no longer at ease” with the poverty, hostility, and violence we find there.

For the Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth.

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