Christmas Eve

"Jesus, The Unifying Bridge"

The Rev. Stephen Elkins-Williams

At the beginning of this month, a great crowd gathered a few miles from here for the official opening of the new Durham Performing Arts Center. Approaching a religious service, the program culminated in the unveiling of an engaging light sculpture entitled “Sleep No More” by its Spanish artist, Jaume Plensa. After a children’s chorus sang, “This little light of mine, Durham’s gonna let it shine,” a narrow beam of bright white light was unleashed, which now shines straight up into the heavens further than the human eye can see. Indeed, Plensa intends his creation to be a bridge, “connecting heaven and earth, connecting body and soul.” Acknowledging the unfulfilled longing in this finite world, the artist expressed his vision that “We will love to look up and walk up to the heavens.”

For thousands of years, human beings have felt this chasm between the earth and the heavens, between the temporal and the infinite, between the human and the divine. Knowing that there is more to existence than what immediately presents itself to our senses, we have lifted our eyes and our hearts upward, seeking something more. Sensing that our temporality and finitude put us on shaky ground, we have searched for something more solid in which to put our trust. Realizing that we continually dig ourselves individually and communally into deeper and deeper holes through our bad decisions and self-seeking actions, we have longed for more profound wisdom and reconciling, life-sustaining grace. Consciously or not, we earthly mortals have sought a bridge “connecting heaven and earth,” something to link us beyond ourselves, some larger entity to unify us with the deeper mysteries and powers of existence.

Christmas is the announcement of that bridge, the proclamation of that restoring link, the celebration of that ineffable gift which restores us and brings us life and lifts us up to union with all that is, created and uncreated. For in a specific time and place, in the birth of a child named Jesus, God bridged the gap between the earth and the heavens, the temporal and the infinite, the human and the divine. This one person was not only the human child, born of Mary, but also, according to John, the Word, the Logos (in Greek), God’s articulation of himself as Love. “The Word was with God, and the Word was God; he was in the beginning with God.” But he was also in Israel, two thousand years ago, subject to hunger and cold and rejection, capable of great compassion and self-giving and sacrifice. In Jesus of Nazareth, God overcame the gap between the temporary and the eternal, between the deserved consequences of our actions and God’s mercy, between death and eternal life.

God’s gift of Jesus as a unifying bridge did not merely benefit human beings. All of creation was restored through the fruit of the death and resurrection of Jesus, already implicitly contained in his birth (Adrian Nocent, O.S.B. in The Liturgical Year: Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, Liturgical Press, 1977). Paul makes clear in his writing to the early Christians in Ephesus that God’s purpose “which he set forth in Christ… [was] to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:9-10). As part of those earthly things, we are united then, through the gift of Jesus, with the entire cosmos and with its Creator. That is why we will proclaim in celebratory song to end tonight’s service, repeating several times for emphasis, “let … heaven and nature sing.”

We sing tonight then, not only out of custom, but in thanksgiving for this incredible gift of God’s incarnation, which has restored and transformed all of creation. We sing not in simple nostalgic memory of Christmases past, but in hope and expectation for God’s continued saving grace in a sinful and broken world. We sing, not holding on to our fears and cynicism of what the future may bring, but celebrating the unconquerable power of God’s love and grace, made manifest in Jesus: Jesus, the link between the temporal and the infinite, Jesus, the embodiment of unending life and grace, Jesus, the light of Durham and Chapel Hill and Honduras and Botswana and Iraq and Afghanistan and Zimbabwe and Washington, D.C., Jesus, the unifying bridge, “connecting heaven and earth.” While we share the vision of Plensa, the light sculptor, of loving “to look up … to the heavens,” we know that we do not need literally “to walk up to the heavens” because the heavens have already come to us.

John 1:1-14