I hate the Christmas carol Silent Night. It is cloying and quiet and boring and would put me to sleep if it didn't make me angry. I mean, Christmas is about the Lord of the Universe invading our world. It is about the transcendent source and the end of all being joining us humans in our lives. The only good line in Silent Night is that shepherds quake with fear when they hear the news.

 

At the clergy conference in November, we heard remarkable mind- and heart-stretching presentations about the first and second axial ages, the spirituality of the desert fathers and mothers, the prayer of the heart of the eastern churches, and the evolutionary mysticism of Teilhard de Chardin. Here in Litchfield at Morning Prayer recently we used a canticle that includes these lines from Revelation 22:

 

 "Behold, I am coming soon," says the Lord.

 "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end."

"Come!" say the Spirit and the Bride; "Come!" let each hearer reply!

Come forward, you who are thirsty, let those who desire take the water of life as a gift.

 

The Incarnation and the Resurrection are the two ideas that Christianity uniquely has to offer the world. Together they represent God's action in the world. In the material world, this action of God is represented by evolution as the opposing force to entropy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that everything runs down eventually. When all possible energy transfers have occurred, the universe will arrive at a temperature of absolute zero, and every particle will be equidistant from every other particle. This separation is the similar to the city in C. S. Lewis' dream recorded in "The Great Divorce," in which everybody who does not choose to go to heaven moves farther and farther away from everyone else. The ancients used the term "corruption" to speak about the general tendency of things to decay, rot, rust, and generally fall apart.

 

The odd and wonderful thing is that there is more to the story than entropy and corruption.

 

Evolution happens. Complexity, specialization, and cooperation increase. The original hydrogen atoms from the Big Bang somehow become helium and carbon and iron and oxygen and all the other elements. Atoms join each other to become molecules. Molecules become cells. Cells become organisms. Organisms become more and more specialized. Individuals of some species become families and communities. And death leads to life. Oh yeah, and I can become a better person. How can this be?

 

This is the work of God. God is creating the world all the time. God invites us into the joy and adventure of creating every new day. On a good day, when I become conscious, I say, "Wow! Another day. I wonder what God and I and the people I meet will make today." The point that Teilhard makes is that the call of God is not to get us to heaven, but to the future. The Lord to whom we Christians devote our lives invites on a journey to the Omega point of evolution. Except that it is not a journey so much as participation in the process of creating the future.

 

When God became human flesh in the time of Augustus Caesar and King Herod, a new stage of evolution began. We now have a closer look and a more intimate experience of how God's love makes the world, creates the Kingdom, builds the Commonwealth, overcomes entropy, defeats death, and throws the best party in the universe.

 

At Christmas we celebrate the incredible fact that God became one of us. God became a human being. And that means God experiences joy and sorrow, triumph and being forsaken. And God dies. By participating in our human condition, God makes it possible for us humans to participate in the divine condition. God gives us God in Jesus; we give ourselves to God in Jesus. This is Christmas. Then comes the new year, the new world, the new creation.

 

OK. So maybe I don't hate Silent Night; it's just that Christmas should be such a noisy new day.