Darkness and Blaze
a Christmas Eve meditation given by the Rev. Roger Paine
on Sunday, December 24, 2006
at The First Parish in Lincoln
You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything:
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
There is a scene in last summer’s movie, Superman Returns,
in which Superman – who has been gone for five years, on a search for his home planet,
is out flying around one night – it’s his way of going for a long walk.
He’s come back to earth, his adopted planet, and things have changed:
Lois Lane, the love of his life, has gotten engaged to a really good guy,
and she has won a Pulitzer Prize for a piece called, “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.”
So he goes for a long, solitary fly, feeling lost and alone – a little sorry for himself –
no longer certain about what he’s doing here,
and then he hears his father’s voice – which is, of course, the voice of Marlon Brando.
Here is what his father says:
“Even though you’ve been raised as a human being, you are not one of them.
They can be a great people – they wish to be...
They only lack the light to show the way.
For this reason above all – their capacity for good –
I have sent them you, my only son.”
Sound familiar?
Some critics thought the obvious Christian imagery was in bad taste,
comparing the story of Jesus with a comic book character,
but in the story of Superman, the world does think of him as a savior –
he is, after all, constantly saving airplanes from crashing and catching people in mid-fall.
And on a very real note, we do have a capacity for good, we could be a great people,
and we certainly need all the light we can get to show the way –
but that’s where the similarities in the two stories end.
Because as anyone familiar with the life of Jesus knows, he was not a superman.
He was an exceptional human being – but human through and through.
He was just as vulnerable as we are.
He could have died in childbirth – a lot of babies did.
When, at the age of thirty-three, he was arrested and executed as a revolutionary,
there was no magic intervention,
nothing to change the terrible conclusion.
His life – like our own – included both darkness and blaze –
“the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.”
He was born on this night with the same strengths, feelings, and limits that we all have.
His goal in life was to encourage our capacity for good, mostly by example,
and by using parables to encourage people to think for themselves – to find their own way –
and there was nothing magic or super-human about any of it.
His life was his own doing, a reflection of his own strong character.
The last thing he wanted us to think was that he was super-human –
and thus impossible for us to follow his lead.
So God did not send a superman to Bethlehem on the first Christmas Eve.
God didn’t even arrange for there to be a spare room at the inn.
Because that’s not how God works in the world.
The innkeeper finds it in his own heart to give a weary couple who have come a long way
a place out of the weather to spend the night.
In other words, God works through us.
And Jesus was born as unpretentiously as one could possibly be –
as Claire said in her sermon here last Sunday,
his first visitors were shepherds, the lowest of the low in Palestinian society.
Yes, three kings also come – so the story is saying: high and low, this night is for everyone.
And its message is: every one of us has the capacity to make a difference for the good.
The baby has it, the innkeeper has it, so do the shepherds and the kings, and so do you and me.
We all have it in us to help make our world more fair, more safe, more just.
We have more capacity for good than we have ever realized, and we are meant to use it.
Centuries before Jesus was born, in the religion of the ancient Chinese
they called this message “the mandate of heaven.”
The danger, as we go through life, is that we lose touch with the divinity that is our birthright.
Wordsworth, in his Intimations Ode, brings us into the world “trailing clouds of glory.”
“Heaven lies about us in our infancy.”
And John Mayer, in his song “83,” wishes he could be six again.
When he asks, “Whatever happened to my lunchbox?” it is a metaphor for innocence lost.
Wordsworth joins him in mourning the loss:
“Turn whereso’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.”
But he ends his poem with a challenge:
“What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now forever taken from my sight,
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.”
And Rilke ends his poem that was our fifth lesson tonight with a similar challenge:
“...it is not too late – it is not too late – to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.”
We must never give up on our capacity for good – or fail to recognize what gets in its way.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Blink,
he tells the story of Abbie Conant, who in 1980 auditioned to play the trombone
for the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra.
There were thirty-three candidates, and each auditioned from behind a screen –
the selection committee could hear them but not see them,
and when they heard Abbie play, they all knew she was the one.
But when she stepped out from behind the screen,
the committee members couldn’t believe their eyes:
they all thought Abbie was a man – no woman could play a trombone that well!
Screened auditions were rare in those days, but since then they’ve become much more common.
And there are now five times as many women in top U.S. orchestras as there were thirty years ago.
There was an obvious prejudice at work in orchestras before screened auditions.
But, as Gladwell points out,
when they were confronted with their prejudice, they solved the problem.
Sometimes, we get a fresh way of seeing things by not being able to see.
When the screening committees could only hear the woman behind the screen,
“a small miracle happened: they saw her for who she truly was.”
What if we couldn’t see the Christmas story – what if we could only hear it.
A knock at the door, a man’s doleful voice – sorry, there’s no room – a long pause:
if you don’t mind, I have a stable out back – I keep it clean – it’s yours if you want it.
A young mother in labor, the rustle of cows and sheep, a newborn baby’s cry.
If we could only hear it, would that help us see it for what it truly is:
a story with no boundaries that says: you have it in you – just live up to your birthright.
There’s a wonderful story about the boxing champ, Muhammad Ali,
who had not fastened his seat belt before take-off on a commercial airliner;
when the flight attendant reminded him to do so, he said, “Superman don’t need no seat belt.”
She answered back, “Superman don’t need no airplane, either.”
Ali fastened his seat belt.
God did not send a superman into the world on Christmas Eve.
But we circle back to this night year after year.
Because this is where all our possibilities unite.
This is where we can remember our capacity for good: the mandate of heaven.
May it be so. Amen.