First Sunday after Christmas - December 29, 2024
Father Vincent Pizzuto, Ph.D.
St. Columba's Episcopal Church
Isaiah 61:10-62:3 + Ps 147 + Gal. 3:23-25; 4:4-7 + John 1:1-18
Allow me, if you will, to dedicate my sermon to Ann McChesney-Young, who is recovering from a severe cold and whose absence will be poignantly felt in the silence of our liturgy this morning.
As we transition in the coming week from 2024 to 2025, I want to take the opportunity to reflect on what remains the most pressing issue of our day: the ecological crisis that is now bearing down on our planet. May the last word from this pulpit in 2024 and the first word in 2025 give witness to this time in which our commitment to the Gospel cannot be understood apart from our commitment to every living being on the planet who is suffering under the impacts of our rapidly changing climate.
To that end, I will offer the first of a two-part sermon on the theme of mythology and history, particularly in light of the Genesis myths of creation and the historicity of the incarnation we celebrate throughout this season of Christmastide. In particular I want to reflect with you on how myth and history mutually inform one another and to demonstrate how the historical incarnation of Christ informs a rich and deep Christian theology of creation that has been under appreciated as a rich theological source for ecological action and discipleship among Christians.
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Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. + I speak to you in the name of the Three-in-One and One-in-Three. Amen.
Gen. 1:1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God swept over the face of the waters. 3Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
So begins, the opening lines of Genesis, the first book of our sacred scriptures, and the first of our two Old Testament creation myths, now cast side-by-side as if one narrative, yet written some three or more centuries apart. This first creation myth, written in the mid-6th century BC tells the story of a transcendent God, Elohim, who creates the world in 6 days, resting on the seventh. Then beginning in Genesis 2:4, we are introduced to the second creation myth (actually written much earlier, around the mid-9th century BC), which tells the story of an immanent God, YHWH, who creates first the Garden of Eden from which Adam and Eve, our primordial parents are made.
These two creation mythologies, radically distinctive and told through the lenses of different theological interests, originally existed independently of one another, until centuries later were placed side-by-side by ancient redactors (or “editors”) who assembled various literary strands and narratives in circulation around ancient Israel in order to compile what is now the Torah, or first five books of the Jewish Tanakh, and Christian Old Testament.
In the 10th and ultimately 6th Centuries BC when these creation myths were written and independently circulating, no one could have imagined that in the millennia to come, these two very localized creation mythologies of an ancient and comparatively insignificant tribal people dwelling in the deserts of the Middle East would have evolved into the most influential creation myths known to humanity. Most of this spread was due ultimately not to the Israelites, in whose tribal cultures these two myths originated, but to Christians, who, by including the Jewish scriptures in the Christian Bible, introduced both Old and New Testaments to peoples across virtually all times and cultures through their missionary work of evangelization [Sandra Schneiders, The Revelatory Text (1991), 88].
Yet, Christianity did not merely reiterate these ancient mythologies, but rather, retold them through the lens of Jesus of Nazareth: his birth, life, death, mission and ministry, or what we might summarize simply and succinctly as “the Christ Event.” Thus, Christianity both drew from these ancient stories of our Israelite ancestors in order to explain Jesus as Messiah, but so too did Israel’s ancient myths, prophecies, narratives, psalmody, take on new “christological” meaning when understood through the “Christ Event.” For Christians, the Old and New Testaments mutually inform one another with the person of Jesus Christ at the center.
For example, in one of the most succinct and sublime affirmations of Christ’s divinity in the New Testament, John begins his gospel with an unambiguous echo of Genesis 1, reflecting the same poetic resonance, which serves as a retelling of the creation myth through the Word-Made-Flesh.
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
2He was in the beginning with God.
3All things came into being through him,
and without him not one thing came into being.
What has come into being 4in him was life,
and the life was the light of all people….
And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.
(John 1:1-4, 14)
Make no mistake, John is here telling a new creation story, a new beginning through the lens of Christ where, God leaps from the pages of mythology to the annals of history. Notice the first lines of his prologue begin with the exact Greek equivalent of the first lines of Genesis. “In the beginning.” In Hebrew, “bereshith” and in Greek: “en arche” – en arche en ho logos: In the beginning was the Word. With this new beginning John makes an audacious claim. The Word that was eternally with God, that indeed was God, that was the very power of God who brought all things into being “became flesh and dwelt among us” in Jesus of Nazareth (John 1:14).
It is difficult to overstate the magnitude and brashness of his claim here. John is asserting that the principal creative force of the universe is not a what but a who. He is asserting that the very word (Logos) through which God spoke creation into existence, “Let there be light, let dry land appear…” is the very One who “dwelt among us” as Jesus of Nazareth, who preached his message throughout the region of Galilee and walked the streets of Jerusalem. There is, in other words, in John’s prologue, an unprecedented LEAP from myth to history in his proclamation of the Word-Made-Flesh. John intentionally draws from Israel’s ancient creation myth in order to reveal the scandalous truth historical truth that Jesus is Divine.
It is the scandal of this leap that lay at the heart of J.R.R. Tolkien’s claim that Christianity as the “one true myth.” What he meant by this is that Christianity “realizes,” “fulfills,” or we might say, “brings into the realm of history” the deepest longings of every myth known to humanity: including the deepest longings of Israel. By far the most brilliant myth-maker of the modern era, Tolkien understood mythology not as falsehood or fable, but as expressive of theological truths which history along cannot convey. In particular, he sees “myth” as a literary genre in which gods walked the earth, as for example, we read of in our “second creation story” of Adam and Eve “walking in the Garden of Eden with God.” But, Tolkien says: in Jesus of Nazareth, God actually does walk in history, The word is made flesh and dwells among us. Thus, in Christianity myth is historicized in Christ. And this is precisely what John is saying in his prologue that we heard proclaimed today: “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” (1:14).
In his book, Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton, Christopher Pramuk observed that “Theology must find new ways – or rediscover old ways – of singing the name of God, in which God dwells” [Christopher Pramuk, Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton, 218]. On a rare Sunday such as this, in which we have such little music by which to sing the name of God, we can better appreciate the importance of what it means to find new ways and rediscover old ways of singing the name of God in which God dwells.
This very process was the specialty of both John and Tolkien, who some of you may know wrote his own creation myth called the Ainulindalë: which, like our own Genesis myth, serves as the first chapter of J.R.R. Tolkien’s larger work, The Silmarilian; itself the grand prequel to his Epic Trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. Without going into the details of his creation myth, there are two aspects of his narrative that are germane to my reflections for this and my subsequent sermon. First, it can hardly be contested that, like John’s prologue, Tolkien’s Ainulindalë is derivative of Genesis 1. It is Tolkien’s retelling of that ancient Israelite myth to explain the creation of his own mythical world of Middle Earth. Like Genesis, God first “speaks” to the Ainur (beings we would think of as “archangels”) who then ultimately sing the universe into existence. (Where is Ann when you need her??).
Secondly, and this is of utmost importance, the Ainulindalë was written after Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings, which is precisely how mythology works in the real world as well. While Genesis was placed at the opening pages of our Bible, it was written centuries after Israel had come into consciousness of itself as a people and a nation. And these origin myths were written precisely during various historical times and circumstances in which Israel was seeking to better understand itself in light of its mythological origins. This too was Tolkien’s agenda in writing the elaborate mythology of Middle Earth – to serve as a noble myth of origins for the English People. And this is always the case. Myths about our origins or beginnings are always written after the fact. Because it is the people themselves who create the myths about themselves in order to create mythical narratives that explain something about who they are today, what they believe, how they relate to the world, and their God or gods.
But as Pramuk observes myths are not static. They are dynamic, always being reinterpreted in new ways – or through which we are rediscovering old ways – of singing the name of God. Thus, as like every generation of Christians, it is our theological task to reclaim the old ways of our ancient tradition, precisely that it may speak anew. And this is precisely what John has done in his prologue: reclaimed the creation myth of Genesis to tell of the historical revelation of Jesus as the “Word-Made-Flesh.” The implications of reinterpreting the creation myths of ancient Israel through our Christian theologies of the Incarnation, cannot be overstated, especially in a time of unprecedented ecological crisis where people are understandably seeking ancient wisdom from creation mythologies the world over.
Since the Genesis creation myths of ancient Israel, modern Judaism, and Christianity are among the most wide-spread and influential throughout history, it is problematic that so many rightfully speak of reclaiming ancient, indigenous wisdom of native spirituality but at the same time, dismiss the wisdom of our Genesis myths, or deny that any wisdom for our current crises exists at all. This speaks not only of a naïve romanticization and fetishization of all things indigenous, but no less of an uncritical disregard of the complexity and unparalleled beauty of Christianity’s incarnational faith and its implications for a thoroughgoing spirituality affirming the sacredness of all creation and our interdependence with it. In short, for Christianity to affirm that the very divine power that spoke creation into existence is now “made flesh” in Jesus, as John does, or for Paul to claim in Colossians that “Christ is all and is in all” for example, can hardly establish a more forceful scriptural warrant for a Christian theology affirming the radical sacredness of all creation.
What is at stake, but which time will not permit me to explore, is the marked distinction between pre-and post-Constantinian Christianity. Remember, the Genesis myths that form the core of Jewish and Christian creation theology have their origins in a small nomadic tribe wandering the deserts of the ancient middle east, only to be taken up by a persecuted and marginalized messianic Jewish sect in the mid-first century, that would be destined to become the global religion of Christianity.
The reason why Christianity was not snuffed out entirely is owed to the Edict of Milan issued in ad 313 by Roman emperors Constantine and Licinius, granting religious tolerance to all people in the Roman Empire. And, not long after in ad380, the Edict of Thessalonica issued by Emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire with. While these helped to secure the promulgation and thus the future of the Christian faith, this new Imperial Christianity coerced and coopted the Gospel to Imperial agendas. In such an atmosphere, it is a little surprise that our sacred scriptures (and the myths enshrined in them) would, over the course of history, likewise be usurped, corrupted, and co-opted by political agendas and ultimately by colonial powers, all of which became egregious betrayals of the gospel and of the church, as it had flourished under persecution in the three centuries prior to Constantine.
It is no historical accident that the rise of Christian monasticism was concurrent with precisely this so-called conversion of the Roman Empire to “Christianity.” Or rather, the conversion of Christianity to the Empire. Known as the white martyrs, the Desert Mothers and Fathers fled to the desert precisely at this time in history to protest this coercion and co-option of Christian faith by the empire. No longer being forced to spill their blood for their faith through Roman persecution, these so-called white martyrs fled to the desert from a church now in bed with the crown, in order to give faithful witness to the gospel with their lives (hence, the term white martyrdom).
Modern society in search of models for sustainable living would do well to examine the austerity and simplicity of the lives of these desert contemplatives, living in close harmony with nature precisely as Christians – in diametrical opposition to the politicization of Imperial Christianity or “Christendom.” Owning nothing, eating strictly vegetarian diets, and living completely off the desert land they inhabited, one could hardly find a more exemplary community that stands in direct opposition to capitalist and consumerist society. As Christian monasticism grew, so too did this Christian life of absolute simplicity, of living off the land, and of radical hospitality to all who came into their purview. Even as monasticism later evolved into mendicant orders, such as that founded by Saint Francis of Assisi, the gospel call of the life of a radical simplicity, living close to the Earth, in intimate, spiritual communities grew with it.
What cannot be missed here is that these Christians who lived in what we would now call “ecologically sustainable” ways did so precisely because of a spirituality deeply informed by the Christian scriptures, NOT despite them. They rebelled against a newly established imperial Christianity in order to continue the countercultural, pacifist, and life of simplicity which lay at the heart of the gospel call to discipleship. Their understanding of the sacredness of all creation was not incidental to this commitment, but central. The word was made flesh. Or as Colossians affirms, “Christ is all and is in all…” Yet in the modern world, appreciation for how our own creation myths both inform and sustain this manner of ecological discipleship has all but been lost or profoundly misunderstood to our own detriment and the detriment of the ecological crisis we now face.
In my reflections next week, I will demonstrate how a deeper appreciation of the dynamic between myth and history, particularly within the Christian context opens news ways for us to resources our creation myths for a more profound commitment to ecological discipleship. Hang tight!
+ Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.