Geertgen, tot Sint Jans, approximately 1460-1495. Birth of Christ, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=46756 [retrieved January 17, 2024].

The Lectionary, Christmas 1
Isaiah 61:10–62:3, Psalm 147:13-21, Galatians 3:23-25 and 4:4-7, Saint John 1:1-18

Christmas Day greeted me with an unusual gift. I do not mean an ugly sweater, a garish necktie, or smelly cologne. I mean in my inbox was a long essay chronicling a man’s journey to become a Christian. Let me give you his subtitle for it: “After years of atheism, I went searching for the truth. I found Buddhism, then witchcraft, and eventually, Christianity.”[1] Actually, as Paul Kingsnorth tells his own story, Jesus Christ found him. I will share the full essay with anyone who wants to read it. You have only to ask. Here, in the pulpit, I can only give a short version of his story. I quote:

“[O]ne night, I dreamed of Jesus. The dream was vivid, and when I woke up I wrote down what I had heard him say, and I drew what he had looked like. The crux of the matter was that he was to be the next step on my spiritual path. I didn’t believe that or want it to be true…After the dream…I started meeting Christians everywhere. They were coming out of the woodwork: strangers emailing me out of the blue, priests coming to me for help with their writing. I found myself having conversations with friends I’d never known were Christian, who suddenly seemed to want to talk about it. An African man contacted me on Facebook to tell me he had had a dream in which God had told him to convert me.”[2]

“It kept happening, for months. Christ to the left of me, Christ to the right. It was unnerving. I turned away again and again, but every time I looked back, he was still there. I began to feel I was being…hunted? I wanted it to stop; at least, I thought I did. I had no interest in Christianity. I was a witch! A Zen witch, in fact, which I thought sounded pretty…edgy.”[3]

“After that, there was no escape. … I could not ignore ‘the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.’ How much later was it that I was finally pinned down? I don’t remember. I was at a concert at my son’s music school. We were in a hotel function room, full of children ready to play their instruments and proud parents ready to film them doing it. I was just walking to my chair when I was overcome entirely. Suddenly, I could see how everyone in the room was connected to everyone else, and I could see what was going on inside them and inside myself. I was overcome with a huge and inexplicable love, a great wave of empathy, for everyone and everything. It kept coming and coming until I had to stagger out of the room and sit down in the corridor outside. Everything was unchanged, and everything was new, and I knew what had happened and who had done it, and I knew that it was too late. I had just become a Christian.”[4]

No longer do I quote him. I am back to preaching. The person who hunted him is the person described in the Gospel today. It is essential for you and me to understand that Jesus is a real person who is alive and who involves himself in our lives hourly. He is “the Word” who “was with God” and who “was God.”[5] The Word is the perfect expression of God. As Archbishop Michael Ramsey wrote of Him, “God is Christlike, and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all.”[6] Jesus is no fable, no memory, and no projection of ourselves upon a meaningless universe. He is real as we profess to believe. As I think about this essay and the Conversion of Saint Paul, I conclude that He interjects himself most forcefully into the lives of those who most forcefully oppose Him.

If He has been born in our hearts this Christmas, well and good. If He has not at any time been born in our hearts, then, it is safe to say, we will meet Him sooner or later, quietly or forcefully, as He sees fit, just as we sing in the great Christmas hymn:

And our eyes at last shall see him,

      through his own redeeming love;

for that child who seemed so helpless

      is our Lord in heaven above;

and he leads his children on

      to the place where he is gone.[7]

[1] Paul Kingsnorth, “The Cross and the Machine,” published on the website of The Free Press, 25 December 2023, https://www.thefp.com/p/paul-kingsnorth-christianity-faith.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Saint John 1:1.

[6] Arthur Michael Ramsey, God, Christ and the World (1969; 2012), page 41.

[7] Hymn 102, Stanza 5, in The Hymnal 1982.