Kenosis

Luke 2:25 Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him. 26 It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. 27 Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was customary under the law, 28 Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying,

29 “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word;

30 for my eyes have seen your salvation,

31 which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,

32 a light for revelation to the Gentiles    and for glory to your people Israel.’

33 And the child’s father and mother were amazed at what was being said about him. 34 Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, ‘This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed 35 so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.’

This week, we come to the end of the Christmas season, this time when we celebrate Jesus’ birth and really, the Incarnation, our confession that somehow this child is fully human and fully divine. And if that’s true, if that’s the story that we’re going to tell, then this person rearranges what we mean when we use the word “God” and what possibilities are available to us as humans. In the words of one early church writer, the Incarnation means that “God became human so that humans could become God.”

And the real wonder of the Christmas story is that in Jesus, God truly becomes human in all the beauty and ugliness of what that can mean. In our story this morning, when Joseph and Mary present Jesus at the Temple, this character Simeon sees him and immediately prays over him and blesses Joseph and Mary. He sees in this child the hope of salvation, glory, and light. But then, at the same time, this child represents a “sign that will be opposed,” and Simeon tells Mary that a sword will pierce her own soul, too. In the words of another early church writer, “that which Christ has not assumed, he has not redeemed,” which means that if Jesus has really come to transform the world, he has to enter into the depths, the very worst of what we’ve made of this place. And so already, days after Jesus birth, the storyteller foreshadows his death on the cross, and what that means for his mother, too.

There’s really no separating Christmas from Good Friday and Easter, not because God needed Jesus to die, but because cruelty and death are so written into the structures of the way things are that if Jesus avoided them, he’d be avoiding us. Just from a storytelling perspective, the tensions of Christmas already set us in motion toward Golgotha—to avoid that conflict between Jesus and the Powers of this World would be to forsake the promise of Christmas.

I bring that up, because we’d prefer this road lead elsewhere. I feel like Peter in another story, when Jesus is like, “Yeah the Empire is going to kill me” and Peter says, “No, no way!” assuming that he can achieve victory without sacrifice, which prompts Jesus to reply “Get behind me Satan;” Jesus identifies the fear of sacrifice, the rejection of dispossession and the loss of self, with the very ruler of this world he means to defeat.

It’s easy to empathize with Peter here. We’ve known enough dispossession, many of us and our neighbors have known it a lot longer than that, why should sacrifice be written into the economy of salvation? The Ruler of this World has been clever and used the idea of the Cross for his own purposes, wielding the demand for self-abandonment against the least of these, so that some people are always carrying their crosses while others banquet as though the New Jerusalem is their estate. Out of a kind of post-traumatic reflex many of us hear that Christmas is already setting us on the road to the cross and say “God forbid it Lord, this must never happen.”

One of the funny things about theological language, church talk, is the way it universalizes so that we think we’re all talking about the same things. But our terms travel, we give them subtle or sometimes not so subtle shades of meaning based upon the metaphors we have in mind when we talk. When a Womanist or an LGBTQ+ theologian says “let’s not make the cross the basis of how we talk about salvation,” they’re saying to the Powers and to the rest of us, “Please stop killing us, your violence is not redemptive,” but I wonder if when a middle class white person says it we’re not often meaning, “I’d like things to be different but don’t want the change to be too abrupt.” Some of us want salvation without stakes, when refusing stakes is the very thing that’s alienating us from our true selves. And because our identities are complex, we might mean more than one of those things at once; there may be burdens you need to put down and different ones you need to take up.

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Any theology of the Cross worth anything begins from the principle that Creation is good. John’s Gospel describes Jesus as the Logos, the Word or the organizing principle by which the Lord made creation. Because existence derives from the Logos, creation is inherently good. This doesn’t just mean that God approves of our delight, the pleasure we find in nature, but even more than that it means the material world is charged with an excess of meaning that is a sign of God’s infinity. One early theologian puts it this way: The Word (Logos) of God…wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things. So in this reading, because the Word of God creates, creation is already an embodying of the Word, and not just creation in general but every particular creature, which is to say, you and me, and our neighbors.

This is what we mean when we say that we bear God’s image. That doesn’t only mean that you are valuable and noble (though it does mean that, too) but it also means that you are an excess of overflowing meaning, always changing and growing to receive more and more of God’s infinite love. Your “self” is not some stable fixed object. This is very important: you are not fundamentally a problem to be fixed. Creation is not a corrupt prison our souls must escape. Your delight, even your pleasure in the goodness of creation, is not a defect keeping you from knowing God, it’s an analogy for God’s own goodness. As Christians, a people who worship an incarnate God who made a material world, this is where we always start. So the Cross is not a rejection of creation or its goodness, or even necessarily a disciplining of pleasure in itself.

At the same time, we confess that we have reorganized creation into an unjust world. When Jesus says things like we must “hate” our lives in this world, he’s not rejecting the goodness of creation. He’s naming the nihilism of systems, and roles within those systems, that teach us what is Real at the expense of divine excess.

Sometimes when we talk about systems or structures or the patterns of this world, I’m afraid it sounds too abstract, so it might be helpful to remember that Jesus lived in the time of the Roman Empire, which very literally reshaped the patterns of the world by crisscrossing the land with roads and building massive aqueducts that moved water to places where there was not water before. And those physical structures create psychic structures, they shape how individual people understand our place in the world. Think about how you react when you see a cop on the highway, not just the change in the way you drive your car, but the sense of threat in your soul, which is vastly intensified (to the point that it’s not a momentary occurrence but a constant feature) if you are not white. A lot of women carry their keys in a parking garage so that they can defend themselves—the parking garage is a kind of structure of isolation cloaking male violence, shaping the way that those who identify as women or nonbinary imagine themselves in the world. Think about the momentary shot of cortisol when you take your phone out of your pocket and see an email with your boss’s name on it. These kinds of reactions shape how we understand ourselves.

Just as the Roman Roads crisscrossed the ancient world, the informational networks of Capitalism enclose the stories we tell about ourselves in an utterly smooth space, teaching us that we have no choice but to join in this economy, whether that’s by docile participation or by stylistic signaling of membership in a counter-culture. Capitalism, racism, misogyny, policing, war: these are what we accept as ultimately Real, and we’re supposed to serve some role in that Real World. As one writer puts it, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism (which is part of why the dystopian continues to be such a popular genre).

The “Real World” lays like a dried out crust over the excess of Creation just as the stories we tell about ourselves to live in the Real World cloak the image of God, the excess within each of us. And so our situation is not exactly that the world is so delightful and a dour religion wants us to hate ourselves. The world already hates us and teaches us to hate ourselves, so the question is how do we remember the excess of goodness at the heart of creation and our own lives? It probably means refusing the names the world has given us, an un-selving of sorts, a denial of whiteness, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia and the way Capitalism funds those stories, and it means refusing meanness and our nursing of pet hurts that no longer serve us but we keep them around because they are familiar.

If the world has given us the stories of who we are, then the only way to find our true selves, beloved in God, is by losing the life we have received from the Powers. The Powers would tell us that’s impossible, that to reject their kind of life is shear nihilism, but Jesus goes to the Cross to show the limits of the Powers’ story and to defeat them by their own energies so that we don’t have to be afraid of them.

The writer Terry Eagleton puts it this way in his brilliant book Radical Sacrifice:

Like all agents of a revolutionary act, Jesus must undergo a radical self-divestiture as a subject. The subjects of baptism undergo a similar self-destitution in a symbolic form, exposed to the trauma of the death drive through ritual drowning and as such able to convert this radical negativity into a new creation. Jesus speaks of his death as his baptism. Only through this encounter with [death], at the utmost limit of human experience, can a true event be opened up, one which involves a momentous emptying and renaming of the subject of this perilous act of passage. It can now be seen in retrospect that Jesus, a man notably wary of all titles and designations, an empty signifier rebuffing all incriminating or well-meaning attempts to pin a label on him, is to be identified as the Christ. For his disciples, everyday ranks, distinctions and identities are thus dissolved. To heed the summons of the Cross is to refuse one’s allotted place in the symbolic order in response to a Real that shears through it like a sword….The transformative action of the Real springs from the lacks and fissures of the symbolic order, signified above all by the…dispossessed with whom Jesus throws his lot (44).

It’s in this spirit, in a rejection of the World as the order of the Powers, and in search of Creation beneath the world, that we the meaning of repentance, of taking up our crosses, of the self-emptying modeled by Jesus, that our tradition calls kenosis. We don’t deny ourselves, abandon ourselves because we are so terrible that the only part of our souls that deserves to pass into God’s presence is a little shred of dignity. We lose ourselves knowing that we are the creations of an infinite God and so there is always more of us to find beyond what we leave behind. This is why the writers of the early church nearly unanimously reached for the language of eros when talking about worship and prayer. Prayer is a kind of sacrifice where we empty ourselves even of thought in order to caress the Unnameable God who is beyond the ways the Powers have named us and taught us to name ourselves. And this is where the sacrifice of the cross meets up with the movement of joy. Because what is more joyful than being utterly immersed in the goodness of a moment such that you forget you are the one experiencing that moment because your attention is so enraptured with the object of your desire? This is what we seek after, this is what we practice in prayer and worship, becoming lost and found, dying to live in the infinite depths of Divine love where there is always more, more, more.

None of this is to say that any sacrifice is good or should be accepted as such. Sacrifice of this kind can’t be compelled, it can only be chosen, as Mary agrees to be filled with God and Jesus chooses to accept the emptiness of the Cross. But maybe that could give us a different way of relating to our struggles, not by blessing them or the powers that bring them down on us, but by letting those struggles radicalize us for a different kind of world. If you’re paying attention, a sword will pierce your soul, too, but you will also see salvation in your rejection of the way things are.

If there’s such a thing as grace, it would have to crack this world open, not because creation is bad, but because the world needs rearranging if everyone’s to receive its goodness. The Cross, which the Powers meant to defeat God, by Jesus’ faith becomes a stake God drives into the crust of this world, so that as the earth quakes beneath Golgotha, cracks open up where goodness can flower again, where the first fruits of New Creation will already be swelling come Easter. But the first tremors begin to rattle on Christmas and that’s what Simeon feels in his soul when he meets the Child. Amen.