Merry Christmas

The Rev. Denise Giardina
Sunday, December 27, 2009

Isaiah 61:10-62:3 (emotional storytelling); Psalm 147:13-21 (beauty of writing); Galatians 3:23-25 (freedom of imagination), 4:4-7; John 1:1-18

Merry Christmas!

I beg your indulgence this morning because I will speak not just as a Christian and a deacon, but also as a fiction writer. I want to talk about telling stories, and creating characters. And because I write fiction, I want to think a bit outside of the box. One of my favorite Anglicans, George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester in the 1930s to 1950s, was often fond of saying that every good sermon should contain a shot of heresy. Let me warn you. Today, I might flirt with that a bit.

In September of 2005, West Virginia writer and National Book Award winner Mary Lee Settle passed away. At the end of the obituary that appeared in the New York Times, was the following: “Just days before her death,” the Times said, “Ms. Settle discussed her memorial service with Mr. Lawrence, her editor. In a conversation that inspired her to give an impromptu recitation of a Keats sonnet ("When I have fears that I may cease to be"), she told him that she would like to have the beginning of the Gospel of St. John read. ‘If you're a writer, you can see the appeal of that text,’ Mr. Lawrence said.” The Times went on to explain to its readers that, “The first words of the first verse of the Book of John are ‘In the beginning was the word.’"

Can you see the appeal of that text to a writer, especially a fiction writer? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” What is more precious to writers than words? And to declare a Word is God? To quote John, “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and life was the light of all people.” “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.”

I will tell you that today’s Gospel is also one of my two favorite passages of scripture, the other being the 8th chapter of Romans. So why do I love the beginning of the Gospel of John, and why did Mary Lee Settle? It seems, at first glance, a mystifying passage. How is a word made flesh? What is a capital W “Word”? Are we to take this literally, so that if Christ is the Word, he is sort of like an alphabet character on Sesame Street?

No, I think these verses are an attempt to explain to the human mind what is not comprehendable to the human mind. Think about that. (Repeat). We are being led to try and understand, imperfect though our understanding is, the great mystery of the Christian faith: the Incarnation. It is so great a mystery, that it is difficult to explain it with mere words. That is the first problem we fiction writers always bump up against. When trying to create the wonderful people and settings and incidents we want to create, we have only words. And words are insufficient, words can never capture what we are trying to convey. So what do we do? We keep on. We tell a story.

Because the incarnation is such a great mystery, we Christians sometimes throw out vague phrases that have become almost clichés, they are so overused. Christ died for our sins. Christ came to save us. We must profess Christ as our Lord and Savior in order that we might be saved. We must be born again. All these phrases are ways, I think, of avoiding the central mystery, of using “words” – little “w” words – to obscure the central mystery, the capital W Word. How on earth do we even talk about God? How do we even imagine God in our frail human minds? Our little brains cannot take it all in. And so, we continue to tell stories.

Human beings cannot live without stories, whether told to us, or whether we watch movies, or whether we read books. The great 20th century Catholic fiction writer Flannery O’Connor made this connection. She said that fiction is “an incarnational art”. Incarnatonal – carne – flesh. The word made flesh. Flannery O’Connor wrote, “The materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human, and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn yourself getting dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.” In other words, when we novelists write fiction, we don’t write about fancy ideas, or complicated arguments. We write about blood and guts, people living and suffering and rejoicing and dying. People making love and throwing up and going to the bathroom and walking through the woods or down a city alley on a summer’s evening. That is what a fiction writer describes.

And I would argue that is what God creates, and has created and is still creating. I would challenge you to think of God as a fiction writer. Suppose God is not the God so many Christians worship who is all powerful and all knowing and has everything all planned out and whatever happens to you is what God wanted to happen and God knows how everything is all going to turn out and you are a powerless puppet of this almighty God. Suppose God is the Word, and the Word is made flesh, and God is a fiction writer.

A fiction writer creates a universe, a world, and then creates characters to inhabit them. But guess what? Characters escape the bounds of the fiction writer. They rebel. They go off and do their own thing. They change the plot of the story.

If God is a fiction writer, and we are God’s characters, that is what has happened, and continues to happen. If that is the case, does God know what we will do, or what will happen to us? No. Does God know how all of this will turn out? No, no more than a fiction writer knows how her story will end or how her characters will turn out, how they will grow or change, or live or die. Part of the joy of writing fiction is not knowing. Perhaps that is part of the joy of being God.

And so God the fiction writer also does not control God’s created characters. Us. We have no invisible strings attached from us to God, God does not order us around, jerk our strings when we stray, plot out all our paths. Perhaps we would be more comfortable if God did that. Though I wonder. Would we, really? And would we be human?

Here is what every fiction writer learns, and I suspect it is what God has learned. When you create a character, that character is free. That character takes charge of his or her own destiny. That character does what that character wants to do. If the character did not, that character would be dead, would not live on the page. If we did not take charge of our own destinies, we would be dead, we would not live on the page of God’s story, would not live our own lives in the world.

So God the fiction writer learns the hard lesson that all fiction writers learn. When you create, you lose control of your creation. If you do not lose control of your creation, the creation is dead. I am not blazing new ground here, telling you this. John Milton discovered the same thing in his great epic Paradise Lost. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh. When the Word was made flesh, the Word became something else. And that is the second part of my argument. Why would the Word become flesh?

Here is what I think, as a fiction writer. Fiction writers create worlds, and characters in those worlds. And so fiction writers long to live in those worlds. Fiction writers long to be with those characters they have come to love so deeply.

Imagine God the fiction writer, creating this world and these characters – us. The great African-American writer, James Weldon Johnson, has imagined for us what this was like. In his poem “God’s Trombones,” Johnson writes, “God stepped out on space, and he looked around and said, ‘I’m lonely. I’ll make me a world.’”

I’m lonely. Could God be lonely? Why not. Could God look at all these characters God had created, and all the stories they were living, and the wonderful places they were living in, and the dilemmas they were facing, and the sufferings they were going through, and the choices they were making. And could God say, with a sigh, “You know, I want that too. I may have thought I know everything there is to know, but I haven’t felt everything there is to feel. I haven’t fallen and scraped my knee. I haven’t had a fight with my mom or dad. I haven’t fallen in love. I haven’t struggled with an illness. I haven’t fought in a battle, I haven’t been hungry or thirsty. I haven’t loved with no hope. So have I really loved, or lived?”

And so the Word became flesh, and God became a poor man named Jesus, and lived and ate good food (and some bad as well) and fell in love, and went to the bathroom and cried and was afraid and got in a huge amount of trouble, and died a painful death. And, we believe, still lives on, as will we. A memorable character in a great story, and so much more. And the Word has known our glory, and our pain, and our joy, and our very lives. “And so the Word became flesh, and lived among us, and we have seen his glory.”