A Difficult Birth: From Bethlehem to Squamish
John 1:1;14 “At the Beginning of all things was the Creating Word. . . . and this Word became flesh and bone.”
(translation from the Greek by D. Bogert-O’Brien)
It was a risky and difficult birth. Mary was very young. She was away from friends and family for her first time. She must have been exhausted from the journey when the labour pains began. Likely a kindly midwife from the village who knew Joseph from his childhood attended the birth. It must have been frightening for Mary, being her first birth and so far from home.
Mary, Daughter of the Poor
by Robert Lenz.
As she laid back in the makeshift bedding, exhausted from giving birth, could she have imagined what the future would hold for her child? His life, we know, would turn the world upside.
In the Orthodox tradition Mary is called the Theotokos, or God-bearer. She is seen as the one who shows humanity how God’s body is born into the world. The Rabbi and Hebrew Scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel put it this way, “God’s being immanent depends on us.” Or, as Holiness Preacher Brother Carl Porter put it, “God is Spirit and ain’t got no body. The only body God’s got is us.” John’s Gospel makes it even plainer, “The Creative Word became flesh and blood and “tabernacled” among us.”
We in Squamish are really not so far from that birth in Bethlehem. That birth, some 2000 years ago, was surrounded by risks and dangers, just as the coming years for Squamish United Church will present the risks of change and growth. And yet as the prelude to John’s Gospel suggests, “from the beginning of all things” God risked in love to call things into their own freedom of being. As Genesis 1, the Old Testament passage that John has in mind, puts it, from the sameness of chaos, God calls forth and risks the differences and diversity that are Creation itself.
At Squamish United Church we enter a new year like Mary, pregnant with new life and possibilities for our church and our community. We are “labouring” that this new birth might come forth. Some of us have lost our livelihood, have fears for our family, grieve the death of a loved one or friend, or have health concerns of our own. Like Mary we all experience the fear and sense the risk of bearing God into a world so broken and filled with dangers. However, let us be like Mary. Let us have the courage to be God-bearers for those who are experiencing difficult times, and bearers of hope and new vision for the whole community. Like Mary, let us labour to give birth to New Life.
May you experience the wonder and the joy of the season, and know the wonder of God’s new birth in your life. May we in this new year be God-bearers like Mary, giving birth to God’s body in and for the world.
Daniel Bogert-O'Brien.
