Fr. J. D. Ousley

Every year, all over the world, Anglican churches like this one have what we call, "A Festival of Lessons and Carols." Our Festival of Lessons and Carols was held on Sunday.

The service begins with these words: "Beloved in Christ, at this Christmas tide let it be our care and delight to hear again the message of the angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger."

The doctrine of the incarnation expresses the belief that the divine appeared on earth in human form. Christians believe that the incarnation began with the birth of Jesus, "the Babe lying in a manger."

Not surprisingly, this Church of the Incarnation has a picture of the birth of Jesus. As it happens, it was painted by the noted American artist, John LaFarge.

This portrait of the Holy Family and the Wise Men has been much appreciated by art historians, and an exhibit on John LaFarge at the Metropolitan Museum a few years ago included a notice recommending that those interested in LaFarge should visit our church.

Unfortunately, many visitors come here without paying much attention to this picture. Of course, they see the painting - actually, not "a" painting but "two" paintings, and not technically a "painting" but a "mural" in two parts that is affixed to the wall on either side of the altar.

The images on the mural are not much appreciated because they seem faded. Maybe they've been obscured by dirt over the passage of time.

A cleaning done 25 years ago appears not to have helped; we recently consulted an art restorer; she didn't know whether the mural could be restored again. She said that we would need to hire an expert to tell us whether we could then hire more experts to fix up the painting!

But there's a more fundamental problem here. Even if LaFarge's work were restored to its original splendor, we still couldn't tell if it's accurate.

For the Bible gives only a few words about the birth of Jesus. We have no paintings of the event from that night, 2,000 years ago.

In fact, any pictures we might form of the birth of Jesus can only come from our imaginations.

How can we "go unto Bethlehem," as the old prayer says? How can we "in heart and mind ... see this thing which is come to pass ... the Babe lying in a manger?"

Well, one way might be by what I would call, "a spiritual act of imagination."

There's a venerable form of Christian meditation, for example, that uses pictures we think up ourselves. The method, devised by St. Ignatius of Loyola and it proposes that we image we are present during some event in the life of Christ. In this way, we project ourselves back into the world of the Bible.

Now in the course of such meditations, different people will be moved by different aspects of the Christmas story.

Some might consider the poverty of Christ's Family - a poverty not always indicated in the sumptuous colors of religious art, but even so a reality, and a reminder that wealth isn't the only thing in life!

Other people might wonder at the grace of God, that the divine might enter into the world in such an ordinary way. The manger scene is, after all, a gathering of family and friends to see a newborn child. The spiritual act of imagination that takes us to Bethlehem reminds us that the incarnation happened in the normal, everyday world.

And that brings us to a second method of approaching the manger. Besides meditation, another way to "go unto Bethlehem" is to imagine Christ among us, in our time.

You might, for example, see the incarnate Spirit of God in friendship. You might sense that spark of communication that comes to you when you realize that you are talking to a human being who knows you and cares for you-a human being who will stand by you whatever happens.

Sometimes, of course, relationships lose the spark of incarnation. Sometimes, you only think you know someone, but find out you didn't; sometimes, two souls that once reached a certain intimacy draw back. They seemed to get too close for comfort, and they no longer have the human inwardness they once had.

Commitments may reach a limit. Yet, even in these cases, we may be grateful is that there's still some "communication."

What did we discover this autumn? Not that there is evil in the world; we already knew that.

This autumn we discovered that there is good in the world. Good in the rescuers. In the love for those who died. In the appreciation for those small moments once taken for granted. We needed no imagination to see the precious transcendence at the heart of human life.

Most of the time though, we don't sense the divine so clearly. Like old paintings, our perception can be blurred by the debris of life.

Our vision of God in ordinary life can be clouded by anger, or resentment, or jealousy, or fear - or any one of a vast number of grim feelings.

These emotions blind the imagination; they swamp the spirit. And in the process, our dark feelings keep us from finding the Spirit - the Spirit who is, even now, in spite of everything - ready to be born anew in our lives.

"Beloved in Christ, at this Christmas tide let it be our care and delight to hear again the message of the angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem."

Or, in the words of Phillips Brooks, a man who often preached here and who wrote of his own mystical vision of the "little town of Bethlehem:"