Wisdom 6:12-16
Psalm 63:2-8
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 25:1-13

Meditating in the Watches of the Night

Our lectionary readings this morning begin with the Book of Wisdom — a book which might well have been named, "The Only-begotten Son of God." Wisdom pre-existed, together with God the Father, before all worlds (Proverbs 8:22ff). She fashioned all things (Wisdom 7:22). She is a savior who rescued all those who served her (Wisdom 10:9). She is a light to the nations, for she is radiant (Wisdom 6:12). As the instrument of God's Creation, we would rightly call her the Λογοσ (Logos), the Eternal Word of God, which was, and is, the divine energy that created, and creates, all worlds and creatures.

Now, we usually think of the creation, as something that happened a long time ago, but, of course, this awesome, cosmic power continues minute by minute. Ask any new mother and father, and they will tell you of its awesome and miraculous properties. With each new birth, the creation is made new again in pristine perfection. Look at a new leaf appearing from a bud or a flower freshly unfurled in its purity of texture and color. Its impossible purity! We durst not touch it! Look at newly created human life shining with innocence. And within each new human life, the Son of God, the Logos, Wisdom, sets a kernel, a seed of His divinity.

Justin Martyr, who was born at the end of the first century, wrote that the Son of God is our framer, our maker, our nourisher. He made this world and formed us. He is the Son, in Whom God summed up all that He is and does (First Apology). In the divine nature of the Son, God the Father sums up (the theological word is recapitulates) everything that He is and does. We read in the Gospel of St. John, that who has seen me has seen the Father. And with the human birth of the Only-begotten Son of God, God recapitulates the creation of the entire human lifeworld. As the Early Church would have known as a commonplace, the Cross of Christ was the new compass set at the center of the world. And the cardinal compass points spelled in Greek "A," "D," "A," "M" — the old man whom He redeemed and the new Man Who He is. As Saint Paul wrote,

To get on the wavelength of this new Man, to live as He lives, is to practice Wisdom. He is Wisdom The woodworker, so to speak, needs to work in the grain of this new Man. The sculptor needs to liberate the wise grain in the stone, freeing the form within, not bringing his own notions to chisel on to the stone, ruining it, but freeing the life that is already within it. To follow Wisdom, to follow this new Man, is to unlock the sweet life, which is already inside us.

What of hereditary sin? St. Paul writes, "Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned" (Romans 5:12). Sin spread to all because all have sinned. New and heavenly life is given to all, so walk of the Wisdom of this new way. Why would anyone choose un-heavenly life? Unlock the sweet life, for it was in you the whole time. The new Man has come to reacquaint us with our original sweetness. It turns out that His divinity was within us, but we had forgotten it.

Among the earliest of the Fathers was Justin Martyr, a trained Platonist who believed that Plato and the other Greek schools of philosophy received their ideas and inspiration from the Hebrew Scriptures. He, therefore, in good conscience could borrow the Stoic phrase, λογοι σπερματικοι (logoi spermatikoi), the seeds of Logos, to elaborate his theology. As we have suggested, a seed of Logos, a kernel of God's divinity, is set within each newborn human. Are these seeds material or spiritual in nature? Are they, for example, matter? Do they have mass and weight? No. They are spiritual, not material. In that sense, we might say (as we say of our genes and DNA), the crucial information turns out to be in their sequencing or order or even orderliness. A sequence, even of our physical DNA, has no mass or weight. It is not a material thing, but an idea, which we may rightly call, therefore, a spiritual thing.

Of course, we cannot by a force of our will change the sequence of our genes. If we could, we might easily devolve into monkeys if animal behavior is our inclination. After all, 96% of all our genes are identical to chimpanzees. As for monkeys leading well-ordered lives, they might resequence into humans. Fortunately, God sets our physical genome, not us.

But it turns out that our "divine genes," our seeds of Logos, can be resequenced by an act of the will. We can re-order our spiritual selves, becoming less or more divine, as a matter entirely of our choosing. Should we give in to the siren-song of culture, beckoning to us to get in touch with our animal-selves, we will become hoggish. Should we set our eyes on Heaven, repulsed by the very thought of an "animal self," we will become angelic. It all depends on the sequence we choose for our spiritual genes.

The Fathers of the Church, beginning with Justin Martyr, Origen, and Irenaeus, saw the creation as being essentially good, in fact, resplendent in its divine shimmer. In each living, created thing, we might discern the vestiges of Heaven, which made them. Indeed, many people today are fond of pointing out that all earthly matter contains vestiges of stardust. In such a world it is not unthinkable that God might stroll through His creation taking delight in His creatures and conversing with humans. That the Holy One did find Eden amenable to His sensibilities tell us all that we need to know about the heavenly character of that first created world. For in each thing He made He placed His essence in a certain encoding, a heavenly encoding. As many have noticed, the Forbidden Tree was the "Encoding Tree" — the tree of Moral Theology, that is, the knowledge, or science, of right and wrong. This science was the Book of All Sequencings. When Adam and Eve chose a novel, though forbidden, sequencing, the same, original divine genes remained, but the sequence had been deformed, and deformities of human life, both moral and physical were set into motion. Apparently this horror is deeply seated in the human imagination for films made by secular people contemplate humans experimenting with forbidden resequencings, devolving into monsters.

This drama plays out with each new life. Each new human, bears the image of God originally. We are captivated by the goodness and innocence of children. Children renew the innocence within us when we behold their charming words and gestures .... and especially their pure and good love. Yet, these children are born into a culture, and will meet with fellows, that will call them to trade this goodness and innocence for novelties that eventually will poison them. After all, don't we all recoil at the first tastes of this toxic world? But the culture nearly always will have the upper hand. But not in every case, and these exceptions prove the rule — the rule that each of us chooses just as Eve chose. Yet many have not.

The great example of the Man Who did not meant much more to the world than virtue and obedience and unblemished innocence, (as important as these are). As Saint Athanasius wrote (De Incarnatione), the cosmic force of God's own Person touching the creation produced so profound a shock that it reached to the very marrow of every creature and caused the divine genome to be reset to its original sequencing. A blueprint of eternal death that had been encoded into each living thing, was nullified and the sequencing of eternal life was restored. The hallmark of this life is wholeness. Consider the virgins from our Gospel parable this morning. Virginity by its nature betokens wholeness, fullness, the purity of new life, and a readiness to bear good fruit. How can we not, therefore, interpret the fullness of their heavenly light in this way? The virgins whose lamps can give only darkness have squandered all the original promise of who and what they were. And are denied marriage.

Without question, Jesus the Christ was a Ransom for many as the Fathers Origen and Gregory of Nyssa taught. But, subsuming that cosmic drama is another, far greater drama: the Advent of our Lord Jesus Christ, Whose effects were even more far-reaching than paying a ransom. And that is that the creative force of God the Father being exerted upon the entire Creation one more time. — and once again through His Eternal Word. When the humanity of God touched even the dung-stained straw of a homeless family's hovel, the world shook to its inmost timbers and became, in its essence, good once again.

But what of sin? And what of the culture that continues to call us with its siren-song? In other words, how do you avoid falling back in to that old and dark world? For the Advent of Christ is not a gift given over and over again, but rather once and for all. St. Athanasius wrote that in Jesus, the Christ, the goodness of God's creation is restored and continues to shimmer. In order to participate in that ongoing, ever-renewing creative energy within ourselves, we must meditate always on the Face of Christ. We must follow His Wisdom, getting in His grain, which is our grain, unlocking the sweet life within by meditating upon His Heart, His Character, His goodness. We must fix our gaze on the horizon expecting His arrival vigilantly into our lives and homes at every moment. Our hearts must beat with His, and through the watches of the night stare up into a star-filled sky remembering always our Love and our Faithfulness, which is Him.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.