Isaiah 65:17-25
1 Thessalonians 5:(12-15)16-28
John 3:23-30
Canticle 15
He must increase; I must decrease.
One of the men who tried to blow up the World Trade Center ten years ago told this story to an interviewer. It is a tale commonly told in the Middle East and South Asia, and he used it to illustrate what it was like for someone like him to live in America. A lion cub was abandoned at birth and was raised by a flock of sheep. The lion didn't know that it wasn't a sheep until one day the flock gathered at a water hole. The lion looked at its reflection, and saw that it was not like the others. The man said proudly that this was what Islam had taught him in America: "I am not a sheep."
The interviewer, who is a Christian, challenged him: "I'm not a sheep either," he said. But the man just smiled. For him, his world and the American world can no more mix than lions and sheep. The wolf and the lamb cannot feed together, and the lion cannot eat straw like the ox: it's a dog-eat-dog world where somebody wins, and somebody loses.
He must increase; I must decrease.
It seems like that, though, doesn't it? George Carlin wrote this: "The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less; we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge but less judgment, more experts yet more problems, more medicine but less wellness . . . We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often. . . . We've done larger things, but not better things."
He must increase; I must decrease.
Into that world comes a prophet's word: "The wolf and the lamb shall feed together . . . They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain." Into that world comes an exhortation: "Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise the words of the prophets." Into that world comes a wild man crying "my joy has been fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease."
Into that world comes Advent, with its stillness, its hope, its patience. Into that world comes this Sunday when, for a little moment, we draw aside Mary's blue cloak and glimpse the rosy, tawny baby skin of the God of the universe in a tiny child, laid in a feeding trough.
He must increase; I must decrease.
Into that world comes a word from Rowan Williams, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, which I shamelessly steal: "here, in the 'little space' of Mary's body, divine fullness is alive. . . . God's way with us is not to overwhelm us with majesty but to live his life 'in little space' and to speak there the quiet words that summon us to faith."
Our decreasing is this: to make ourselves still and small, for only so can we enter into this "little space" of God. Rowan Williams continues: "Only when we are very quiet can we hear. Only when we stand still can we give him room. . . . we have to look at ourselves hard, and ask what it is that makes us too massive and clumsy to go into the 'little space' where we meet God in Jesus Christ."
He must increase; I must decrease.
That was the fulfillment of John the Baptizer's joy, and it is the only fulfillment of ours. Jesus' very name means "Yahweh makes room." In Jesus, God makes room for us in this world, but it is a very little room, a little space no bigger than a mother's womb, because that is the space God has chosen to dwell in. Just before this passage in John's gospel is that dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus, where Jesus speaks of being born again and Nicodemus asks in bewilderment whether anyone can go back into the mother's womb and be born a second time. He is obviously too literal-minded, but he is on the verge of understanding something great: that it is in the "little space" where we meet God, where God has chosen to be, that we will be reborn to new life in God, a life without hatred and rivalry and one-upmanship, a life in which it doesn't matter if you're a lion or a lamb, since both those names and all other names belong to Jesus, and to us in him.
The Archbishop reminds us that there is no way in to Christ's little space "without shedding our great load of arrogant self-reliance, bluster, noisy fear and fantasy." The God of the universe laid aside all glory, "emptied Godself of all but love," to enter the space of Mary's womb. Faced with that, how can we do anything different? "Who would not love thee, loving us so dearly?" we sing. "Oh come, let us adore him"-adore him in his littleness and lowness, in his poverty and weakness.
Then, and only then, do we find (Rowan Williams also tells us) "that it is only in the little space that there is room enough for all of us-forgiven, welcomed, made inheritors of the divine fullness of life and joy that God longs to share with us. Behind the low door of the stable is infinity-and more, an infinity of mercy and love. No straining our eyes to see a distant God; but a God whose fullness dwells in that space we are not small and simple enough to enter."
He must increase; I must decrease.
It is only by becoming little that I can enter the space where infinity dwells, where God's smallness expands to fullness, increasing not in the vastness of space, but in the little room of my heart, made small enough, at last, to receive God. Amen.