Incarnation

Philippians 2:5-11, John 1:1-14

July 13, 2008

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

“In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child.”

So begins the all too familiar story we tell every year on Christmas Eve. It is the story that puts the specifics – time, place, characters – onto the theological reality spoken of in the first chapter of John’s gospel. It is a beautiful story of love and struggle, of joy and singing, of quiet and hope. Sometimes in all the folderol around Christmas we forget how beautiful and amazing this story really is.

Whenever I am asked to tell my “faith journey,” I say that I am a Christian because of Christmas, but not the kind of Christmas we do in December. I’m not a Christian because of decorations and presents or even Christmas music. And I’m not a Christian because of a lovely story. Lots of religions have wonderful festival celebrations and lovely stories. I am a Christian not because a sweet baby was born, but because that baby was God in the flesh, and that is the best good news human beings ever got.

Think about it. What is God like? The Hebrew Bible consistently says that human beings could not bear to be in the actual presence of God. Moses veils his face because he can’t look upon God and live. People who even touch the Ark of the Covenant with the Ten Commandments in them, written by God, die immediately. Abraham and Sarah and Noah and the prophets hear the words of God through angelic intermediaries. Popular culture picks this sense of God up. Those of us who watched the film “Dogma” on Wednesday night remarked how fun it was to see God portrayed by Alanis Morrissette, a small woman who does not speak. We’re used to movies or TV portraying God with a great booming deep male voice along the lines of Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones.

God is mighty, the great Creator of the universe, the Judge, the power behind all powers. We might imagine that God taking on flesh would look something like the Incredible Hulk or, as the children and I imagined, someone with great earthly power and superior ability. That’s what the Hebrew people imagined as well when they considered the possibility of Messiah, a logical conclusion to come to after thousands of years of being prepared for God as all-powerful.

The great scandal of the Incarnation, the “en-fleshment” of God, of how God chose to be Immanuel, God with us, is that this did not happen. God did not come as super-natural, as un-earthly, as a superhero, but as a baby, natural, earthly, fully inhabiting exactly the same kind of human beginning that each one of us inhabits. The writer Frederick Buechner imagines God fitting into that small body like this:

“The Word became flesh. Ultimate mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not touching. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this. ‘God of God, Light of light, very God of very God….who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven.’ Came down. Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see.” (Whistling in the Dark, p. 29)

I wonder, how could Mary touch him without being burned, so full of the light of divinity was he? How could she put him to her breast? How did her body not explode at his delivery?

But the baby was not like that. The all-powerful, mighty God, whose love is fiercer than any other divine power, did not come to take over the earth or to take us away from the earth or to destroy the earth, but to inhabit the earth. God taking on flesh and, as John says, “pitching his tent among us,” affirms that what God called “good” in the original creation still is. The darkness of human failings, all the things our bodies and minds and voices have done to hurt each other, the earth and God, have not overcome the light that was the essential part of that first creation. “In the beginning” there was light; the book of Genesis tells us. “In the beginning there was the Word,” John tells us, and the light and the voice that spoke the words of creation has come to inhabit creation with us, to love us and teach us to love again, to call forth that powerful light that dwells in each of us so that we can show forth God’s image in the same way God took on our image. It goes both ways.

Do you see why this is powerful good news? This flesh, these bodies, these minds and hearts, these voices we have, this earth we depend on for life, all of this God inhabited and so blessed as worthy. Worthy. Some Christian traditions have a sentence in their liturgies for Holy Communion that goes like this, “I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and your servant will be healed.” That word was spoken the day Mary said yes to the angel Gabriel and the Word became flesh in her womb. God didn’t just say the word; the Word became flesh just like us and so made our flesh worthy as a dwelling place for God.

If we believe this, and it is a big leap of faith to take, which is why many who met Jesus or heard about him later did not believe, but if we believe this, it makes a difference in how we see ourselves and in how we see each other. If this very flesh I have was good enough for God to live and die in, it is good enough! Scripture tells us that Jesus was not considered drop-dead gorgeous. His charisma came not from the accidents of genetics that give each of us our shape and form, our skin, hair and eye color, but rather from the divine light that shone through him. Whatever our shape and form and color and size, this body, made of the same stuff Jesus’ body was made from, is a fit dwelling for God, a temple, as Paul writes elsewhere. As Jesus used his body in service to God, as an instrument for speaking truth and love and forgiveness and challenge, as an instrument for healing and feeding, so may we use our bodies. Jesus’ body died, as will all of ours, and then rose from the dead in a new form, and so, we are promised, will ours.

And so will the other bodies around us. If we are worthy, so are they. If there is light living and shining in us, there is in them as well. We can cover that light in ourselves and we can pretend not to see it in others, but it is there.

(Go down and take the Christ Candle)

It is July, now, and not December. We in the northern hemisphere are in a time when there is a great deal of daylight, unlike the long darkness of winter days. So perhaps we feel less need to talk about the light that cannot be overcome, the light that shines like Christmas candles at an evening service on December 24. In July, we are the candles. Can you look and see how the light shines within you? Can you tease it out so that it shines more brightly? Now, I am going to pass the light of Christ, the Word made flesh, the light that shone at creation and shines still, to each of you and I invite you to pass it to each other. Look at your light and the lights around you. When you leave here, do not take the candles with you, but remember how we passed the light. Can you do that with everyone you meet, helping the light they carry within them to shine the way you lit your neighbor’s candle here? You are worthy; so are they. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We are all worthy. Amen.