Transfiguration,
Mesa
1st
Sunday after Christmas
Year
C, 2015
Isaiah
61:10-62:3
Psalm
147:13-21
Galatians
3:23-25; 4:4-7
John
1:1-18
“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”
So reads a poem by John Shea, which was
included in some of my required reading in my last year of seminary.[1] Personally, I tend toward a rather
melancholic attitude. Years studying
religious violence and genocide will do that to you. But I love this poem. It powerfully speaks to
me of total joy in simple, yet profound, faith.
Total joy is rare for me, but I continuously return to this poem as a
meditation of joy. In fact, the book
that contained this poem was close to my heart when I made the decision to name
the campus ministry I started Incarnation.
What comes to mind when you hear the word “Incarnation”?
What do you think is the good news of the Incarnation?
I’m going to begin with a claim:
We live in a world in which the larger cultures we inhabit, and quite a
bit of Christianity, under-appreciates the radical nature of the
Incarnation. Many who believe in God are
probably more properly called theists than Christians. The difference between the two is that for
the theist God is in Heaven, transcendent, and if not wholly transcendent, is
only present in the world as some vague ground of being. Christians, likewise believe in God, but also
in a God who is incarnate. The Christian
God is also transcendent, is also the ground of all being, but—importantly—also
has a physical body on earth.
What this will mean practically is that the good news of God goes
beyond the notion of a deity who abstractly loves us and is in general pulling
for us here on Earth, but joined us in the mess of our existence and can love
us within our own specificity. The full
implications of God joining us on Earth probably go unrecognized by many. And before I begin to sound too proud of
myself, let me also say that I do not and cannot recognize the full nature of
the incarnation. Suffice it to say that
we all fall short of comprehending God to the fullest, and there is no shame in
admitting that fundamental difference between our finitude and God’s Eternal
being.
So, to manage some expectations here:
this sermon will not fully explain the incarnation. (Whew, I feel better taking that pressure off
of myself). But I hope to give you some
glimpses of why the incarnation is an important concept and why it matters to
the life of faith.
The incarnation is the central mystery within all of Christianity, undergirding
everything else.[2] Before there could be a ministry of Jesus,
before there could be a crucifixion and resurrection, God’s son had to enter
the world. Incarnation derived from the
Latin (in-carnus), literally “in
flesh.” As John puts it today: “And the Word became flesh and lived among
us.” Not that the Word became a visible
apparition, a disembodied perfection of God that showed the way but never
entered into a polluting physical form.
No, the Word became flesh. God
joined the human race in a body, and subjected himself to all of the problems
and joys that come from such a joining.
Now, some might bristle at this and think that I am downplaying the
crucifixion and resurrection. But
consider this: Without the fall of
humankind, there would have been no need for an atoning death. The Fall gave a particular mission and a
necessity to the incarnation. However,
it is possible to believe that even if there had not been a Fall, a perfectly
loving God would have chosen to become enfleshed and inhabit the very Creation
God called Good. “God’s taking our
humanity is to be understood not only as an act of restoration, not only as a
response to [our] sin, but also and more fundamentally as an act of love, an expression
of God’s own nature. Even had there been
no fall, God in his own limitless, outgoing love would still have chosen to
identify himself with his creation by becoming [human].”[3]
[Note: the footnotes more fully develop this line of thought, which is commensurate with the Eastern Orthodox notion of the End of humankind--theosis as salvation.]
Are you with me so far?
There is good news here: God did not send his son begrudgingly into
the world simply to fix our mistakes.
The loving nature of God makes it likely that the incarnation—God’s willingness
to dwell in the very materiality of His own creation—would have happened beyond
humankind’s rebellion. Still more
awesome is that God showed this love in response to our sinfulness.
As it is, the fall did happen; and yet Christ
still bridges the gulf between us and God.
And so the way the incarnation
plays out is colored by the reality that we live in a creation marred by death,
decay, and sin. As John puts it, “What
has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all
people. The light shines in the
darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
“There is a story of a four year old girl who
awoke one night frightened, convinced that in the darkness around her there
were all kinds of monsters. Alone, she ran to her parents’ bedroom. [Does this story sound familiar to anyone?]
Her mother calmed her down and taking her by the hand, led her back to her own
room. Where she put on a light and reassured the child with these words: “You
needn’t be afraid, you are not alone here.
God is in the room with you.” The
child replied: “I know that God is here, but I need someone in the room that
has some skin.”
“In essence, that story gives us the reason for the incarnation, as well as a definition of it. God takes on flesh because, like the young girl, we all need someone with us who has some skin. A God who is everywhere is just as easily nowhere. We believe in what we can touch, see, hear, smell, and taste. We know things through our senses, we communicate through them, and are open to each other and the world only through them. And God having created our nature, respects how it operates. Thus, God deals with us through our senses. The Jesus who walked the roads of Palestine could be seen, touched, and heard. In the incarnation, God became physical because we are creatures who at one point need a God with some skin.”[4]
There is good news here: Christ in his incarnation shows God’s
complete and total identification with humankind in its vast array of fallen
experience, from the highest joys to the lowest depths of our existence.
Here was a God with skin who was born by a
sexually suspect, poor, unmarried, Jewish, peasant woman in an occupied
territory. A God with skin whose family became refugees in Egypt to escape the
reaching of a genocidal king. A God with
skin who showed us signs of the kingdom to come by teaching and by miracles of
healing and feeding. A God with skin who
endured betrayal, torture, and tasted death.
A God with skin who resurrected a glorious
body, still bearing the deadly wounds that He ultimately triumphed over.
A God who tells us that he lives on within
us, so that now we are the skin of God.
That last thing that Jesus tells us in the
Gospel of Matthew is that he is with us, even to the end of the age. That is a powerful identification of Christ’s
ongoing presence with us. St. Paul,
based on his experience of Christ, illuminated the relationship even more
radically by showing us that the community of Christ—the Church—is Christ’s
very body.[5] This means
that the incarnation did not end 2,000 years ago, but is still ongoing. God is
still here, in the flesh, just as real and just as physical, as God was and is
in Jesus.
“This is not simply a truth of theology, a
dogma to be believed. It is the core of
Christian spirituality [and discipleship]. If it is true that we are the Body
of Christ, and it is, then God’s presence in the world today depends very much
upon us. We…keep God present in the
world in the same way that Jesus did.”[6]
As scripture scholar Jerome Murphy-O’Connor
puts it:
“The community mediates Christ to the
world. The word that he spoke is not
heard in our contemporary world unless it is proclaimed by the community. The power that flowed forth from him in order
to enable response is no longer effective unless manifested by the community.
As God once acted through Christ, so he now acts through those who are
conformed to the image of his son and whose behavior-pattern is in imitation of
his. What Christ did in and for the
world of his day through his physical presence, the community does in and for
its world.”[7]
There are a number of implications to this reality of God’s continuing
incarnation through us who form Christ’s body.
But I will focus only on one:
what the incarnation means for our prayer life.
What does it mean to pray as though we are truly members of the
incarnate God, the body of Christ?
It means that we move from treating prayer as a promise to woefully
consider the problems of the world in obedience to a God who makes no claim on
our individual lives.
It means recognizing that our prayers are just as much a commissioning
of ourselves as Christ’s body on Earth as our prayers are a petition to a
transcendent God.
It means that prayer must move beyond asking for God to intercede, and
become the time in which we name the need and listen for where God prompts us
to put skin to prayer.[8]
And it sounds like a lot of work, but I testify that there is joy in
becoming a conduit of God’s love to others. There is joy in finding that God
put you in the position to be the answer to someone’s prayers. There is joy in making real for someone else
a God that otherwise seems far away and invisible.
And may it be so that we see the Christmas season and beyond as a
prolonged exercise in bringing to others the gift of a faith made real enough
to touch and taste. That, also, would be the proper response to the good news of
the incarnation.
[1] The poem is found in Ronald Rolheiser’s The Holy
Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality (New York: Doubleday,
1999) 71-72. Much of the following discussion of the Incarnation follows from
this book.
[2] Rohlheiser, 75.
[3] Bishop Kallistos Ware, paraphrasing St. Isaac the
Syrian (c. 700AD), (The Orthodox Way. Rev. ed. (Crestwood, NY: St.
Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995), 70). Edited to be gender neutral.
What this means for the
incarnation is that it was not simply God sending his son on a 33-year long
rescue mission on Earth. “The true image and likeness of God is Christ himself;
and so, from the very first moment of [humankind’s] creation in the image, the
incarnation of Christ was implied. The
true reason for the incarnation, then, lies not in [our] sinfulness but in
[our] unfallen nature as a being made in the divine image and capable of union
with God (Ware, 70).” Christ would still
have been made man in order to move us from the state of an unfallen Adam—in
which we are made in the image of God—to be the bridge and show the way toward
full union with God. This line of thinking conforms to the Orthodox notion of
the End of humans being in perfect union with God—theosis, or deification. As
St. Athanasius put it: “God became man
so that man could become God.”
[4]
Rohlheiser, 76-77.
[5]
1Cor 12:12-27.
[6]
Rohlheiser, 80.
[7]
Rohlheiser, 80-81.
[8] As St. James asks in his
epistle: What good is it, my brothers and
sisters, if you say you have
faith but do not have works? … If
a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in
peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily
needs, what is the good of that?(Jas 2:14-16)
And what if we were to simply say “I’ll pray for you”? That is not nothing. But there may be something missing.
