Incarnation

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Mer Rouge, Dec. 28, 2014 

So... there we were, just 3 days ago, kneeling beside a manger gazing in wonder at a newborn babe. He cries from time to time, as newborns do, to signal that he is hungry and needs a diaper change.

He looks so very human, lying there tiny and helpless, wrapped in bands of cloth. Our hearts melt. The least maternal among us cannot resist offering a finger for a tiny hand to grasp. It takes a cold, hard-hearted human to resist a newborn baby.

But, how do we wrap our minds around what the angels and the shepherds told us—that God has come to dwell among us?

 I think for most of us, most of the time, our belief about who Jesus is and Jesus’ relationship to God, comes “from below.” In other words, we come at it from the human angle. We begin with the babe in a manger, his earthly parents standing protectively near. We understand that.

We understand that the child grows to be a man and takes on responsibility. Jesus the man ministers to poor people and sick people; he associates with tax collectors and sinners. He is tempted; he walks the dusty roads of Galilee and grows weary of the crowds. He is human. He has a special relationship with God, to be sure, but he’s human nevertheless, like us in every respect.

Then along comes the Gospel according to St. John. Every 1^st Sunday after Christmas, we read this poetic and compelling, yet mysterious, prologue to John’s account of Jesus the Christ.

Where, we might be tempted to ask, is the babe? Where is Mary, the blessed mother, Joseph, the faithful father? The shepherds? Indeed, not one human populates this account.. save John the Baptizer!

Here’s a Gospel trivia question for you: Where and how does Jesus the human first appear in the Gospel according to John? In verse 29 of Chapter 1, as a 30-year-old man, when he comes to the river Jordan to be baptized!

The Christmas story is not part of John’s account. John’s Gospel offers us a view of Jesus “from above.” That is, John’s account begins with God, and with the unity of “the Word” with God.

It echoes the creation story, and tells us again that God exists outside of time, and that even light and life itself are from God. And in so doing, it provides us with a healthy reminder of God’s difference from humankind.

In John’s interpretation of Christmas, the babe in the manger is “the Word” that not only was with God, but was God, “the Word” spoken in an act of self-communication. It reminds us that we can know God only as God comes to us in self-revelation. Nothing we can do—not our most noble aspirations or our most dedicated acts of service—can earn or precipitate such an event.

From the prologue to John’s Gospel, we learn first and foremost that in Jesus Christ we meet nothing less than the revelation of God. Christmas is, first of all, the celebration of a gracious decision on God’s part to become human in the baby of Bethlehem.

I myself have often wondered why the author of John chose to tell this story in quite such abstract words and concepts. Why didn’t he just come right out and say, in plain Greek, “Oh, and by the way, Jesus was God!”

I suspect it had to do with the fact that “plain Greek” is no better than “plain English” for talking about such things. How could any human language be up to the challenge of declaring and explaining something so utterly unbelievable, so preposterous, as God becoming human?

Indeed, another lesson we learn from John’s prologue is that God’s revelation in Jesus Christ is just not obvious. The Word came to a world that should have known him. After all, he created it.

In particular, he came to a people who perceived themselves to be chosen from all the peoples of the earth to be God’s own. And they expected a Messiah!

Yet, he was rejected. As John states, He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.

Jesus was not universally recognized or acclaimed as the revelation of God. The remainder of John’s Gospel relates story after story of how prominent religious people not only did not recognize Jesus, but found him offensive, accused him of blasphemy, and charged him with being demon-possessed.

Jesus just wouldn’t obey the rules and hang out with the right kind of folks! Those who confidently thought they saw things rightly, in fact turned out to be blind.

But of course John the author addresses us as well, and he will not let us off the hook. He confronts us with a divine self-disclosure that does not document itself with foolproof evidence. We are not provided with irrefutable grounds for faith.

Instead, we are asked to believe that a baby in a feeding trough, born to a young woman who was not yet married, a Palestinian peasant who grew up to be an itinerate preacher living in a buffer zone in the Middle East, powerless before a Roman Governor, is the One in whom we meet the Creator of heaven and earth. The fact that the good church people of the day, who should have received him, in fact rejected him, leaves us all the more uneasy.

But rejection is not the whole story. Some did receive Jesus. They trusted and believed in him, and found themselves empowered to become children of God. They just aren’t the company we quite expect to find ourselves in: a couple of fishermen, a tax collector, a Samaritan woman with a checkered past, a beggar born blind, an unnamed Roman official, and ultimately, on Golgatha, a thief and a foot soldier.

What a motley crew! What an unlikely group to become the community called into being and nurtured by the revelation of God in Jesus. Certainly none of us needs to worry about whether we are pious enough or good enough or successful enough to be called into the community of the children of God.

But that in itself tells us much about the character of God and God’s intentions in Jesus. If we accept that God has seen fit to materialize in human flesh and form, then we live in a universe of possibility we can hardly imagine. If God can reconcile with humankind through a helpless babe born to an unwed mother in the lowliest of places, what might God be able to do through us?

Mary and Joseph “Yes” to God and the world was transformed. Each of us has a “Yes” we can say to God. It might seem small, insignificant. Not worth doing. But we’re all called. What is the Christ Child asking you to do to change the corner of the world you live in?  

Amen.