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Matthew
1: 18-25 & Colossians 3: 12-17
First Sunday After
Christmas Day/ 30th December 2012
Emmanuel. God is with us. The heart of the Christmas message. This is what theologians since the early
church have referred to as the doctrine of the incarnation. John’s Gospel is most explicit, “And the Word
became flesh and lived among us…full of grace and truth.” And the Word – the eternal divine Logos or
Word, the creative language of the universe that is God – became flesh and
lived among us, literally, “tabernacled” among us; or, to put it another way,
with the birth of Jesus, “God pitched a tent” with us and invited us to live
under it with God (John 1:1-5, 14).
Matthew’s
Gospel makes a similar claim using different language. Instead of appealing to Greek Logos
philosophy as a way to make sense of Jesus’ birth, Matthew, writing primarily
for a Jewish audience, drew upon Israel’s past, delved into the Hebrew
scriptures and lifted up Isaiah’s promise that a young maiden shall conceive
and bear a son and they shall name him Emmanuel,” meaning “God is with us.”
This is the staggering, mind-blowing claim we celebrate and affirm this time of
the year. God with us.
On
Christmas Eve last week, at the Candlelight Service, I built the meditation around
a quote from E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s
End (1910), to express the core theme of the Gospel. “Only connect.” Forster (1879-1970) writes of the character,
Margaret, “Only connect! That was the
whole of her sermon. Only connect the
prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at
its height. Live in fragments no
longer. Only connect…”
He,
she, is talking about writing here, connecting prose and passion, but this
wisdom speaks beyond the world of writing.
Words and emotions, bring them together and both will be exalted. Bring them together and love will be seen at
its height. Enflesh the words with
passion, with emotions, thought, purpose, and love will be embodied. In many ways, this is what Christmas, the incarnation
are all about, connecting prose and passion.
“And
the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Word embodied in human action, in a human
life. Bring them together and love will be seen at its height. The birth of Jesus the Messiah, Emmanuel, God
with us, is the fullest expression of this truth – that God wants to connect
with us and we really want to connect with God because we were created this
way. It’s all about connection. This is the root and true meaning of the word
religion. It doesn’t mean being holy or following
religious practices, it has little to do with belief. Religion, from the Latin religare means, to make a connection. Our words ligament
and ligature come from the same
root. Religare. It’s all about connection – God connecting with humanity,
humanity connecting with God, human to human, person to person, connecting with
the depths of the self, connecting with creation, with the cosmos itself. As Einstein (1879-1955) showed us, this
entire universe – at every level, from the micro to the macro, including the
properties of light – is all based on connections, relationships, making those
links and realizing how we’re all connected.
And
God is tireless in making these connections with us and to us and for us. Incarnation. God taking on flesh in Jesus
reveals to us something of what matters to God – God comes down and God comes
in, God comes down and God gets close to us, takes up time and space, shares
time and space with us, coming not as an idea or philosophy or a disembodied
spirit, but as a person and a person has and is a body, with a face. We have to
dispel the notion that Christian experience is something essentially
“spiritual.” It’s more than that; it’s an embodied experience.
This
is really an extraordinary claim if you think about it. If you take this image
of God born in a manger and let it dwell in you, let it sink down into your
body, allow it to become enfleshed in your life, it will shape how you see
yourself and your neighbor and the world around you. The doctrine of the incarnation is almost too
much for our minds to take in, but if we had embraced it, if we had allowed its
images to shape us, the history of the Church would have been very different. I believe that if we embrace this image, allow
its images to shape us, the future of the Church will be very different.
The
theologies we hold – or that hold us – always have consequences. Here are
several implications of an incarnational theology.
·
That
God would act in this way, affirms that God loves time and space, the birth of
Christ means that God makes times and
space for us.
·
It
affirms the gift that is our humanity.
Yes, we are fallen and broken by sin, but the birth of Jesus means that
he has shared our humanity with us. Yes,
to redeem it, by showing us what a human being really looks like, what it means
to be human, how to love as a human, how to suffer and die as a human, how to
be relationship with God.
·
The
incarnation affirms the value of embodiment; that bodies matter, it matters how
we use them and care for them.
Embodiment includes the affirmation of emotions and feelings, as well as
thought. The Church’s centuries old,
anguished frustration with sexuality would have been very different if we did a
better job affirming the Incarnation. We
can embrace all aspects of our humanity.
I also think we would have been healthier as a people, emotionally,
psychologically, if we welcomed and embraced emotions and feelings, along with
beliefs and ideas and thoughts about God.
·
The
incarnation also affirms the goodness of this creation; that God would become
part of creation. The Creator takes up creation and incorporates it into
Godself. If we really embraced this
aspect of the incarnation, we would honor and care for this earthly body. If we
had, I wonder if we would be facing climate change and the destruction of the
environment today.
·
The
incarnation affirms the gift of history, that God wants to enters time and
space embodied, which means that God cares deeply, passionate about how we live
in time and space, about justice, about reform.
We’re more than just a passin’ through this weary world on the way to
heaven, this world matters to God.
Heaven and earth need to connect.
·
Theologian
Wendy Farley puts it this way: “The incarnation is the sign for Christians of
the joining of heaven and earth, of Divinity and humanity. We are all embraced
by that glorious ‘oneing’ as Julian of Norwich [1342-c.1416) put it. …The incarnation is the unspeakable
joyousness that we dwell in at the intersection of Divinity and humanity.”[1]
God
with us, enfleshed in Jesus Christ. These are the staggering claims we affirm
as Christians. And yet, as Christians and as the Church have yet to fully
embody what this means for us over these 2000 years. This is the ongoing work of the Spirit; the Spirit’s
task is to embody the truth in us. The
enfleshment, the dwelling of God with us
continues in us through the power of
the Holy Spirit, when we let, as Colossians puts it, “the peace of Christ rule
in [our] hearts” (Col. 3:15). The writer of Colossians, heavily influenced by
Paul, affirmed the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ,
who is at work in our hearts and the world, continually engaging, connecting,
embodying, enfleshing God’s redemptive love in our lives, in our souls. This is the Gospel: God is with us – not was with us or will be
with us – in Christ, Emmanuel, God is with us – now and now and now, in this
moment and the next and the next.
Forever and ever; Amen!
[1] Wendy Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away: A Theology of
Incarnation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 17, 14. Theologian
Mark Jordan argues, “the history of Christian theology can be seen as a long
flight from the full consequences of its central profession. The big business of theology has been to
construct alternate bodies for Jesus the Christ – tidier bodies, bodies better
conformed to institutional needs. I
think of these artificial bodies as Jesus’ corpses, and I consider large parts
of official Christology as their mortuary” (cited in Farley, 35).
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