Second Sunday After Christmas

Text: John 1: (1-8), 9-18

NB: reference to David Lose, Luther Seminary St Paul: Preaching the Scandal and the Glory of the Incarnation; Johannine imagination brought forth from a previous homily.

I don’t know if you’ve ever consciously noticed this, but we spend a lot – and I mean A LOT – of time here talking about Jesus. In particular, one aspect of Jesus, the Incarnation. The notion that Jesus, as the Logos (the Divine Word, one part of the holy Trinity), took on mortal flesh and became one of us. We celebrate that incarnation at Christmas.

But how real is that Incarnate Word for us? Is it some sort of intellectual assent – I know Jesus was just like me, but not, because he was better than me? Is it maybe more of a compartmentalized thingy – This is how Jesus is.

Here in church we toss about so many theologically loaded words that have to do with that Incarnation – justification, sanctification, salvation, sin – that as we focus on those we lose the person of Jesus. This is nothing really new, as even the Gospels ignore twenty or so years of Jesus’ life. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all pay a lot of attention to different aspects and attributes of Jesus – but it’s John’s gospel that brings our attention back to the reality of the Incarnation of God.

Those of you who’ve held babies, newly born – did you hold them and realize, even for an instant, that that is how the Messiah came into this world? If you’ve walked into a stable – and you know, they stink – have you wondered exactly how a young woman coped with those circumstances?

Have you ever walked the scene of an accident or terribly tragedy – horrible suffering, blood, the smell and shame of lingering death – and come to the realization that Jesus died like those people?

Because in the fourth and fifth centuries – the formative years of our faith as it sought to correct itself from the rampant spread of popular and personal theologies – people died for saying that God himself was born of flesh, in squalor, and in blood.

People stated – and indeed still do – three problems. The first was to reject the idea of a ‘carnal God’. Early objectors to the Incarnation claimed that Jesus, as the perfect ‘Word of God,’ could not actually have anything to do with waxy human flesh and in fact only appeared to be human – but was really not at all subject to physical birth, suffering, or death.

Now it may be very easy for us to simply say, “but we know Jesus was born a baby.” But think of your image of that baby. And then think of some of the Christmas carols we sing:

From “Away in a Manger” – the cattle are lowing, the poor baby wakes, but little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.

Or from “Silent Night” – Son of God, love’s pure light, radiant beams from thy holy face.

Those are images that come to us through the lens that Jesus couldn’t have cried as a baby; couldn’t even have looked red and splotchy and ugly like new babies do. Those hymns aren’t wrong – but they don’t really encourage us to imagine Christ in flesh, and we find ourselves right in the middle of that problem.

The second problem pointed out comes to us right out of John 1:18: “no one has ever seen God.” “Yes!” said those early objectors, “Because no one has ever seen God, then obviously God did not take on human form!” In our lives, in times of trouble, stress, suffering, or setback God can seem frustratingly and infuriatingly far away – not incarnate, nor beside us.

And the third problem is quite possibly one of the most pervasive in our culture—the idea of a vulnerable God, which is quite possibly the hardest for us in twenty-first century North America to understand.

By and large, in our age of sterile and sanitary hospitals, lower-than-ever rates of infant mortality, a safe, hands-off approach to handling our dead, and general ability to numb any pain or suffering we experience it can be very hard to see that God is not only passionately involved in our lives but also tremendously vulnerable.

In that same baby lying in the manger is the man who will hang to death on the Cross at Calvary. But often, we don’t like to think about Jesus sweating, stinking, bleeding, suffering through the ups and downs of life even as we do. Somewhere along the line we’ve been conditioned to think that demeans him, makes him seem more ‘human’ than Jesus really is.

Now I wonder if those three problems are less academic disputes than ways that we express our own boundaries. A boundary that keeps the reality of God in a box lest we lose our prized ‘uniqueness’. To keep Christ at arms’ length.

That being said, I would strongly urge us to recognize three features of the Incarnation that make it a fact and a reality for us:

1.) God understands us, because he has walked the same lives as we do in taking on human form and flesh.

2.) God is understandable to us, as even now as the ‘eloquent God,’ we listen as he continually speaks to us through the Son who is with us,

3.) God himself is with us, walks with us through our suffering, understands our agonies – from a hangnail to the hangman – and is vulnerable with us.

Through the mystery of the Incarnation we meet our God in Christ Jesus. In seeking a huge and powerful God who accomplished the work of salvation we often aggrandize the image of Jesus. We simply often grasp that the most awesome work of God Almighty was done through the frailty of his Son.

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Picture this. Jerusalem. About 70 A.D.

It’s Sunday, and we’re at church. The building is full, cool against the heat of day. We smell the animals that are in the stable underneath us. Earthy smells. We feel the press of people, hear the noise of proclamation and prophesy.

In the front, sitting on a small stools, is a little, old man. He’s stooped from years of labour, weathered from years of exile. He’s deeply respected in the congregation, and it’s rumoured that he may even have met Jesus, once or twice.

But nobody today cares about that. They want to hear about the new firebrand preacher. Fellow named Saul, from Tarsus, who people say actually saw the risen Christ and was appointed by him to go to the nations.

Now Saul (or Paul, as he now wants to be called) is bringing a radical approach. In fact, he’s saying that Jesus fulfilled the Law – what we read out in church – and justified us with God. And he’s preaching everywhere, and writing letters, and telling everyone that Jesus paved the way to everlasting life.

But now it’s time for worship to begin, and the elders quiet the congregation. A hymn is sung, and the old man at the front sings along quietly. Other times, he sits and sways to the music, lost in his own world, or he talks under his breath.

As the service progresses, the Reader brings out the scrolls, and the Torah reading for today is from Genesis – “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” – and the old man perks up as the passage is read. A discourse follows, reminding the assembly that God is above all things and reigns over all things.

Then some people speak in tongues, and others interpret, and two or three people tell of the dreams that they had. “The word of the Lord came to me,” they declare, in the best prophetic style, “and told me what to say.” They tell of miracles, healings, and boast of their own accomplishments as they follow Jesus.

Now the old man is agitated, but the congregation largely ignores him. It’s time for the meal, and since the old man can barely handle a small piece of boiled fish, they leave him in the company of a young orphan, a gifted lad who can write and read, and of whom the old man seems particularly fond.

On this day, though, the old man tells the lad to take up a quill and a small piece of parchment. As the congregation dines mere feet away, the Apostle John, the one ‘whom Jesus loved,’ tells a different story.

VEn avrch/| h=n o` lo,goj(

In the beginning was the Word,

kai. o` lo,goj h=n pro.j to.n qeo,n(

and the Word was with God,

kai. qeo.j h=n o` lo,gojÅ

and the Word was God.

Kai. o` lo,goj sa.rx evge,neto kai. evskh,nwsen evn h`mi/n.

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.

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And in coming into this world, in taking on our burdens, he became one of us. He walks with us, beside us, carries us when our own steps falter. When our hearts are breaking he is holding us; when we are grieving it is that grief that he shares.

And because Jesus Christ became flesh and was born of humanity, through him we receive our promise that we are born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

Who dwells among us.

Amen.