Sunday, December 29, 2019

December 29, 2019 - First Sunday of Christmas



In the name of the Word become flesh, Jesus Christ. Amen.
            Through the Sundays of Advent, I preached about the centrality of the Incarnation in our faith and about how this belief is at the foundation of our Anglican theology. Now that we’ve arrived in the season of the Incarnation this claim of our faith is on full display. As we heard in this morning’s collect, “God has poured upon us the new light of the Incarnate Word.” This light that has been kindled in our world is to be our guiding light. Christmas is so much more than a day, it is the claim that God has come to us to be the Light of the world.

            What an Incarnational theology does for us is to put Jesus, the Incarnate Word, at the center of our faith. To be very clear about this, we are staunchly Trinitarian – God is three persons in a unity of being and so any separation of the Father, Son, or Spirit is a dangerous move. It’s not that we ignore any part of the Trinity, but rather that different Christian traditions put their emphasis on different understandings of God. This isn’t to exclude any understanding of God, but when it comes to trying to grasp the ungraspable, we all grab onto a different handle.
            Some churches, you might notice, talk a lot about God, as in God the Father. God the Father is certainly present in our theology and worship, but not in the same way that Jesus is. The difficulty with emphasizing the Father is that the Father is, as the great hymn puts it, “immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.” So if we put God the Father at the center of our faith, we are left fumbling in the dark. What we end up worshiping is more likely to be our opinion than the immortal and invisible God. Other traditions focus on God the Holy Spirit. We invoke the Spirit multiple times in every liturgy, so it’s not that we ignore the Spirit by any means. But as we know from Scripture, “the Spirit blows where it chooses.” Trying to capture the wind is a futile exercise, and so having a faith that primarily focused on the Spirit can be problematic because it makes us pin down that which can never be pinned down.
            An Incarnational faith though puts Jesus at the very center. And this is what God intended by becoming flesh and dwelling among us. Jesus is the full revelation of God and came among us so that we might not have to wonder or argue about what God is like – we know without ambiguity what God would do. We know that God would hang out with the rejects of society. We know that God would feed the hungry. We know that God would reject the status quo of the world. We know that God would warn us about the dangers of money. We know that God would pardon sinners, welcome strangers, raise the dead, and challenge the powerful. We know that God would go to any length, including betrayal and death, to show us just how deep this love goes.
            So you’ll notice that all of our prayers end with some version of “through Christ our Lord,” because Jesus animates our faith. It’s why we call ourselves “Christians.” It’s why our church is cross-shaped. It’s why the focal point of our church is the aumbry – the cabinet where the blessed bread and wine, which are, for us, the very Body and Blood of Christ, are kept. At the center of our worship is the act of the Eucharist – when Jesus is present in the breaking of the bread. At the very heart of our worship is Jesus.
            This is what the evangelist John expects as he gives us his version of the nativity story in the opening chapter of this Gospel. Jesus came so that we might know what God is like and Jesus shows us what God is like because Jesus is the eternal Word through which all things came into being. All things find their source in Jesus. In focusing on Jesus, we learn about the true nature of the world and ourselves. In Jesus, we have God’s self-expression, God’s autobiography, we might say. Jesus shows us what is on God’s mind.
            And the way John portrays Jesus coming into the world is in a universalistic way. By calling Jesus the “Word,” he is appealing to both Jewish and Greek thought. As you’ll recall, in Genesis, all things are created when God speaks them into being, as in “let there be light, let there be night and day, let there be birds of the air and fish of the sea.” By calling Jesus the “Word,” John makes it clear that Jesus was the voice that was doing this creating. But “Word” could also be translated as “reason” or “logic,” as the Greek text is logos, which is where our word “logic” is derived. And in Greek and Roman culture, the idea was that the universe was held together by a series of logical proofs – not all that different from what modern-day atheists might say about things like gravity and nuclear physics as being the underlying reality of the universe.
            John’s audacious claim is that this Word – this creative voice of God and the very nature of the universe – became flesh and lived among us as Jesus. So Jesus shows us the grain of the universe. He shows us how things are designed to work. He shows us God’s priorities. Having an Incarnational focus in our faith puts us in alignment with Jesus, allowing us to go with the grain. When we have Jesus as the center of our faith, we find the abundant life that God desires for us. As John tells us, “What has come into being in him was life.”
            What’s so crucial about an Incarnational faith is that we pay attention to Jesus and the entirety of his ministry. On a Sunday off recently, I attended a different church that has a different sort of focus and what I noticed is that though they might have talked about Jesus, they did it without an Incarnational focus. And this is a problem with focusing on Jesus without the Incarnation. I realize that sounds silly – how can you focus on Jesus without focusing on the Incarnation. But it happens all the time when we think that Jesus did nothing but die on a Cross and then rise again. Not to diminish those events at all, but Jesus did so much more than die. He lived, he preached, he taught, he healed, he loved. An Incarnational faith pays attention to the entire trajectory of Jesus’ life.
The problem with focusing only on the Cross of Christ instead of his entire Incarnation is that we might end up thinking that Jesus really doesn’t have any impact on our life. A non-Incarnational focus on Jesus might lead us to think that Jesus makes a difference to our afterlife, but we might ignore the difference that Christ makes in our current lives. John tells us that though Jesus came to his own people, many did not accept him. But to those who do receive him, he makes them children of God. Theologians have long said that “God became man that man might become God.” If the whole point of the Incarnation was just that God die on a Cross, then God could have shown up as a 30-year man and skipped right to the chase. But God didn’t do that because all of Jesus matters.
What this allows us to do is to also take part in the story of the Incarnation. God is looking for children to draw into this great drama of love. God wants nothing more than for us to flourish by knowing that we are loved. And Jesus came to show us this and to give us real examples of what it looks like for this love to flourish in a human life, not only in a human death. So loving our enemies, forgiving those who trespass against us, being generous, loving God with all our heart, soul, and mind are all things that we saw Jesus do and so we know what the path of light looks like. We no longer need to walk in the dark.
But that doesn’t mean we won’t walk in the dark. John tells us that, though Jesus came to his own people, they did not know him. The way of Jesus is a liberating one, but sometimes freedom is more than we can handle. As TS Eliot wrote, “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind cannot bear very much reality.” Jesus certainly showed us reality, he showed us the grain of the universe. But in that grain are things like turning the other cheek, like taking up our cross and following him, like the least of these inheriting the Kingdom. But if we don’t pay attention to the Incarnation we can avoid all of that. If we jump straight to Crucifixion and Resurrection then we can view Jesus as our ticket to heaven and live as the rulers of our own domains. And so an Incarnational theology is a corrective to our attempts to make religion about God instead of us. To be clear, God doesn’t need religion; we do.
So we are given a wonderful gift in Christmas – we are given God in the flesh who not only saves us from sin, rescues us from death, and blesses us with love, but Jesus also shows us the pattern of living in the grace and truth of God. Having Jesus at the center of our faith allows us to live by the light of the world.
And if you want to see what difference Christ can make in our lives and our world, just use the word “Jesus” instead of “God” and you’ll notice that things change, sometimes rather uncomfortably. Whether it’s on our money, public buildings, or police cars, we read the phrase “In God we trust.” A nice thought. But what if we read “In Jesus we trust?” I think our spending habits might change if we were confronted with that more often. How about when a politician says “God bless the United States?” I think it would sound a bit different if they said, “Jesus Christ bless the United States.” What if we put Jesus’ name in front of the phrase “Damn you?” I have a sense that we’d probably use that phrase a whole lot less. Would we ever say “Jesus is going to get them?” Of course we wouldn’t. Because of the Incarnation, we know that Jesus doesn’t get people, or damn them. Try it in your own life – say “Jesus” instead of “God” and see what difference the Incarnation it makes.
Invoking the Prince of Peace would change what we thought about war. Talking about the Light of the World might change how we treat those in the darkness of poverty or prison. A focus on the Lamb of God could make us rethink how we deal with conflict. An Incarnational faith reminds us that this Jesus is exactly who we’re talking about when we say God.
            We have been given the gift of God’s very being in Jesus. We have the Light of the world fully accessible to us and that makes all the difference in the world. This Christmas, the words of that wonderful hymn can serve as a prayer for us who have an Incarnational faith: “In him there is no darkness at all. The night and the day are both alike. The Lamb is the light of the city of God. Shine in my heart, Lord Jesus.” Amen.