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.
