Preached on July 27, 2008 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC, a day when we celebrated "Christmas in July”
John 1:1-14 Luke 2:8-20
Dedicated to this congregation; and always to the glory of God.
While John Shea was writing a book about the meaning of Christmas, and all of the cultural stories and legends that have grown up around it, he went one day to the library to look for the classic Dr. Seuss book about Christmas. It was July, and here is how he describes his experience:
The stacks in the children’s section have two shelves and are only three feet high. I am six feet, three inches high. The special Christmas shelf was the bottom shelf. As I was crawling around, a boy of about five, barely taller than the stacks, said, “What are you doing in here, Mister?”
“I’m looking for a book.”
“What book?”
“How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
“It’s not Christmas time.”
“I know that,” I said. Then I added defensively, “I’m writing a book.”[1]
There is almost a rule that you can’t do Christmas things at the wrong time. Doesn’t it feel odd to you to be singing Christmas carols today? It feels strange to me, but I think that there is value in the unfamiliar if it gets us to look at something important with new eyes, and to hear with new ears. Here’s how I have been thinking about this Christmas in July. Think about the moment in a wedding when the bride and groom share their vows. They come to that moment surrounded by family and friends, with their close friends or relatives standing here next to them, and all looking as good as ever. They come to this spot with beautiful music, flowers, and all the traditions behind them, and all of that adds to the meaning of those words: I promise to love you, to be faithful to you, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live.
That is a wonderful, holy moment. But how important it also is to think about the meaning of those words before the wedding day, and in the years after. That is our purpose in celebrating Christmas in July. The celebration of the birth of Jesus is central to our Christian faith. We proclaim Jesus as Lord and God, who was born in lowly circumstances to join our human condition and to share our common lot.
The Catholic theologian Ron Rolheiser suggests that “the central mystery within all Christianity, undergirding everything else, is the mystery of the incarnation. Unfortunately, it is also the mystery that is the most misunderstood or, more accurately, to coin a phrase, under-understood.”[2] And that is why we are centering this day on the birth of Jesus. We seek to move away from misunderstandings or under-understandings, and allow this mystery to give us life, because it is, as the angel said, “good news, which shall be for all people.”
Incarnation comes from the Latin word carnus, which means physical flesh, as in carnal or carnivore. Incarnation means that God took on human flesh. Rolheiser boils it down like this: “The mystery of the incarnation, simply stated, is the mystery of God taking on human flesh and dealing with human beings in a visible, tangible way.” Or as we heard in the gospel of John: the word, which is God, became flesh, and dwelt among us. Or, for a more direct translation of the Greek, “the word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.”
Incarnation is one of those churchy, theological words that gets used to describe a doctrine, or central concept of the church. I like the way that Rob Bell, a minister in Michigan, talks about doctrine.[3] He says that there are two ways to think about doctrine, one is helpful but the other is not. Sometimes we treat our doctrines like bricks. With bricks, we build a solid wall, brick by brick, of all the things one needs to believe in order to have a secure faith. Faith is seen as something vulnerable to protect, but the brick wall ends up trapping us.
Bell says that faith is more like a trampoline. The point of a trampoline is to jump, to play, to live! Doctrines are the springs in the trampoline that help us to jump. The point of religion is not our doctrines, not the springs themselves, but our doctrines do help us to live and to rise to new heights! If you are a child and you see another child jumping on a trampoline, it is almost impossible for you to not want to join in. That’s what Christian faith should look like. What an invitation!
The doctrine of the incarnation is not a test of how strong our belief is. It is a spring for our lives because it tells us that God is not distant and unconcerned; God has moved into the neighborhood. God draws close to us. That’s the God we worship. So great is God’s love for us that God comes to be with us, to live life as we live it, to be with us in even the most difficult, most painful moments of our lives. That’s what the incarnation means. Sometimes people get the idea that God sits way out there, absent from our lives except to look down and keep track of our balance of good and bad acts, to send on us reward or punishment accordingly. That’s what Job’s friends all said when his life fell apart. But Job knew better, and now we know better, because Jesus came as an answer for God’s bad reputation. We celebrate the birth of Jesus because it is in Jesus that we know God, in Jesus that we see God’s extravagant love, and in Jesus that we hear God’s passionate call for justice and mercy, for the lifting up of people who are down.
The birth of Jesus is good news, for all people, because Jesus shows us God. That is how the incarnation is mainly understood. But remember that I told you before that the incarnation is under-understood, and the part that we usually overlook is the human side of the incarnation. The mystery of the incarnation is that Jesus is both fully God and fully human. So we have in Jesus a clear way of seeing what God is like, but it also means that in Jesus we can clearly see what human beings are, or at least, what we can be. In human history we have always had the sense that we were not living up to our potential. In Jesus, we see what a fully realized human life can be, we see what the quality of our lives can be.
Wasn’t Jesus always inviting us to live as he did? He said take up your cross. He said abide in me; I am the vine and you are the branches. greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for a friend. He said I give you the keys to the kingdom: whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Jesus didn’t expect us just to see him as God and worship him. He expected us to see him as human and follow him.
Do I mean that anyone could be just like Jesus? No, I do believe that Jesus was the definitive revelation of God in human form. But we should not think that Jesus was so different from us, either. Sure, none of us will be Jesus, but none of us will be Mozart, either. We won’t think like Albert Einstein or write like Jane Austen, but we look to them to show us the human potential. Yes, Jesus shows us what God is, but he also shows us what human is. For us to live with the compassion of Jesus, with the strength and humility of Jesus would not mean that we were becoming God, but that we were becoming fully human, that we were living our lives at full force and greatest depth.
And so we come to the full mystery of the incarnation, and it is this: The incarnation is not over. The incarnation is not just a past event, lasting for the 33 years between the birth of Jesus and his ascension to heaven. The incarnation did not end; it just changed form. Jesus showed us how to be human and then he trusted us to be the incarnation of God to others. Remember how Rolheiser defined incarnation as “God taking on human flesh and dealing with human beings in a visible, tangible way.” Now that happens with us. When we listen and offer prayers, when we host a meal or take food to someone’s home, when we help a neighbor with a repair or work on a home in Kentucky, when we offer forgiveness for someone who has hurt us, and acceptance for someone who has been left out. When we do any of these things for a fellow person, we show God in our very lives. We are a part of the incarnation.
The word of God becomes flesh and dwells among us. This is good news, and it shall be for all people. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace. Amen.
[1] Shea, John, Starlight: Beholding the Christmas Miracle All Year Long, page
[2] Rolheiser, Ron. The Holy Longing. Page 75.
[3] Bell, Rob. Velvet Elvis.
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