2022 Christmas Day Incarnation: God is NOWHERE

CrossWalk Community Church Napa

John’s Prologue (John 1:1-5 NLT)

In the beginning the Word already existed.

The Word was with God,

and the Word was God.

He existed in the beginning with God.

God created everything through him,

and nothing was created except through him.

The Word gave life to everything that was created,

and his life brought light to everyone.

The light shines in the darkness,

and the darkness can never extinguish it.

Christ isn’t Jesus’ last name. Christ means anointing. Jesus was clearly anointed by God given his teaching, his lifestyle, and his ministry (especially of miracles).

Christ is the presence of God that permeates everything. We witnessed it in Jesus – an ordinary man by his own account and preference – who woke up to the presence of God that is everywhere, always, and inextricably intertwined in all of creation, including ourselves. We are not separated from God as the tracts tell us – not literally – because that is impossible. Our separation is in our blindness, in our incapacity to recognize what’s been here the whole time. Jesus was unique in this – he took a major step forward from the great prophets Elijah and Elisha, and from Moses. For Jesus, God was never “up there” but in here and everywhere. That Good News changed his perspective which changed his life and eventually changed ours! Richard Rohr notes,

“We daringly believe that God’s presence was poured into a single human being, so that humanity and divinity can be seen to be operating as one in him—and therefore in us! But instead of saying that God came into the world through Jesus, maybe it would be better to say that Jesus came out of an already Christ-soaked world. The second Incarnation flowed out of the first, out of God’s loving union with physical creation” (The Universal Christ, 16, 14-15).

If Rohr is right – and I believe he is, perhaps we need to train our eyes differently. Amy E. Herman, in her A Lesson on Looking TED Talk, refers to her work on “seeing” that has helped people from a wide range of industries pay attention to things they might otherwise ignore. Could it be that we need to learn from her when it comes to our faith? Is it possible that if we had eyes to see, we could discover God in the midst of the artwork of our lives as often as we are willing and able to look and see?

Author Madeleine L’Engle (1918–2007) saw incarnation this way:

A sky full of God’s children! Each galaxy, each star, each living creature, every particle and sub-atomic particle of creation, we are all children of the Maker. From a sub-atomic particle with a life span of a few seconds, to a galaxy with a life span of billions of years, to us human creatures somewhere in the middle in size and age, we are . . . children of God, made in God’s image.

Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, Christ, the Maker of the universe or perhaps many universes, willingly and lovingly leaving all that power and coming to this poor, sin-filled planet to live with us for a few years to show us what we ought to be and could be. Christ came to us as Jesus of Nazareth, wholly human and wholly divine, to show us what it means to be made in God’s image. Jesus, as Paul reminds us, was the firstborn of many brethren [Romans 8:29].

I stand on the deck of my cottage, looking at a sky full of God’s children, knowing that I am one of many brethren, and sistren, too, and that Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

Bathed in this love, I go into the cottage and to bed.

Writer and organizer Kelley Nikondeha describes how the context of Jesus’ birth demonstrates God’s Incarnation amongst those who suffer and are oppressed:

The advent narratives demand we take the political and economic world of Roman Palestine seriously. The Gospel writers named the empires of Caesar and Herod not for dramatic effect; they didn’t mention a census or massacre for literary flourish. The Gospel writers used contextual markers to describe in concrete ways the turmoil of the times that hosted the first advent.

It is this very context that makes the advent narratives contemporary—whether in Israel-Palestine or lands beyond. Our troubled times, shaped by all manner of injustice, cause continued suffering, making the loud cries of lament and cries for peace timely, as they are answered by advent. . . .

The Incarnation positions Jesus among the most vulnerable people, the bereft and threatened of society. The first advent shows God wrestling with the struggles common to many the world over. And from this disadvantaged stance, Jesus lives out God’s peace agenda as a counter-testimony to Caesar’s peace.

This is the story of advent: we join Jesus as incarnations of God’s peace on this earth for however long it takes. God walks in deep solidarity with humanity, sharing in our sufferings and moments of hope. Amid our hardship, God is with us. Emmanuel remains the name on our lips in troubled times (Kelley Nikondeha, The First Advent in Palestine: Reversals, Resistance, and the Ongoing Complexity of Hope).

And how about this? Father Greg Boyle is the Founder of Homeboy Industries, which offers jobs, services, and dignity to former gang members. He has witnessed the healing that comes from having reverence for reality—which is where we bump into God:

We remember the sacred by our reverence.... This is the esteem we extend to the reality revealed to us. Jesus didn’t abandon his reality, he lived it. He ran away from nothing and sought some wise path through everything. He engaged in it all with acceptance. He had an eye out always for cherishing his reality. A homie, Leo, wrote me: “I’m going to trust God’s constancy of love to hover over my crazy . I’m fervent in my efforts to cultivate holy desires.” This is how we find this other kind of stride and joyful engagement in our cherished reality. The holy rests in every single thing. Yes, it hovers, over our crazy asses....

I always liked that Saint Kateri Tekakwitha’s name “Tekakwitha” means “she who bumps into things.” What if holiness is a contact sport and we are meant to bump into things? This is what it means to embrace a contemplative, mystical way of seeing wholeness. It gives a window into complexity and keeps us from judging and scapegoating and demonizing. If we allow ourselves to “bump into things,” then we quit measuring. We cease to Bubble-Wrap ourselves against reality. We stop trying to “homeschool” our way through the world so that the world won’t touch us. Hard to embrace the world . . . if we are so protective and defensively shielded from it. A homie told me once, “It’s taken me all these years to see the real world. And once ya see it—there’s only God there.”

Boyle closes the gap between the secular and the sacred:

We don’t want to distance the secular but always bring it closer. It’s only then that ordinary things and moments become epiphanies of God’s presence. Some man said to me once, “I want to become more spiritual.” Yet God is inviting us to inhabit the fullness of our humanity. God holds out wholeness to us. Let’s not settle for just spiritual. We are sacramental to our core when we think that everything is holy. The holy not just found in the supernatural but in the Incarnational here and now. The truth is that sacraments are happening all the time if we have the eyes to see... the Infinite is present in it all... (Gregory Boyle, The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness).

And finally, Rachel Held Evans sums it here:

To understand Mary’s humanity and her central role in Jesus’s story is to remind ourselves of the true miracle of the Incarnation—and that is the core Christian conviction that God is with us, plain old ordinary us. God is with us in our fears and in our pain, in our morning sickness and in our ear infections, in our refugee crises and in our endurance of Empire, in smelly barns and unimpressive backwater towns, in the labor pains of a new mother and in the cries of a tiny infant. In all these things, God is with us—and God is for us.

May we have eyes to see, really see, and appreciate and embrace the incarnation of God in all of creation, and at this time, in Jesus, that we might embrace the reality of incarnation in ourselves. May that truth permeate us, change our vision of ourselves and all others. May we find great strength and courage and self-esteem to move forward in the knowledge that we are forever loved, forever held, forever included in the grace of God.

A Closing and Opening Prayer: God, Lord of all creation, lover of life and of everything, please help us to love in our very small way what You love infinitely and everywhere. We thank You that we can offer just this one prayer and that will be more than enough, because in reality every thing and every one is connected, and nothing stands alone. To pray for one part is really to pray for the whole, and so we do. Help us each day to stand for love, for healing, for the good, for the diverse unity of the Body of Christ and all creation, because we know this is what You desire: as Jesus prayed, that all may be one. We offer our prayer together with all the holy names of God, we offer our prayer together with Christ, our Lord. Amen.