Incarnation

Christmas Eve                             2009

here are three great festivals of the Christian Year.  The one that gets the most attention culturally, of course, is the one we begin tonight and celebrate for twelve days—or shall I say, what our society finishes tonight and rests from tomorrow, since it is worn out from buying and selling for six weeks.  Many of our neighbors are almost sick of Christmas music, having heard awful renditions of them in the stores since Thanksgiving or earlier.  Some have decided to do without parties and family gatherings this year, since the stress levels are just too high.  Christmas is and has been in our culture for quite some time a midwinter festival of happiness and ebullience though sometimes of excess.  If you haven’t worn yourself out and overspent your budget, then it can be a pleasant thing to gather with family and friends and eat and drink and be merry in a warm place in the midst of a cold winter.  This is all very good and worthy of approval—except, perhaps, the excess, the notion that we all have to help the merchants balance their books at the end of the year—and the sense of panic we feel when we forgot that one last gift we ought to have given someone.  But Christmas, as you perhaps know, is not the first in importance or the first in having been fixed on the calendar as a primary Christian festival. 

he greatest festival of all, and the center around which all hangs together, is Easter.  On that day, against all expectations and contrary to what almost everyone thought possible, our Lord Jesus rose from the dead and appeared alive, although changed, to his disciples who had known him during his ministry amongst them.  The second great festival commemorates the day, soon after the cessation of our Lord’s resurrection appearances, of the bestowal of the Holy Spirit—the fulfillment of our Lord’s promise that He would send to his followers the power to live His own resurrected life in this world by the personal assistance of the other Advocate, the One who would make Jesus Himself present to His followers no matter where they were in the world.  Pentecost is the name of this feast day, fifty days after the resurrection of Christ from the dead.  These two events turned the world upside down for they made good on God’s age old promise that He would act to repair and restore this fallen world and bring into existence His Kingdom, His direct rule, in this world.  The wounded world had finally been set on the road to healing.  The very power and life that brought Jesus through death and beyond was the power by which the world was created and was now made available to Jesus’ followers by the Holy Spirit.

 he resurrection of Jesus meant nothing less than the intervention of God in this world to renew and restore it.  For those who could see and understand and accept the reality of what God had done through Jesus, life was not the same.  They could now share Christ’s own life and be God’s agents in renewal, while the order of time continued to run its course to the final end, when Christ would return and finish the new creation.  The end, as it were, had intervened in the middle—the new creation had appeared in the midst of the old one—the sorrows and sins and evil of the old world continued, but there was now a power loose in the world that was stronger than they, and men and women could know that power and live by means of it—and they did.

s Christians experienced this new life and reflected more and more on what had happened to them because of Jesus and the Spirit; as they collected Jesus’ sayings and the records of his acts and thought about them; as they checked with the eyewitnesses to be sure they had the story right, and as they saw what the Spirit was doing in their midst as they worshipped together in Jesus’ Name and knew Him in Sacraments and in their love for each other: they began to draw some conclusions that had escaped them earlier.  They began to understand that Jesus’ death and resurrection proved the truth of what He had told them about Himself.  They saw that He fulfilled the promise that God had made through the prophets to return in person to His people and rule them directly.  And so they came to understand that He was no ordinary human being—well, obviously, they already knew that: what they came to see was that He was more than human.  His resurrection proved that He was actually God come in the flesh.  To see Him was to see the Face of God: He was God and Man, Son of Mary and Son of the Father, the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.  He was the Word of God made flesh, who dwelt amongst us humans for a while, and took our humanity through death and beyond, into the new age of the Kingdom of God.  What He had done, He did not do for Himself, but for us and could never have done it were He not divine as well as human, God as well as Man. 

 nd so Christians began to think in terms of Incarnation—Emmanuel, God with us, was not merely a metaphor for an earthly hero especially blessed by God, it was an actual fact: God had become Man.  And that required an important festival—the Festival of the Incarnation: Christmas.  We do not know exactly the time of the year Jesus was born.  But we know the early Christians used some materials close at hand that pertained to this time of the year and turned it to their own use.  Winter, in our hemisphere, is the time of the longest nights and shortest days, and some ancient peoples had already celebrated the return of longer days in a festival of the sun—our solar system’s star and source of light and life.  Into a dark world the Lord of life and light had come—He who is the source of all the universe’s light and life—including that of our own sun.  How fitting to celebrate His birth amongst us, when the nights are longest, to proclaim that in the darkness of the evil that corrupts our human existence, the light of God’s life had begun to shine again in greater brilliance, with the hope of one day eliminating the darkness altogether.

nd so we gather here together tonight to keep the festival of the Incarnation of God in our world.  We can hardly take too seriously what this meant for our world and continues to mean.  That the God who created everything would actually enter into the conditions of our mortal existence as one of us, assuming all that we are, taking into Himself the very atoms of which we are composed, living according to the biological systems out of which we live, sharing the social matrix out of which we find our own identities, adapting to the political realities that shape our world—all of this is extraordinary, to say the least. 

e have wrapped our Christmas celebrations around the pictures that Matthew and Luke have provided for us: the Holy Family in the stable, Mary giving birth in a manger, surrounded by oxen and donkeys and sheep, shepherds on the hillside, oriental magicians following a star.  All of these elements have served to highlight even more profoundly the contrast between what actually happened and how it looked—God taking human flesh and squeezing into our world as one of us, as a helpless baby born to parents living in poverty, outside all power structures, whose creative power nevertheless upholds all things.  But it was not a sweet, sentimental event, notwithstanding our susceptibility to pastoral imagery—shepherds and sheep and all.  No sooner was he born than our Lord was forced into exile, just escaping a massacre, as many of the world’s poor and weak have continually done.  God certainly entered into our world from below, at its weakest and most vulnerable point.  Yet, as the resurrection showed, the power that was born into the world on this night was the divine creative power that was capable of breaking the force of sin and death and bringing our human nature out into the light of a resurrection world.

s it still reasonable after all these years to hold onto these old beliefs?  Is a world of cloud computing and instant messaging and Google place recognition, not to mention super-colliders and magnetic imaging, a world of postmodern sensibilities and twittering, virtual friendships and global warming—can a way of thinking about the world so old as the Christian conviction of the reality of the Incarnation still hold its own in a world such as the one in which we live?  There are those, of course, who think not.  But that is not new.  Most of the arguments, philosophical and practical, still urged against the wonder and miracle of the Incarnation, were brought against the Christians centuries ago, when there were far less of them in the world with much less political and social power than they have now.  When Paul told the Corinthians to be stedfast and immoveable, always excelling in the works that flow from the Lord’s new life living in them, knowing that nothing they did out of faithfulness to Jesus would ever be lost because it would all be taken up in the new age when He returned, he was speaking of the cosmic implications of the reality of the Christian facts when there were only a few thousand people in all world who believed them. 

 hether many or few believe the truth, of course, makes no difference as to the reality of that truth.  If the Incarnation happened, which we believe it did—for which we can give serious and sensible reasons which provide the basis of real knowledge—then it is the great reality to which all lesser truths must accommodate themselves—whether few or many believe it.  Just like the Resurrection and Pentecost, the Incarnation is a truth which can be known, if one is willing to do the work it takes to know it.  And if it is a true depiction of the nature of reality, then it means that this world has been taken hold of by the God who made it in a spectacularly new and different way from that in which the ancient Greeks thought of it and from that in which even the ancient Hebrews thought of it.  They knew that God made it, but we know that God entered into it and took it to himself so that whatever there is here is precious to Him—sin and evil only excepted—both by the fact that He made it and by the fact that He took it into His own personal life.  Of course our age runs away from a truth such as the Incarnation since its manner of life is inconsistent with it.  If it is the great truth about reality, then our normal way of life is under judgement and is unsustainable in the long run, since our culture flees from the idea that how we treat the world should be in obedience to the design of the One who made it and is redeeming it.  The really shocking thing about the Incarnation, however, is not that many modern people disbelieve it but that many modern Christians do not seriously live in a way that is consistent with it: that is, as agents of the renewal of the world.

o, everything matters—every little thing—because all was and is being taken up and renewed in the life and in the power of God and we who know both our Lord Jesus and the power of the Kingdom at work in the world ought to be a part of His great work.  This was the night when that great work started that was perfected on the Cross and in the Resurrection and became available to us at Pentecost.  If we are to keep Christmas, then, it will be not only through participating in the celebration of a mid-winter festival of fellowship and gift-giving, but by entering into the great work of re-creation which the Incarnation inaugurated.  And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld His glory, glory as of the Only-Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.