Year C, Christmas Day, 2012

And the Word became flesh and lived among us...

John 1:1-14 (click on the scripture to read it)

We are gathered here today to celebrate the incarnation…, to celebrate God becoming human.  But why did God become incarnate?

 

I have posed this question to many people in a variety of ways over the last couple of weeks.  Though several people did actually answer the question of “why”, most people skipped the question of “why did God become human” and went directly to “how we are to live as Christians because God became human.” 

I believe that today is a celebration of why God became human and then the rest of the year we get to wrestle with how to live into the incarnation.

As we look back through written history of the relationship between God and humanity we can see different methods as to how people reconciled with God.  The oldest form was to make burnt sacrifices to God.  As it turned out, that didn’t work all that well for them.    

Those burnt sacrifices were supposed to bring them back into a good relationship with God, yet bad things kept happening to them.  For thousands of years they held to the belief system that if something bad happened to them, it was because they sinned against God, or if not them, then they were being punished for the sins of their father, or their father’s father.

This concept was pushing blame on others and not creating right relationships with God.  So God added something new, the Torah, the written law.  Having the Torah required the people to gather in God’s name in order to hear what the word of God had to tell them.  Though this helped some, it seems to have created an unhealthy and even oppressive imbalance of judgment among God’s people.  This imbalance created an understanding that God was oppressive too. 

Following written rules and seeking forgiveness through the works of ritual sacrifice didn’t cut it.  God created us in God’s image to be in a healthy relationship with God, not a relationship based on fear.

Today we celebrate Christmas, the birth of God into the world.  We are celebrating the Word becoming flesh and walking among us.

But again, I ask why?  Why did God become incarnate?

Recently a friend of mine began online dating.  The process was going kind of slowly.  She went on a couple of dates but the guys she met were not the right fit.  Her most recent attempt was a little different.  She spent more time getting to know the man via texts, emails, and phone conversations before taking the big step of actually meeting face to face.  They were kind of like giddy middle school kids who spent hours and hours on the phone, not wanting to hang up.

Things seemed great.  She even began telling her friends about him and even to us he sounded

like a great fit.

Well, the time came and they arranged a couple of lunch dates.  The lunches went fine, but it turns out that reading about him and talking to him over phone was not enough to form a genuine relationship.  When building and sustaining relationships, something happens when we are able to look at one another in the eyes and truly experience each other face to face in flesh and blood.

My friend and her date are both nice and genuine people, but after spending actual time together, they realized they needed to keep looking for the right person in which to enter into a long lasting covenantal relationship.  I guess we could take this as a warning.  The more we enter into electronic relationships, the less meaning and connection those relationships actually have. 

Since being in a relationship through the works of sacrifice didn’t work and neither did the addition of the written word, what would it take to restore the intimate relationship between God and humanity?  What would it take for the restoration of the level of intimacy that existed in the Garden at Creation?

God and humanity needed to be able to look at one another face to face in order to really know one another.  It was time to do away with sacrifices and time to stop these cold impersonal long distance relationships. Now it was one-on-one.  It is only through personal one-on-one relationships that we can know God and each other.  It is only through experiencing God in the flesh that we can experience Agape, a genuine connection with God and each other founded on unconditional love. 

In the Gospel of Luke we get to hear a beautiful story about Jesus’ birth; a story filled with Angels, Shepherds, and a picturesque image of Joseph and Mary loving their new born baby in a manger.

In John’s Gospel we don’t get the warm images of a Christmas pageant.  What we get is theological.  What we get is why…why God became flesh and walked among us.  If we don’t understand why, then our relationship with God becomes out of balance.

John’s Gospel tells us that God and the earthly Jesus were one in the same.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  The Word was Jesus, so this is very important in our understanding that God became flesh. 

The Gospel also says, “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”  This lets us know that Jesus is the light for all people and in his light the darkness cannot overwhelm and consume us.

This is why God became incarnate.  God’s chosen people had fallen into darkness.  They were being oppressed by the Romans and they were even being oppressed by each other.  As the oppression grew the darkness grew.  The wealthy grew in power and the poor became weaker.  There was no middle class.  You either were rich or poor.  If you were born into a rich family you remained rich, and if you were born into a poor family you remained poor.

The darkness grew and grew and with the darkness came the loss of hope.

For humanity to turn away from the darkness and regain hope, we needed to see God face to face.  We needed to begin to see what God intended for us and not what society had become.  So God did what was necessary.  God emptied God’s self and was born into a human family; a poor family…and the Word became flesh.  For the first time God and humanity saw each other eye to eye, and in doing so, created a new set of boundaries and new way to live in relationship with each other.

Today we celebrate Christmas….we celebrate that God loved us so much that God would come and walk with us in our humanity.  In this walk with us, God in Jesus lifts us out of the darkness in our lives. 

I think there is no better time in our lives for us to focus on why the “Word became flesh and lived among us”.  There is so much darkness in our world that it is beginning to swallow us up.  There has been no better a time in our lives than right now for us to take John’s Christmas words to heart and embrace the Light of Christ.

To actually believe in the incarnation,.. to actually believe in Christmas,.. we too must shine.  

Through the Spirit, we have become Christ incarnate; we have become Christ’s hands and voice in the world.  As we live into this new covenant with God, we become light of hope for those in the shadows; we become the Light of Christ for the world around us.

May the Christmas star within you shine brightly, now and evermore.  Amen.