The Incarnation - Stooping Low to Meet God

Preached on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, December 18, 2016

Scripture readings: Isaiah 53:1-6; John 1:9-13

The word incarnation is a big word. It’s an old word from the Latin language. It means “embodied in flesh”. It means made flesh and blood. It means made human.

Around Home and Desert Aire/Mattawa WA
December 2016

It describes what we celebrate at Christmas. God came to earth in the flesh: God himself became a human being: a human baby, like any other baby. Like any other baby: except God was a baby who would grow up to give his life for the sins of the world; and to give us light and life; and to give us himself.

The Gospel of John calls Jesus the Word: God speaking himself. The Word is God making himself into a message. It says, “The Word was with God and the Word was God.” (John 1:1) The thing about Christmas is that, when God became a particular human baby, in Bethlehem, God was speaking himself in that life he had taken into himself.

The story of the first Christmas is God describing himself. God is living out who he really is and what he wants for himself, and for us, in that manger, in that stable, in Bethlehem.

John says, “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not (did not recognize him). He came into his own, and his own received him not.” (John 1:10-11) And this perfectly describes what we see in Bethlehem.

Now Jesus was born at a time of great spiritual discontent both for the Jews and the pagans. There was a lot of searching, and praying, and questioning going on. But, when God’s answer arrived, nobody seemed to notice.

Well, some noticed. But John is pretty clear that the normal thing was not to notice, not to receive, not to be open to what God was doing. That is the human condition. That is the way humans are. It’s the way we are, if we are normal humans.

So when you are discontent, or questioning, or searching, the lesson is that God is there speaking to you, shining his light on you, and you just don’t see it. And you don’t receive it: that is, if you are normal; because that’s the normal thing, according to the Bible. At least that’s that state of our being normal that God wants to overcome.

The pagan Greeks and Romans were discontented with the old paganism. They were looking for newer answers among what they called “The Mysteries”. In the Mysteries, there were special places you could go in order to be initiated into hidden truths that would give you a new spiritual life. Stories of the gods and the great heroes would be acted out in gorgeous pageants, as if it were theater, with music, and singing, and dancing, and art, and special staging affects.

Those who attended the mysteries would experience inspiration and ecstasy. They believed that this experience was their spiritual rebirth and the promise of everlasting life. But their inspiration was mere excitement.

The Jews were waiting and searching for a great warrior king to lead them to victory over their enemies; and to bring the Lord’s people to power, and success, and glory.

The pagans and the Jews were looking up; looking up to hear a divine message, a spiritual message: God’s word to them.

But the lesson which was made flesh in Bethlehem is that you don’t look up to find the spiritual truth. In some strange way, you have to look down.

This is hard for us, if we are normal human beings. The Old Testament prophet, Isaiah, said it. This is how the Lord, the Savior, would come. “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” (Isaiah 53:2)  

You look down into the messes and weaknesses of this world, and of your own life, and that is where you can hear the Lord speaking to you. If the Lord loves you just the way you are (and he does) you will never know God, or hear God, unless you know what he sees when he loves you just as you are.

There was a girl I was in love with, when I was twenty years old. I even asked her the question: “Would you ever consider marrying a guy who was going into the ministry?” But, even though she didn’t want to do that, the great thing about her was that she could see right through me, and laugh at me, and still like me, even though I might not deserve it.

One of my problems was that I didn’t always want to admit that I was the guy she liked just as I was. I wanted her to look at me as if I were someone she knew I wasn’t. But she even saw through this, and she still liked me, and she could make me laugh at myself.

I was a very serious Christian and, as such, I would have been much better off if I had known how to deal with myself just as I was. To really know God, and know one’s self, one must be able to look down to the struggles and the weaknesses of one’s own life, and hear what God is saying just there, in his infinite love.

We want to look up for peace, and joy, and fullness, and love. God is full of peace, and joy, and fullness, and love. When we experience these things, we experience the presence of God. These things are heavenly, but they were meant to be found on earth too. God means for us to find these blessings in our deepest and greatest needs.

The heavenly things became rare, and almost disappeared, when sin and evil came into the world. When peace, and joy, and fullness, and love disappear, we have trouble believing that God is present. We don’t know where God is, or what God is doing.

So God became flesh and blood in order to be in our world, such as it is. He became a baby in a town where King Herod ordered all the baby boys under the age of two to be killed in order kill the baby king.

We hate this about the world, and God agrees with us. But God became flesh and blood in order to be wherever peace, and joy, and fullness, and love are absent, so that we can have him especially there. We have a lot of trouble recognizing this and receiving it.

We don’t know the actual date, or month (and we’re not even sure of the year), when Jesus was born. We only know that he deliberately came down from light into darkness in order to shine in the darkness.

This is why ancient Christians chose the idea of Christ being born in the winter, near the winter solstice, in the cold and dark. Knowing this, we add their wisdom to what the gospels tell us about the beginnings of his life in this world: on a straw bed, in a feed trough for livestock, in a stable, in the cave, under an inn, in an obscure village of an occupied, defeated country, in a violent corner of the ancient world.

The novelist Taylor Caldwell wrote this about a dark period of her life: “I am not alone at all, I thought. I was never alone at all. And that, of course, is the message of Christmas. We are never alone. Not when the night is darkest, the wind coldest, the world seemingly most indifferent. For this is still the time God chooses.” (Taylor Caldwell, “Family Circle”, Dec. 24, 1961)

When we look down to where we really are, we can find God there with us, working for us, working for our new life.

If you’re lucky, you can look back and down, into your childhood, and remember the faith of your parents, or your grandparents, or Sunday Schools, or Vacation Bible School teachers, who taught you things that you once knew to be real, when you were ten and much closer to the ground. But now you are tall, and you look up when you should be looking down.

Or you should look down to see the people who are doing justice, and loving mercy, and walking humbly with their God. Or you should look down, in love, and see the people who need justice, or who need mercy, or who need to walk humbly with their God.

There are people around us who are living demonstrations of the grace of God, or the need for grace, but we want to look up to better people, smarter people, cooler people. We spend our time looking at famous people and thinking about them.

The normal thing is to look up. You may very well find something when you look up, and call it Jesus, and call it God. But it won’t really be the real Jesus, who chose the feed trough of a stable for his first bed. You have to look closer to the ground to truly find Jesus as he wants you to know him, and to know yourself as he knows you.

Excitement is a high. Repentance (which means adjusting your life to the real truth) is a low. But Jesus is with the low. We think inspiration comes with excitement, but it really comes with repentance: with a kind of looking down and turning around.

Sometimes we think that faith means looking up to receive God’s blessings, God’s help, God’s strength, God’s mercy. But, in a way, faith is looking down, looking low, because it means trusting. It means letting the Lord be God. A preacher asked a child, “What does Lord mean?” And the child answered, “He’s the boss!”

John wrote “But to those who received him, who believed in his name...” When you receive someone, they may be the guest and you are the host, but the host is the servant. You look low to serve the one you have welcomed. Jesus did this for us. We look low for Jesus.

“But to those who received him, who believed in his name he gave power to become children of God.” God became a child to make us children. It means knowing our dependence; knowing who to listen to. It means imitating and following. We aim high, but we start low.

The wife of one of my cousins posted on Facebook ten “Perks of Being Sixty and Older”. One of them was “People no longer view you as a hypochondriac.” I could see that one. The one I disagreed with was: “There is nothing left to learn the hard way.” I commented that I’m still learning plenty of things the hard way.

Children start out wanting to be like their dads and moms. We want to be like Jesus. And we know that this means learning to do what the child in Bethlehem grew up to do. We aim high, but we start low.

There is one way we don’t look high enough, and that is to see what the Lord wants to do with us. We are not usually very ambitious about letting God have his way with us. We have plans of our own, and we are more than happy if God cooperates with our own ideas and plans. God doesn’t usually do this.

C. S. Lewis wrote about God’s high plans: "Imagine yourself a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised.
But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to?
The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up the towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a little decent cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself." (CS Lewis, “Mere Christianity”, Chapter 9)

If we look low enough at ourselves, we’ll understand why we need the gift of freedom that comes from the humility of God in the manger, and on the cross. God came low to make us capable of something beyond our wildest dreams, and hopes, and ambitions: something beyond our deepest desires.

God came low to pay the price for our entry into a new life as the sons and daughters of God. Some translations say that he gave us this as a right. Others translate the gift as “the power to become children of God.” Both are correct.

We need both: the right and the power. We need the right and privilege of entry; the open door and the greeting. And we need the power of God. We need what it takes to grow up into that privilege; that new life.

Christmas first tells us to look low. When you look low, you will hear the Word and his message to you where you are. The Word made flesh (Jesus), the Word of God, will find you and make you his child.

Telling It - Giving Rest

Preached on Sunday, November 8, 2015

Scripture readings: 1 Peter 2:11-17; Mark 6:30-44

Being Jesus, and following Jesus, can be exhausting. I hate to say it. I would like to protect you from it, if I could, but I don’t think I can.

In fact I have a strange personal history of getting in trouble with people I tried to protect from getting exhausted. Once, in a church I served while I was an seminary intern, the husband and wife of a new family in our church accused me of looking down on them as if they couldn’t do all those things that they were being asked to do by the people of the church who were giving them all the jobs that were exhausting them. Of course they wouldn’t have put it that way because they didn’t realize what I was trying to protect them from. After I left to go on my next internship, they left that church because they got exhausted.

Being Jesus, and following Jesus can be exhausting, and Jesus and his disciples had reached that point. They didn’t even have time to eat. So Jesus said, “Let’s get away from it all. Let’s take a break and rest.” So they set sail across the lake.

I think that Jesus must have let them rest at their oars, and that the wind wasn’t blowing, because the crowds cut them off from their rest. The boat should have beaten the crowd, and the disciples should have been able to slip away before the crowd got to them.

Maybe Jesus even arranged it all on purpose. I wouldn’t put it past him. That Jesus can be a tricky fellow.

So their much needed rest was interrupted. What was it that interrupted their rest? Was it the needs of others, or was it the compassion of Jesus? Well, it was both. Their rest was interrupted by the needs of others and by the compassion of Jesus. And knowing that and conducting your life accordingly is a good way to stay exhausted.

Jesus had a good idea about sparing his friends from exhaustion. He showed the compassion of the creator. Jesus is our creator who has come to live beside us, in the flesh. In the beginning God created rest and blessed it. The seventh day of creation is about rest and renewal.

The interesting thing about that seventh day is that it is a day without sunset or sunrise. It’s a day without beginning or end. It means that, in the middle of our life, we must spend time with eternity, and we must spend time with the God who made us for eternity.

Sunday is one of my days off. I preach on my day off so that I can spend some time today with eternity; and with the God who made me for eternity and died to give eternity to me as a gift.

We need rest to interrupt our lives, and so we are just as needy as the disciples who needed rest and as the crowd that ran to Jesus in order to be amazed. The fact is that everyone needs the same rest and the same amazement as we do.

Separation from God is the opposite of rest. The world clearly needs rest. And Jesus is compassionate and Jesus interrupts our exhaustion and tells us to rest; and to help others rest as well. Our job is to tell the good news that rest can be found with Jesus.

Mark tells us that, on that lakeshore of Galilee, Jesus looked at the crowd and “had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” (Mark 6:34) Jesus’ compassion didn’t begin then and there. It began earlier, when he saw that his followers (his friends) needed rest, and he showed them that he wanted them to rest.

Then his compassion made him speak to the crowd and teach them many things. Then the compassion of Jesus made him want to feed them.

Actually it was the compassion of his friends that made him feed the crowd: maybe. They were the ones who told Jesus that that people needed to eat. Maybe the compassion of Jesus made his friends compassionate, just as he was. They were learning compassion, and they showed they cared about the world by sharing the world’s needs with Jesus.

Then Jesus did a clearly tricky thing. Jesus proposed that his friends give all their food to the crowd; and they did. But the trick was to show his friends that, when they came to the end of their resources, they did not come to the end of his resources at all. They exhausted their food, yet they had more in the end than they had before they gave their all.

Sometimes we Christians get exhausted. But it is usually for a different reason than the exhaustion of Jesus and those who follow him. Too many Christians exhaust themselves with church committees, and church work, and it’s true that something has to be done to take care of things.

But our church business often has no compassion in it. Our stewardship of our building, our practice for worship, our determination to be organized often has no heart and no compassion in it. We have compulsion but little compassion. We have forgotten the story of the good news of Jesus even when we are in the church business.

There is no secret of rest in a lot of what we are doing for Jesus and with Jesus. If the rest of Jesus was in it, maybe we would be in a better mood and a better place.

If you read on in the Gospel of Mark, it doesn’t look like the disciples ever got their rest. There was only a lot more drama. But all the drama that followed showed them Jesus in a new way. They found their much needed rest by seeing Jesus in that new way.

Maybe we need that kind of rest: to see Jesus in a new way, to see the compassion that Jesus has for others and for us. Have you seen enough of the compassion of Jesus?

The compassion of Jesus that saw countless people as though they were sheep without a shepherd didn’t begin on the shores of Lake Galilee. It all began in eternity. It began when the Lord looked out over the wreckage of a world that had not even been created yet. The Lord looked out over the wreckage of countless broken hearts, and countless scarred and aimless lives, even before he gave them life.

His eternal compassion brought out the good shepherd in his heart. The Lord knew that he would be their shepherd, and that he would give his life to rescue those sheep from their scarred and aimless lives.

He knew that there would be a power in this compassion that would change them. The power of what he would do on the cross and in the resurrection would set them free, and give them rest.

That is the power of the compassion of Jesus for us. It’s the power of Jesus to make a difference in our lives. It’s the power of the good news that we are called to share with others.

What we call salvation is a miracle that changes everything. It works like magic. We try to work. We try to be responsible. We try to play and rest.

We do the best we can at all of these until the miracle of Jesus surprises us. The compassion of Jesus changes everything about what we do. It changes us.

We are called to tell the good news of Jesus and how Jesus makes a difference in our lives and sets us right. The whole world needs this change. This world of broken people will never work right unless the people of Jesus show the way.

Strangely, what Peter says in his letter about living as strangers and aliens in this world shows the difference that Jesus makes in our lives. Peter talks about living “for the Lord’s sake” (1 Peter 2:13) He talks about living for “the Lord’s will”. (1 Peter 2:15) He says, “Live as servants of God.” (1 Peter 2:16)

Peter told us to “abstain from sinful desires” and we have taken much too narrow a view of what such desires are. It is not just about sex. When we limit these desires to sex we lose a lot of the change in our lives that Peter was writing about.

Our sinful desires affect our reasons for loving our neighbor as ourselves. For instance, we want love to serve our own interests. The New Testament word for the love of Jesus, and for the love he requires of us, is called “agape” (in Greek). Agape means a love that doesn’t serve our own interests. The dominant world of the Greeks and the Romans almost never used that word for love because they wanted their love to serve their own personal interests, just as we do.

The dominant world of Jesus’ time also thought that compassion was soft and weak. They thought that humility was only fit for slaves and other underlings.

Peter told us to do amazing things. Peter told us to respect everyone. Peter told us to love the whole set of those who belong to Jesus as brothers and sisters, whether it fit your interests or not. Peter told us to love those who have legal and constitutional authority over us. Rome was proud of its constitution and of the way the emperor played his part in respecting it. Peter told Christians to honor the system that was persecuting them and killing them.

Peter told us that our fear of God (or our living with God in a state of wonder and awe) was a part and parcel of this holy discipline of love; this strange way of life. It was and is the way to live for the Lord’s sake. It is the way to be a servant of God. It is the way to do God’s will.

We often miss the point of this. The point is that the way of life that the Bible gives to Christians is meant to be the heart of a miracle. “Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.” (1 Peter 2:12)

Peter didn’t tell us how this would happen. It’s like the change that Jesus makes in our lives. It is a miracle. The compassion of Jesus wants everyone to love and enjoy what he has to give in a kind of miracle that changes lives from anger to glory.

People who look down on you and people who judge Christians as inferior will be willing to lose their own desires and priorities (as taught by this world) and they will learn to desire what Jesus gives.

This miracle that changes life will prepare the world that looks at us suspiciously: it will prepare them for the kingdom of God. They will learn to love the softness, and the weakness, and the slavishness of a love that does not serve their own interests. They will love humility. They will love compassion.

We are called to tell how Jesus made this difference in us. We are called to tell it by living in this world in ways that can heal the world around us.

The Lord’s Table is the table of the one who pursued us because he didn’t pursue his own interests. This is the table where we find true humility and compassion. Here we find the healing of our exhaustion. We are called here to find rest. We are called here to Jesus and to his great story that makes all the difference.