Sharing the Journey

A sermon by Dr. Jim Somerville
Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
December 28, 2008
The First Sunday after Christmas Day

Luke 2:22-40 

One of my regular daydreams is to do a wedding as part of a Sunday morning worship service, and I keep trying to convince young couples to give it a try, especially at this time of year.  “Think of it,” I say:  “Instead of having a separate ceremony with all the headache and expense you could just ride the coattails of a ready-made worship service.  You’d already have a good crowd of people there.  The choir would be robed and ready to sing.  The Christmas decorations would all be in place.  You could just come forward near the end of the service, join each other at the front of the church, and express your vows.  It would be simple, beautiful, meaningful.  And if you got married at Christmas—the season of Incarnation—I could preach a sermon on the incarnation of Love.  Doesn’t that sound great?”

No one has taken me up on it yet, but I keep hoping, and I keep thinking about that sermon topic: the incarnation of Love.  It happens to every couple I’ve ever talked to about a wedding:  what was once for them only an abstract idea—Love—has taken on human flesh in the form of that person they are planning to marry.  From the moment they fall hopelessly into it, Love has a face, and a name.  On that day they express their vows to one another they will look on a particular face, and pronounce a particular name.  “I, John, take you, Mary.”  “I, Mary, take you, John.”  It is the incarnation of Love, and really, very much like that other incarnation, the one we celebrate at Christmas.

For so many of us God—like Love—begins as an idea.  We hear people talking about God in church, we sing hymns of praise to the Deity, but in the beginning God is just an idea, and a very vague one at that.  God is “out there,” or “up there,” somewhere.  And, like Love, God often seems far, far away.  But what the writers of the New Testament all seem to agree upon is that the abstract became concrete in a man with a particular face and a particular name—Jesus of Nazareth.

Rather than dig into any one Scripture text today I’d like to take a broader look at how the Bible bears witness to the doctrine of the Incarnation, and I’d like to begin with the Gospel of Mark.

Mark doesn’t mention the birth of Jesus, and so we don’t know whether or not he had any notion of a “virgin birth,” but he does say that when Jesus was baptized the sky was “ripped open” and a voice from heaven declared: “You are my son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  Whether or not Mark wants us to believe that Jesus was God’s son in any literal sense, he certainly wants us to believe that Jesus was God’s son in the sense that he did what was pleasing to God, and God loved him for it.

Matthew and Luke both write about his birth, and strive to show their readers that from the very beginning Jesus was the son of God.  Matthew says that an angel told Joseph in a dream that what was conceived in Mary was from the Holy Spirit, and added that this was to fulfill the prophecy from Isaiah 7:14, that a virgin would conceive and bear a child whose name was “Emmanuel:  God with us.”  Luke tells the story differently but the outcome is the same.  In his version the angel Gabriel comes to Mary and amazes her by saying:  “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born [to you] will be holy; he will be called the Son of God.”

John doesn’t write about the birth of Jesus, but his version of the story makes the idea of incarnation most clear.  He says in chapter 1 that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  And then he says, “The Word became flesh and lived among us” (literally, “pitched his tent with us”).  There is no clearer statement of incarnational theology in all of Scripture.  If incarnation means “the embodiment of a deity or spirit in some earthly form,” if it comes from Latin roots that mean “entering into flesh,” then John expresses that complicated abstraction with stunning simplicity:  God became human and pitched his tent among us; he moved into our earthly neighborhood; the Word became flesh.

When I am at a wedding rehearsal we always practice that moment when the bride comes down the aisle toward the groom, and I tell the groom that his responsibility during that moment is to have a look of absolute rapture on his face.  “Rapture!” I demand, because his bride is going to be looking at him in that moment for some sign that she is doing the right thing.  In the same way, I think that the proper response to the Incarnation is rapture.  God isn’t coming down the aisle, adorned as a bride, but coming down the back steps of heaven with a baby in his arms.  It should make us gasp for breath, shout for joy, and Psalm 148—the Psalm for this day—has some of that flavor about it.  It is a riot of praise in which the psalmist insists that the sea monsters and the deeps praise the Lord, the fire and hail, the snow and frost, the stormy wind.  “Praise the LORD you mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars!” he shouts.  “Praise him wild animals and flying birds, kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all rulers of the earth, young men and women alike, old and young together, let them praise the name of the Lord!”  It is the only appropriate response to the wondrous works of God.

But incarnation has another aspect, one that Paul touches on.  He doesn’t talk about the virgin birth, either.  In fact, he says very little about either the birth or baptism of Jesus.  His understanding seems to be that God claimed Jesus as his son only after his death on the cross; that God vindicated that death through resurrection.  But in some of his writings Paul picks up on the incarnational language that was circulating in the hymns of the early church.  In the letter of Colossians, which is attributed to Paul, we read that Christ is “the image of the invisible God,” and that “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”  In the letter to the Philippians Paul writes:  “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (2:5-8).

Now, I may have said more than I needed to, but I wanted you to see that the consensus of Scripture is clear, and in these writings we find a truth that is older and deeper than anything the present age has to offer:  Jesus of Nazareth was somehow, miraculously, God-in-the-flesh.  What a gift to the people of his time and of ours!  Instead of remaining frustratingly abstract and forever distant God came near to us in Christ Jesus, entered into our own frail state.  “He was born in human likeness,” Paul says.  “He was found in human form.”  It is a wonderful truth.  But it is also a dangerous one.  As long as you are God no one can hurt you.  When you become human you give up your invulnerability.  “He became obedient to the point of death,” Paul writes, “even death on a cross.”

Incarnation is risky business.

It was risky from the beginning.  In today’s reading from Luke’s Gospel we find the baby Jesus in the temple surrounded by people who sing God’s praises at what he has done, but who also warn that trouble is on the way.  Old Simeon tells Mary, “A sword will pierce your own soul too.”  In Matthew’s version no sooner is God-with-us than King Herod wants to kill him!  The writer of Hebrews acknowledges that “becoming like his brothers and sisters in every way” also meant sharing in their suffering and sorrow.  And even as love is made flesh in a wedding ceremony we talk about the danger of it.  We ask couples to take each other for better, but also for worse, for richer, but also for poorer, in health, but also in sickness.  We make it clear that that this journey called marriage is not always easy.  We feel it is our duty to warn anyone who would risk incarnation that you make yourself vulnerable this way; you open your heart like a fresh wound to someone who may or may not be holding a handful of salt.

For God to do such a thing for us is to take the risk that we might abuse his gift, that we might seize Love-in-the-Flesh and nail him to a tree.  Surely that shadow hung over the manger of Bethlehem, and surely God knew it, but still God did it in the same way that people still get married.  If you ask the most honest among them they will tell you that they had to do it, that they were driven to it by a Love that had become so real, so strong, they really felt they had no other choice.

I think that’s how it was for God, too.

The Bible says that he loved the world, and that’s true.  He loved it so much he could no longer remain a distant abstraction from it.  He had to come near, had to make himself known.  Love gave him no other choice.  So he stripped himself of his invulnerability, emptied himself of his divinity, and entered—naked, frail, and tiny—into human existence.   It was a risky thing to do, and in the end it would prove to be the death of him.  But great love is capable of great risks, and is willing to take them for the sake of the Beloved.

That is what Christians celebrate in this season:  not gifts and toys and goodies, wonderful as they are, but the surprising truth that Love came down at Christmas, that the Word did indeed become flesh, and that in Jesus whom we call the Christ the incarnation of Love and the incarnation of God turned out to be one and the same. 

—Jim Somerville © 2008