December 25, 2010

Living Among Us

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor

Psalm 98
Isaiah 52:7–10
John 1:1–14

Christmas, the celebration of the birth of a child, is about the fact that God’s presence is everywhere. In the smallest things. In the weakest things. In the beginning of things. And we are responsible for nurturing it.

Joan Chittister

Holy God, you were born in the midst of our sins
the better to pardon us.
Strong God, you were born weak as a child
in order to give us strength.
Immortal God, you put on a body to die
in order to give us immortality.
Holy God, Strong God, Immortal God,
give the peace of heaven to our earth,
and open the door of your mercy
to us who are beggars for your love. Amen.

(adapted from a prayer by Lucien Dei)

The great gift of Christmas is named “Emmanuel,” meaning “God is with us.” The Gospel of John proclaims, “The Word became flesh and lived among us.”

We don’t speak much about flesh in church. We are not completely comfortable with Jesus’ humanity, or perhaps our own. Take, for example, what happened to Professor Barbara Brown Taylor when she visited a church in Alabama. In the sanctuary, over the altar, was a striking mural of the resurrected Jesus emerging from his tomb. Barbara was so taken with it that she moved behind the altar for a better view. She recalls,

Except for a white cloth swaddling his waist, Jesus was naked. His skin was the color of a pink rose. His limbs were flooded with light. . . . The painting was so realistic that I leaned in for a closer look. I could not remember ever having seen so much of Jesus’ skin before, especially in church. I felt protective of him, all exposed like that in such a public place. But I could see the artist’s point. Even in Jesus most transcendent moment . . . he remained recognizably one of us. He came back wearing skin. He did not leave his body behind.

After a while Barbara sensed something was missing. The wounds in his feet, his hands, and his side were clear but not gory. His upraised arms looked thin but strong. Staring at his underarms, she suddenly realized why he looked so ethereal. Jesus had no body hair.

Another woman, quite properly dressed in expensive clothes with manicured fingernails and each hair on her pretty head in place came into the sanctuary and said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” “It surely is that,” Barbara answered, “but did you ever notice that he has no body hair? He has the underarms of a six-year-old. His chest is as smooth as a peach.” The other woman replied, without moving her lips, “I can’t believe you’re saying this to me. I just can’t believe you’re saying this to me.”

We don’t speak much about flesh in church. Yet it is our bodies that connect us with all other people. Barbara Brown Taylor says,

Our bodies remain God’s best way of getting to us. . . . However differently you and I may conceive the world, God, or one another, physical reality is something we can usually agree on. When the temperature drops below 32 degrees, I am as cold as whoever happens to be standing next to me. When I see someone run into a piece of furniture, catching the corner of a table right in the thigh, my own thigh hurts in that same exact place. When I am sitting next to someone in a meeting and our stomachs growl at the same time, we both shift in our seats, unable to ignore a connection more fundamental than knowing each other’s names. When I watch a perfect stranger open her mouth for a bite of Key lime pie at my favorite Mexican restaurant, my mouth starts watering without my permission.

Wearing skin brings us into communion with all these other embodied souls (Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, pp. 35–37, 42).

By God taking on flesh, we know that everything we experience, Jesus experienced—not just what we experience physically, but all dimensions of life: laughter, tears, defeat, success, confusion, clarity, hope, despair, feeling abandoned and knowing the joy of being surrounded by loved ones. We are not alone or lost in whatever life brings us. Jesus not only knew our same experience, but is with us here and now, in this very moment and in every moment to come. The Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us is God’s way of revealing to us that God knows us through and through and is ever with us. It is also how we know who God is and how to embody Christ’s Spirit in our lives. Iranaeus said, “Because of his boundless love, Jesus became what we are that he might make us to become what he is.”

As Edith Stein wrote, “It is truly a marvelous exchange: the creator . . . taking a body gives us his Godhead. The redeemer has come into the world to do this wonderful work. . . . He came to be one mysterious Body with us: he our head, we his members.”

This great and paradoxical mystery is hard to comprehend. As it says in the Eastern Orthodox Church’s liturgy,

O my child, child of sweetness,
how is it that I hold thee, Almighty?
And how that I feed thee,
who givest bread to all?
How is it that I swaddle thee,
who with the clouds encompasseth the whole earth?

The Word of the Lord comes, as William Sloane Coffin put it, “with the force of a hint,” a vulnerable baby lying in a manger. Why would the all-powerful God, creator of 6 billion galaxies, ever want to come to earth in this fashion? The answer is suggested by Søren Kierkegaard, a man from Denmark, who told this story more than 100 years ago:

Once upon a time, there was a king who loved a “humble maiden.” The king wanted her to become his bride. But more than that, he wanted her to respond with genuine love for him. And that posed a problem.

As a king, it would have been easy for him just to make her his queen. She wouldn’t turn him down. She couldn’t. He would appear to her in his royal finery, and she would fall at his feet and be his. Everyone would congratulate them at the wedding. Everyone would celebrate. No one would dare stand in the way of his plans. After all, he was the king.

And it would be wonderful, additionally, because he would be a king of miracles: the young woman he loved was very poor. She lived in a tiny cottage and wore ragged clothes and she often didn’t have enough to eat. What the king planned to do was to rescue her from her poverty and take her with him to live in his castle, to be dressed in beautiful clothes, and to share his banquet table. It would be wonderful.

Except there was this problem: The king wanted her to respond with genuine love for him.

The king got worried. He thought to himself, “If I make her my queen, she’ll do it, of course, because she is one of my subjects. She has to obey me. And she’ll be grateful, because I will do so much for her. She can’t help but respond with love out of her gratitude. But will she really love me?”

“Will she ever be able to forget that I am a king, and she was only a humble maiden? Will she constantly be thinking that she has to love me out of duty? How can I be sure her love is deeper than that? What can I do?”

At this point in the story, Søren Kierkegaard explained that his story was a parable about God and us. The king represents God and the maiden represents all of us. The storyteller asked, “How can God approach human beings so that we would respond willingly, in love?”

It might be done by God elevating us to God’s high level. But the king had seen that that would never do. His queen wouldn’t be fooled into believing that she had really become a different person. She may also sense that the king hadn’t been willing to accept her as she was but instead tried to change her into someone more acceptable, someone she wasn’t.

Maybe God should appear to us in glory and just dazzle us, just as the king considered appearing to the young woman he loved in all his pomp and finery. But he realized that wouldn’t work. He didn’t want to scare her or force himself on her. How would it be possible for her to return his love happily because she genuinely wanted to?

Finally the king had his answer. They way for them to be united, in love, couldn’t be by his lifting her up to his level. It had to be by his going down to join her where she was. So late one night, he slipped out the side door and appeared in front of the maid’s cottage, dressed as a servant.

And that is what Christmas is all about. That is why God came to us as a human being, Jesus.

God chose to let the Christ child be born in poverty, of questionable parentage, in an occupied country with an unstable ruler. God chose the risk of the infant dying in a dirty stable after a long journey by a pregnant teenager. Jesus grew up poor and in danger, and misunderstood and even betrayed by those he loved. God decided to become the equal of people like us and so became human as we are, as one of the humblest.

God loves us enough, Kierkegaard wrote, to come be with us in the form of a servant. May we genuinely return God’s love.