Friends,

I am really happy not preaching every week. I love attending worship and simply letting it flow over me; I am responsible only to be present.

But apparently I have a Christmas Eve sermon in me.

-Liz

The Incarnation

Theologically, we are at my favorite holiday. I love the incarnation. I love the image of God made human, God incarnated, God made, well, carne: meat. Flesh. One of us.

As an institution Pentecost is important; the spirit arrives and we become the body of christ. There is that body word again. The spirit enlivens our flesh. We are made spirit-filled.

I'm sure many find Easter most important; life after death, non-violently resistance wins because death is not the end. Jesus' body, and thus our body can risk torture, desecration, and death because God has vanquished death. The end of our body is not the end of our importance.

But the Christmas story, both Christmas stories, get at how basic it is for God to enter human life. In Mark perhaps Jesus becomes full of God at his baptism (which I like, also), and in John Jesus is present at the creation, there with God. When God says "Let us make human beings in our image" in Genesis the Gospel of John reinterprets that to see Jesus present.

The incarnation is often described God entering a human, but I think God is, and always has been within all humans. The incarnation, I believe, is a re-do of creation. We have always been made in the image of God, with Jesus we get a new model for what that means.

To be in the image of my mother or father is to have their look, their habits, their idiosyncrasies. We don't have to specify that one of the things we have in common with our parents is flesh, arms, legs, eyes, a pancreas, a very short middle toe. What we notice is details of our appearance, our aptitudes, and our attitudes. We get something essential about who we are from our biological ancestors.

What do we have in common with God?

Adam, and Eve, and their descendants, and Noah's family, and then Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, the judges, the prophets, and the kings spent centuries figuring this out. They stumbled, pulled away, pulled close. Just being in God's image didn't work well, so God added a covenant, and later a ruler. This work of figuring out who we are, and who is God, and how we are connected, is the work of generations.

And then Jesus is born, and for Christians, we say that he is God incarnated. But born as a human, Jesus was already in the image of God, right?

Our gospels identify him as the son of man. You may remember it instead as the "Son of Man" with capital letters identifying a title, or at least importance. But the Greek does not have this capitalization--the original texts are written in all capitals or all lower case. And without the capitals, the son of man is simply to be the child of human parents. Walter Wink translates it "the human being".

Which is an amazing thought.

What was special about Jesus? He was the child of human parents. Our savior, the one predicted, the one come to usher in God's rule, was simply a child, with parents. A child of human parents. A child created in the image of God.

For me the incarnation the return to the first adam; the Hebrew means something like dirt man. Made from the soil, this first being was just another animal until God breathes their spirit into them. God fills adam with God. In Psalm 8, we hear "what are human beings that you made them little less than God?" I believe that Jesus is the new adam, created, like all of us, in God's image. He starts fully human, that is, fully human, filled with God's spirit.

But Jesus figured out how to fully express that God-within-ness. He got a grip on what it means to be created in the image of God. We are all fully human, and fully divine, but the rest of us sputter, slip, and shut down that holy-spirit-energy. Jesus did not.

Jesus then is the image of what we could be, if we could connect to the divine, connect to God, connect to our shared heritage as people of God. Jesus for some reason could do that. He is our model for how to proceed. Merry Christmas. Happy Incarnation.

How does the incarnation fit into your theology? Reply to this email to let me know. ​
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Priscilla Herdman, Anne Hills, and Cincy Mangsen sing Unto You This Night. This is on my favorite winter/Christmas album "On a Winter's Night."

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Christiana Boehmer sings My Jesus Came a Baby on her excellent album "As the World Lay Sleeping."

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