Luke 2:1-14(15-20)
For this sermon on the Incarnation, I am indebted to the work of the reverend Mark Nabors, vicar of St Alban’s Stuttgart and St Peter’s Tollville, who composed the hymn text
In the birth of Jesus, God came among us as one of us. This was not a symbolic act of solidarity but a real act of surrender. When God chose to become incarnate, enfleshed, God became subject to the risks of pregnancy and childbirth alongside Mary and entrusted God’s own life to the body of a young woman with few resources. God surrendered to the process of becoming, of developing fingers and toes and a fluttering heartbeat. God surrendered agency and control, depending upon Mary for every breath, every drop of nourishment. God became a burden, a weight to be born. God in Jesus came to know firsthand what it is to need. To want. To be unsatisfied. God who created humanity became truly human, and there is nothing symbolic about it. The body of Jesus was the Body of God, and that means that God himself knew what it felt like to cry, to be lonely, to be held close, to miss someone.
The incarnation, the God-enfleshed, what we come to celebrate tonight, is not a theological concept. It is as real as our own bodies, our own skin. It is as real as the Christmas dinner we are looking forward to, and the presents we’ve wrapped, and the bittersweet quiet of going home to an empty house at the end of Christmas Eve services. It is as real as the weight of an infant in arms, as real as diaper changes and stuffy noses and cold fronts. More real, even.
I don’t personally feel a strong connection to the image of infancy that some of the traditional carols give us- a Jesus that never cried, a sanitized labor for Mary, a hands-off Joseph. A pediatric ER nurse once told me that hearing a baby cry in the hospital is an answered prayer, because it means they’re breathing on their own. Immanuel, God-with-us, was the ultimate answered prayer, so the Incarnate Word of God had to have had a strong pair of lungs on him. I believe that Jesus was born naked and wailing and utterly uncomprehending, just as each of us entered the world. As he grew, he would become more attuned to his interior life and his relationship to the Father as all teenagers and young adults must discover and decide who they are and who they will become. But in-between, Jesus slept and cried and was fed and bathed by others. God in flesh surrendered to the process of growing, of changing, of learning and starting from scratch and falling down and limitations. I bet he needed a lot of naps and rarely went down easily. He learned to babble before he spoke and he crawled before he walked. Someone taught him to read the scriptures, and perhaps his mother sang hymns to him on the hard days of toddlerhood. I know he must have wiggled in church, and I doubt if he ever learned how to whisper quietly.
The power of God contained in the body and mind of the incarnate Word cannot be overstated. Neither can the powerlessness God chose to experience in the womb, in the manger, on the cross. God chose to alter the course of history by becoming part of it. God chose to defeat the unreality of sin and death by becoming subject to our reality, to experience joy and friendship and suffering and temptation as we do. The eternal mystery is that both can be true at the same time- Jesus was fully God and fully human, Jesus was both eternal and entirely new, Jesus is God of all and the God of all was born in Bethlehem to a human mother. This paradox, this scandalous surrender, is the true meaning of Christmas.
A dear friend of mine, Father Mark Nabors, is a vicar of two small parishes in rural Arkansas. One of his many gifts is the gift of poetry, and he has composed a good number of hymn texts. I’d like to share one of his hymns with you on this night full of singing. (This hymn can be found set to music here)
In Bethlehem God’s Word came down
that grace for many would abound
and in the world divisions cease,
a quiet roar, a thunderous peace.
Incarnate love, begotten Son
in humble human flesh adorned:
almighty God on Mary’s breast,
eternal word as infant blessed.
A manger for an earthly throne;
a borrowed cave as new abode;
a scepter in a baby’s hand;
a shepherd court, an angel band.
He came unto his own unseen,
the King disguised in poverty,
and still he comes to you and me,
incarnate yet a mystery.
A quiet roar, a thunderous peace. That is the heart of what we worship, the axis on which our world turns. The birth pangs of a young woman of humble means, the red-faced wailing of a newborn’s first breaths, the quiet awe of shepherds. That is the quiet roar that signals a thunderous peace. The arrival of our God among us was as miraculous and commonplace as childbirth, as contradictory as a scepter in a baby’s hand. By surrendering all, Peace reigns victorious. This radical act of love continues among us now, in a bite of bread, a drop of wine. The King, disguised in the mundane. Our God’s own body, given for us. The gifts of God, for the people of God. Let Earth receive her King.
Mother A Writes 