GOD WITH US John M. Buchanan
John 1:1-4; 14-15 Broad Street Pvesbyterian Chureh
December 17, LO7G Columbus, Ohio

Each year at about this time, when the schedule bepins to creak and groan with
the added activity, when there doesn't appear to be the remotest possibility that
all the cards will be addressed, gifts purchased and wrapped, parties attended, when
we begin to detect the seésonal goodwill becoming testiness and irritability and
impatience, - at just this time I remember an incident which occurred in my home
several years ago, I've told this story before but it fits sa well here I trust
you'll forgive me for using it again, I had purchased a pressed-paper Nativity
Tableau which was to be punched out and assembled, easily, the package promised:
‘cut along line X, fold 4 and insert in slot B." My youngest and I sat down after
dinner to do the job which, of course, turned out to be rather complicated, Before
long the table was littered with paper; sheep slightly bent, cattle folded wrongly,
shepherds who refused to stand up and a manger that insisted on tilting, He was
about four at the time, and surveying the chaos before us he asked, "Daddy, where
is God in this mess?”

A good question, I thought at the time, and still do, In fact, it is the
theological question which presents itself and while there may be lighter and less
Ponderous topics for the third Sunday in Advent, ZI invite you to think with me
about this one this morning. Where, exactly, is God in this mess?

It is no secret that an American Christmas has long since generated its own
head of steam and can do quite nicely without God - or the birth of Jesus, for that
matter, The cynic inside me wants to conclude that the extravagance of an American
Christmas is in direct proportion to the loss of basic belief in God: the more remote
the idea of God becomes the more important it is to us to affirm something good about
humanity, The fact is that an American Christmas has a life of its own, and that it
condescends to borrow from us those elements of our story which are pleasant, touching
and good for business: which is to say lots of Lambs and cattle Lowing and not a vord
about a petty tyrant raging in his palace and ordering the murder of a few thousand
Jewish bables,

Christmas is not necessarily about God at all and one of the reasons is that we
don't know the answer to my son's question, We aren't sure where God is in this mess ,
if He is here at all, I had the privilege of hearing Professor Hans Kung, author of
On Being a Christian, deliver a series of lectures this fall in which he argued per-
suasively that the question of God has suddenly become respectable again in academic
circles, For several centuries, Kung points out, the most revolutionary and most
influential scholarly thinking has regarded religion in general and the question of
God in particular as irrelevant, In science, political theory and the social
sciences, religion and its God have been seen as repressive, superstitious and the
arch foe of human progress. It was religion and its God, after all, who clamped the
lid on Galileo, It was in the name of the comfortable God of State religion that
democracy was opposed throughout the western world - and until very recently in lands
where the church was an important part of the establishment. Religion stood against
the discoveries and theories of psychology and psychiatry, preferring to exorcise
demons and burn witches instead of heal sick souls, Human enlightenment meant, in
stholarly circles, liberation from all the vestiges of religion.

But, Kung maintains, that is over now, Nothing has failed so completely as the
utopian vision oc Karl Marx, There is far more to the human spirit than Sigmund
Freud could explain and science, of all things, has come full cirele, and now stands

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gaping into a vast unknown, inviting theologians back into the conversation about
the beginnings and meaning of human life, It is an exciting and challenging time
if you happen to be a professional theologian, And yet, Professor Kung suggested,
the biggest mistake a preacher can make is to assume that all the people who come
to church on Sunday believe in God and understand what they believe, Rather the
situation seems to be one of practical atheism, If god exists it simply doesn't
matter,

The arts confirm the practical gedlessness of the modern mind, The distinguished
Swedish film director, Igmar Bergman, continues to turn out stari:, bleak movies which
eritics recognize as the most brilliant work being done, nearly all of which are
obsessed with the question, The New York Times Arts and Leisure section two weeks
ago ran a major story on Bergman and commented, "When we are in Mr, Bergman's world,
the presence of God ~- or the presence of God's absence - is overpowering." In a
Bergman movie, The Serpent's Ege, a priest summarizes what the brilliant director
perceives in modern life ~ "We live far away from God, so far avay that he doesn't
hear us when we pray for help, So we must help each other, give each other the
forgiveness a remote God denies us," (NYT, 12/3/78). And Woody Allen, whom the Times
regards as a "lesser imitator of Bergman", has gone on record that " there is no
veligious feeling that can make any thinking person happy." If art reflects life, it
is fair to say that the question of God is still very much unresolved: that we Live
in a time of skeptical agnesticism - or practical atheism,

The unspeakable horror of Jonesville has forced the issue again, As is the case
every time an airliner crashes or a baby dies of ieukemia, so the suicide and murder
of nine hundred people in a remote South American jungle raises the old and funda-
mental issue; How is it possibile to believe in God in a world where evil is so
rampant? Time Magazine, as I knew it would, asked the question in its Religion
section this week, It will not so away - this persistent and relentless surfacing
of demonic human evil, It flies in the face of everything we hold dear and want to
believe, "How can people do that?" we ask, and what we are really saying is "How
can God, if He exists, allow people to do that?"

People who want to believe in Ged have a problem dealing with human evil, The
old constructs don't stand any longer, It just isn't possible to explain all evil
as God's punishment for sin - at least with a straight face. And to tell someone
who has just Lost a baby to leukemia that it was God's mysterious will is to contra-
dict everything we know about the God of the Bible. Who needs a God like that?

Lf we are voing to believe in God at all, it had better be in a way that takes
very seriously the human condition: a way that at least relates God to the fact of
evil: a way that includes God - as participant - in the joys and tragedies of human
life, God, if He exists at all, has His existence among us, not in some celestial
hide~away in the clouds, And that, frankly, is what Christmas is about, Lambs and
shepherds, cattiec lowing and little baby to be sure: but more to the point, a God
who got into human life with us, and whose existence will continue to be perceived
and experienced in human life,

the Christian faith maintains that the only God there is, took on human flesh
for a while and lived as Jesus of Natareth - the Christ, Dectrinally the idea is
known as the Incarnation: the enfleshing of God, and it is the very bottom line of
Christian theolonsy, Christian thinkins about God begins, not with philosophic
abstractions, but with the life of a particular man, The incarnation - terribly

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important, but also, frankly, terribly tedious, ‘he early church fathers debated

it endlessly: what is the relationship of the divine to the human in Christ? Was He
of the same “essence'’ as the Father, or was it "substance"? There was a time when I
thought chat it vas urgently important for my congregation to grapple with the thizcd
and fourth centur; debates about the nature of Christ, and as IT think about those
somber and slightly pompous sermons I am filled with gratitude for the sturdy souks
who endured them with grace, and afi occasional nap! What I have concluded, in the
meantime, is that it isn't all that important to own 4 personally styled theology of
Incarnation: that how Jesus of Navareth was at once human and divine is no more
available to my rather ordinary powers of reason than that incredible, astonishing
phenomenon that occurs every single time a sperm cell and an ovum meet and new life
appears, What I have concluded, after pondering it for a modest number of years, is
that the earliest Christians didn't understand it either, but that somehow in this
man Jesus they sav coming at them God himself, And while I love the stories of
Christmas with a special and personal love, I have concluded that they become Little
more than pleasant but irrelevant sentimentality unless they pull us to a point of
confrontation with this incredible claim: this baby - this man - this event - is God
with us, And that is why, while I love Matthew for his Wise Men and Luke for his
shepherds, the Christmas story is not complete for me without the mystical poetry of
the Fourth Gospel, written perhaps a hundred years after the fact: ‘In the beginning
was thelford: and the Word was with God; and the Word was God,,,And the Werd became
flesh and dwelt among us,"

John wrote later, Long after the stories of Jesus' birth were known, His assign-
ment was to tell the story to a world which spoke and thought in Greek, He chose a
familiar Greek concept: the Legos - the mind and will and self-revealing nature of
God: it is translated "the Word", It is the very nature of God to be in relationship
with His people: to communicate with them, (Cicero complained thai the gods of the
Epicureans didn't do anything. This God, the Fourth Gospel maintains, does things,
acts, comes amons His people in the life of a humble Jewish carpenter, That is the
significance of the birth - this Jesus is God with us, The Uord has become flesh,
That is the orthodox Christian position, But Professor Kung was risht, I think,

Tt is not an easy time to believe in God, Even the best of us have moments
when the whole question aeems terribly unresolved: when, instead of a joyful and
satisz,ing sense of God's presence, ve know nothing but an emptiness, a vacuum, a
vague dis-ease that perhaps we really are alone and that this brief life is ali there
is, The doctrine of the Incarnation suggests to me that, in our humanness, if all we
have to hold on to is a sense of God's absence, if all we have in moments of honest
doubt is a sense of God's silence - we still have something. What I am learning, at
least partially because I cannot forget Jesus himself at the moment of His death
crying out that most human of crics, "My God, My God, Why hast thou forsaken me?" is
that the reality of God is affirmed precisely by my sense of His absence,

On a wail in the Vargaw Ghetto was scratched a little poem that I regard as one
of the bravest affirmations of faith ever written, and certainly one of the most
beautiful:

"J believe in the sun, even if it does not shine,
I believe in love, even if I do not feel it,
I believe in God, even if I do not see hin,"

(Hans Kung, Simmposts for the Future, p.154),

~ & -

The Incarnation suggests that God is not a remote potentiate who pulls the strings
for the puppet show on earth, but that He ~ God himself - has submitted to life, sot
into it with us, That means, in terms of evil and suffering, for instance, that God
doesn't cause it: rather God feeis it: and grieves with us, and veeps as we weep, The
Incarnation means, in J B Phillips’ words: "there is not disappointment or frustra-
tion, no pain or sorrow or failure, that He does not understand." (Good News, p,169).

And it means that God rejoices when we rejoice: that our laughter and love and
happiness is as much music to His ears as it is for one another,

In terms of personal piety the Incarnation is radically relevant, The baby was
born in a barn: the man lived a human Life: - ate, drank, slept, vas happy, got angry,
hurt, doubted and died,a very human death, That means that if you want to be in
touch with God,you don't need to vait till the general prayer at 11:15 on Sunday
morning, It means that you don't have to go to a special place where it is assumed
He is at home in a special way, The Incarnation means that the vhole world is full
of Him: that you will encounter none other chan God in your office, classroom, at
your dinner table, in the beauty parlor and on the golf course, The Incarnation
points to a very vorldly God who came to be with people where they were - and who
continues to be vresent in human life - ali of it,

Tt means, in very personal terms, chat there is no area of your life about
which God doesn't care and which lies outside His love and healing power, For tao
long we have denied the Incarnation py assuming that God is concerned about how we
say our prayers but in sexual relations, for instance, abandons us to our own devices,
God cares deeply about human Life because He has lived it, He is available: He is a
power to heip and heal, It is personal, but it is not simply personal,

The Incarnation means that God cares deeply about the way life is lived in the
world, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us'', not as a sacred priest behind a
oly altar, but as a man who Lived his life fully: a man who grev up in a family,
and knew hunger and weariness: a man who argued with the religious authorities and
was arrested and executed by the state for treason, God cares, that is to say, about
the quality of life in this world, He cares, that is to say, more about how poor
peopte are treated than how wealthy people sing Aymma, He cares more about how
ehildren are educated and the mentally retarded cared for, than about the properness
of religious ritual, He cares more about peace and justice and integrity and fair-
ness and compassion in the public and political sense, than about ali the ereeds
of Christendom, God with us?

And it is the quiet but astonishing suggestion that the God who is, and who is
with us so intimately, is a God of love: that we are loved with an eternal love:
that in this vast universe and this bewildering life there is one reality more real
than anything else, more real than death - the love of God in Jesus Christ: Love
incarnate: love alive and among us,

I have asked you, one week before Christmas, to leave the pleasant customs
behind and think hard for a while, J have suggested chat the bivth of Jesus Christ
is far more than a simple story: that it has to do with the most difficult and
profound of questions, I have sugnested that the God whose presence or absence
haunts you is available to you here and out there in whatever life you live, And
now I'm asking you to celebrate Christmas in a special and private way. Look for
Him: watch for Him: open your life to Him,

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Let me share with you a few sentences which meant a great deal to me as I read
them this week - in the midst of ‘this mess" as it were, WMaicolm Mugseridge
wrote them...

“Every happening, great and small,.,is a parable whereby God
speaks to us; and the art of life is to get the messace, In
the same sort of way, listening to great music, or reading
@reat literature, or standing before great buildings, an inner
rhythm is detected, and the heart rejoices, and a Licht breaks,
which is none other than God's love shining through ail his
creation,"

(Christ arid the Media, p,25).

Look for Him! Watch for Him! Open your life to Him! And sometime in the
days ahead He will be there and the Word will become flesh for you and the Christ
will be born again in your life: and you can Lift your voice in honest and
abundant joy:

In the besinning was the Vord, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God, And the Vord became flesh and dvelt among us full of grace and truth: we
have beheld His slory as of the only Son of the Father,
Amen,

God our Father, in the midst of our rejoicing over the birth of Your Son,
deepen us: enlarse our thinking: push us to expand our vision, Help us to know
again the truth and beauty and reality which You have given us: through Jesus
Chris’ our Lord,

Amen,