The Fourth Church Pulpit

INCARNATION
December 13, 1992

John M. Buchanan

FOURTH
PRES BY
TERIAN
CHURCH
A LIGHT IN THE CiTY

126 East Chestnut St. Chicago, IL 60611-2094
312.787.4570 John M. Buchanan, Pastor

Scripture: Isaiah 35:1-10, John 1:1-18 f

“And the word became flesh and lived among us...”
-John 1:14 (NRSV)

We praise you, God of life and light, for the mystery of word made flesh.

We praise you for love and laughter.

We thank you for the incarnation, your love, born in our midst...in Jesus, our light in the darkness. Amen.

What in the world did God have in mind?... A fairly serious question, that, and the answer I encountered
this week was provided by a ten-year-old whose name is Charlie. It’s in Robert Cole’s wonderful bestseller,
The Spiritual Lives of Children. Coles is professor of Psychiatry at Harvard and has written several important
books about children and their growing and becoming. In this recent volume Coles asked children about their

faith, what they believed and what it meant to them. He discovered some delightful surprises and some
profound wisdom.

Charlie said:

“People forget Jesus had a father as well as a mother and he was a carpenter. | told
my friend Gerry that Jesus’ dad was a carpenter, and he said, ‘No, God is Jesus’
father.’ We argued. Our minister said we’re both right: Jesus had two fathers, one
in heaven and one here! That’s not bad! I kriow a lot of kids, they don’t have any.

“T think of Jesus having a dad who was a carpenter because I wonder why God chose
that kind of family for him. He must have had a reason, right? That’s how I see it.
He must have thought to himself: ‘Why, I want my son to be down there with just
plain people, nothing fancy.’”

Charlie went on then to editorialize delightfully:

“If Jesus had grown up in a plush house and been a spoiled brat, that’s the big
danger in this town, my folks keep telling me! — he’d have been different.
Wouldn’t he? Don’t you think? [The Spiritual Life of Children, Robert Cole, p. 210]

Charlie, age ten, from Sudbury, Massachusetts, exhibits impressive theological precision with his
proposition that God thought “I want my son to be down there with just plain people, nothing fancy!”

That is the incredible claim of Christmas. That is what Advent is about. It is the heart of our faith, our life
together, our witness, our mission, our church. “I want my son to be down there with just plain people.”

The theological term is “Incarnation” which means, literally, enfleshment.
And the loveliest and earliest expression of it sounds like this:

“In the beginning was the Word,

And the Word was with God

And the Word was God.
And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

And:

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

written around the end of the first century of our era, Charlie and his friend in Sudbury, Massachusetts, are by
no means the first people to argue about who Jesus’ father really was. For several hundred years the Christian

Church fiercely debated who Jesus was, and what it meant to call him Son of God, and also God Incarnate. That
argument is still going on, almost two thousand years later.

The prologue to John’s Gospel, which we heard this morning, was written in a different way and froma
different perspective, probably a few decades later than Matthew, Mark and Luke. It is one of our precious
treasures. It was a custom of the ancient Christian Church for the priest to read the passage over newly baptized

The ancient church had symbols for each of the four Gospels. They are, in fact, carved into this pulpit. The
symbol assigned to John the Evangelist by the ancient church is the eagle. The symbol for Matthew is the lion

I think of that every time I read the opening words of the fourth Gospel... like looking directly at the sun,
like looking directly into the heart of God. “in the beginning was the Word.”

“In the beginning was the idea,” Reynolds Price says is a way to get at this. First the idea — the notion — ~
the impulse; it is with God - it is God; and when the idea is expressed the result, the word spoken is Jesus.

Reynolds Price is one of our finest modern writers. He contributed to a collection of essays by
contemporary writers on the New Testament. Price wrote about the fourth Gospel and with a novelist’s fine eye

and ear for nuance proposes that there is a “burning outrage in this prologue. It is either a work of madness or
blinding light.”

“If we give it the serious witness it wants, we must finally ask the question it thrusts
so flagrantly — Does it bring a life — transforming truth, or is it one gifted lunatic’s
tale of another lunatic, wilder than he?”

, [Incarnation, Contemporary Writers on the New Testament, Alfred Corn, p. 39]

What was so outrageous about John’s notion of the word, the idea becoming flesh, was that nobody,
nobody at all in his world thought like that. The word — if there is such a thing, God — if God exists and
almost everybody then and now assumes the existence of some deity — God doesn’t become flesh. It’s the
exact opposite. God being God is not flesh at all. The intellectual world of the Roman Empire rested on the
foundation of an unassailable assumption that there was spirit and there was matter. God is spirit... the
tangible world of creation: human beings — their senses, their passions, their natural processes — are matter.
God is perfect, good; matter is obviously not so good, not perfect, obviously finite; the flesh deteriorates, dies,
decays. The purpose of human life must be to transcend, to rise above all that is earthly and finite and
imperfect. It is the function of religion to point to — to show the way to — that other realm, the realm of the
spirit.

12/13/92 —2—

So when a first century Jew writes:

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God and the Word became flesh and lived among us” he

is saying something outrageous. He is either mad, or he has, literally, seen a light that no darkness can
overcome.

Rice expresses it beautifully, I think.

“The world around us is completely changed by the incarnation, and we are enabled

to see everything in a new way when we view it as those who believe God saw fit to
live here in the person of Jesus.” [p. 164]

To entertain the notion of the incarnation, to accept as a viable intellectual proposition that God somehow

dwelt in the life of a particular man, is to see everything in a new light. Incarnation is a way of seeing the
world, a way of thinking about the world which is very different than the way secularists think. Nowhere in

ideology. When there is no place to subject ideas to free inquiry and criticism, when to do so openly can cost
you a career, or the opportunity for your children to go to university, or even land you in prison, the only
places to register dissent, to say “no” intellectually, are the arts and the church.

Librarian of Congress, James Billington, in a recent speech said:

Billington says;

“The reality goes unrecognized. The role of religion is the most stunning single -
intellectual omission from media analysis and, indeed, from most university-based
analysis of world events.” [Martin E, Marty, “Context,” 12/ 1/92}

12/13/92 —j—

Incarnation — this world as the place where light shines in the darkness, the world, the place where God
lived in Jesus; this world where God's kingdom comes; this world where all people of all nations, all races, bear
God's image and are therefore creatures of infinite worth, creatures of dignity, and integrity who, because of
incarnation are created for freedom and justice and fullness of life. It’s a new way of looking at the world.

And it’s a new way of understanding what it means to be faithful as an individual — and asa church. If the
spiritual realm is different from the material realm, if religion's purpose is to assist people to transcend the

But if the word became flesh and lived among us — the faithful life is modeled on that dynamic. The
momentum of faithfulness is not away from the world but into the world in the name of God.

Howard Rice argues for a “new spirituality” which emphasizes both a personal relationship with Jesus
Christ, which has been the focus of conservative Christianity, and a passionate concern for this world and for
other people, the speciality of liberal Christians. A “new spirituality” will include birth. John Calvin set the
tone, Rice reminds us, by beginning his mammoth theology, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, with a
“Prefatory Address to King Francis I of France,” on the role of a Christian ruler.

It is a characteristic of reformed spirituality, he says, to be deeply invested in the world. Presbyterian
churches are hotbeds of do-gooders, in the best sense of the word; people who are everywhere in society, giving

boards, colleges, museums, homeless shelters, and every conceivable kind of committee and organization

promoting public betterment and improvement. Calvin developed the idea that public service is a noble calling
from God. [op. cit., p. 153-155]

Incarnation is a way of viewing the church — a way of being church: a way which intentionally balances
two orientations - God and the world - worship and mission: piety and social action, Part of the agony of the
mainline church in our culture is the residue from a struggle, which is decades old now, between those who
want the church to do and to be one or the other —a worshipful sanctuary from the troubles of the world ora
social service agency whose purpose is to cure the ills of the world. To view the church incarnationally is to
reject the argument and to insist that our task is to be and do both. As Harry Emerson Fosdick used to say, “to
comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” to be an incarnational church is to go public with the faith, to
celebrate God’s gracious forgiveness and the gifts of reconciliation and peace which are part of our salvation,
and to tutor the children and house the homeless and provide physical fitness classes for the elderly and day
care for infants, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. To believe that the word became flesh is to know that
our place is here on this most worldly corner, to be here what we advocate, what we stand for, and will fight for
— the value of life, for instance, the precious value of every child’s life. By what we do here, to be in this place
a light which will not be overcome by darkness because the word, the idea, became flesh and lived among us.

Became flesh. Flesh must be good if the word became it. I read somewhere that 80 percent of women and
probably as many men dislike their own bodies. But bodies must be okay, if God’s Word, God’s Idea became
one. If not beautiful by the standards of high fashion advertising, absolutely beautiful in God’s eyes and
therefore in ours, because the word became flesh.

And beyond that: this life of yours, this bubble of existence which is your life, your dearest relationships,

your hopes and aspirations, your fears, your failures, your sins, your passion and joy — nothing about it is alien
to God. Nothing about you exists outside the realm of God’s healing, reconciling, saving love.

12/13/92 —4—

4

D. H, Lawrence understood the radical idea of incarnation even when the theologians and churchmen of his
day were backing away from it and retreating to a more ethereal, spiritual religion. He wrote in a poem:

“Religion knows better than philosophy.

Religion knows that Jesus never was Jesus till he was born from a womb and ate

soup and bread and grew up, and became, in the wonder of creation, Jesus, with a
body and with needs, and a lovely spirit."

[Demiurge, D. H. Lawrence, Selected Poems, p. 133]

All flesh is blessed because the word became flesh. Noth
knows what hunger and thirst and desire feel like;
alone, abandoned; knows the exhilaration and fest

knows grief, knows tears, knows laughter, knows
became flesh.

ing about you is alien from the God who in Jesus
knows what it means to be joyful with friends and lonely

ivity of wonderful celebrations; knows humility and shame;
even death. Nothing about you is alien from God. The word

It is the one sentence we human beings crave, Reynolds Price says:

“The maker of all things loves and wants me. Fr
hurled into space, then caught at last b
the arc of God.” {op. cit., p. 72]

agile creatures made by God’s hand,
y a man in some ways like ourselves, through

It's like looking directly at the sun — and not being blinded. It's like looking into the heart of God and for a
moment, at least, a brief filament of time, understanding it’s like a light shining in the darkness.

Charlie said God must have thought, “Why,

I want my son to be down there with just plain people, nothing
fancy.”

Another way of saying it is this:

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was
God... And the Word became flesh and lived among us,....”

12/13/92