Text Study for John 1:1-18 (Pt. 2); January 2, 2021

In and Among

“And the Word became flesh and tabernacled in us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the Only-begotten from the Father, full of gracious truth” (John 1:14, my translation).

Translation requires choices. The old Latin proverb is “Traduttore, traditore” – “The translator is a traitor.” As long as we can stick with the original language, we can maintain the ambiguity, double entendre, the multivalent and multivocal meanings of particular words.

But the moment we translate, we have to choose. There is rarely an absolute one to one correspondence without remainder between words in different languages. And that lack of correspondence is often biggest in the littlest words.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

In John 1:14, the phrase in Greek is “en hemin.” It is usually translated as “among us.” This is the translation preferred, for example, by the NRSV. It’s an accurate and acceptable translation, but I’m not sure it’s adequate. The most basic meaning of the phrase is “in us” rather than “among us.” I think that most basic meaning is the more helpful translation at this point.

Why does this matter to me? I think that “among” shades pretty quickly, in our minds, into “with.” The Matthean declaration that Jesus is “God with us” colors, I believe, our understanding of the Incarnation as described in the Johannine prologue. And “with” leads many of us to focus on the Divine accompaniment of the cosmos – God alongside us, keeping us company, reassuring us when we feel alone.

I’m not criticizing that understanding. It is certainly part of what we Christians mean to say when we talk about the doctrine of the Incarnation. But I don’t think it encompasses what the Johannine author seeks to communicate. I would suggest that in the Prologue we meet the Incarnate One who not only accompanies but always empowers us. The Incarnate One is not only among us but in us.

I would suggest that this is one of the reasons the Johannine author uses the verb, “skenoo,” here. Elizabeth Johnson, in her workingpreacher.org commentary notes that “the Greek verb translated ‘lived’ in this verse is skenoo, which means more literally, ‘pitched his tent.’ Just as God traveled with the people of Israel in the wilderness by means of the ‘tent of meeting’ in their midst,” she continues, “John announces that God has chosen to ‘tabernacle’ among us in an even more radical way, by the Word embodied in human flesh.”

In the Exodus account, the living presence of God moved from Sinai into the Tent of Meeting (which becomes the Tabernacle). Certainly, the living presence of God was “among” or “in the midst of” the people, although the Tent of Meeting was really located outside the camp. More than that, however, the living presence of God was powerful in and through Moses and the people and led them on the way.

It seems to me that an emphasis on the Incarnate Word as tabernacling “among” (with) us, tends to focus exclusively on the “Person” of Christ. Thus, it leads us to sermons about the nature of the Incarnation and descriptions of Trinitarian relationships. By noticing the “in” character of this presence, we can focus on the “Work” of Christ to empower disciples to put their trust in him and to participate in the mission of the Church.

I don’t think this is an either/or conversation. All I’m saying is that translation forces us to choose one word where several probably would be better. Let me move to the end of the Johannine gospel to illustrate what I mean.

When Jesus appears to the disciples the first time in the locked room, they rejoice when they realize that their Lord is with them again. That is the beginning of the interaction, however, not the end. Jesus then breathes into them the Holy Spirit which empowers them to embody the Divine Life in their relationships with one another. The Word takes on flesh in them and in their reality as community.

I think that the Johannine intertextual reference is obvious here. Just as God breathed the Breath of Life into the nostrils of the first man in Genesis, so Jesus breathes that Breath of Life into the disciples, and they are put on the path to full and flourishing humanity. That gift is certainly among them, but it is also in them. They become walking, talking tabernacles, or as Paul would put it, temples of the Holy Spirit.

It is, therefore, no accident that the Gospel of John is the primary anchor point for the Christian traditions that emphasize theosis (divinization) as the path of the Christian life. These, primarily Eastern, traditions, call us to see not only what God does for us and with us in Christ but also what God does in us by the power of the Holy Spirit. This is the gift of truth to which we are called and into which we grow for now and for eternity.

As I have noted in other posts, this perspective finds a home in Lutheran theology in the notion of “Christ present in faith.” Tuomo Mannermaa reminds us that when Luther discusses the theology of faith in his Preface to Romans, he refers to our passage as an illustration. “Faith, however,” Luther writes, “is a divine work in us which changes us and makes us to be born anew of God…” (Kindle Location 467).

Luther continues his description thus. Faith, as this divine work, “kills the old Adam and makes us altogether different men (sic), in heart and spirit and mind and powers; and it brings with it the Holy Spirit.” Then comes the sentence that is often quoted without this theosis context. This faith “is a living, busy, active, mighty thing,” Luther writes. “It is impossible for it not to be doing good works incessantly” (Kindle Location 472).

In the Incarnation, Jesus is filled with the gracious truth of the Father. Colossians 1:19 would tell us that in him “was pleased to dwell all the fullness [of the Deity].” Luther argues that Christ “lives and works in us, not speculatively but really, most presently and most effectively” (Kindle Location 480). “According to Luther,” Mannermaa writes, “faith is the right way of becoming a partaker of God because it possesses the whole fullness of the essence of God in Christ” (Kindle Location 489).

The logic of the Reformer’s thinking is as follows,” Mannermaa concludes: “In faith, human beings are really united with Christ. Christ, in turn, is both the forgiveness of sins and the effective producer of everything that is good in them” (Kindle Locations 675-676). The gracious truth we receive from the Incarnate One is that we are restored to full and flourishing humanity and are called by God in Christ through the power of the Spirit to live according to that humanity.

The Incarnation is, therefore, both “comfort” and “call.” We can receive that call or reject it, as we noted in the previous post. Receiving that call makes us children of God who put our trust in His name. That call doesn’t come from any human agency but rather from God, present in Christ through faith.

I rejoice in the presence of the Incarnate One among us as the source of comfort and hope. I rejoice all the more in the presence of the Incarnate One in us as the source of good works that embody that presence and shape me more and more in the likeness of the Incarnate One.

References and Resources

Johnson, Elizabeth. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-christmas-3/commentary-on-john-11-9-10-18-9.

Lewis, Karoline M. John (Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.

Tuomo Mannermaa; Kirsi Irmeli Stjerna. Christ Present In Faith: Luther’s View Of Justification Kindle Edition.

van Deventer, Cornelia. “Performing John: the participatory nature of the Fourth Gospel.” Neotestamentica 53.3 (2019): 517-534.

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Text Study for John 1:1-18; January 2, 2022

Getting Into the Act

I think I am making a gradual return to the land of the living after a week and a half of cold and flu symptoms. I am wondering about what performance criticism methods may have to tell us about the Prologue to the Gospel of John.

We have learned to pay attention to the first-person pronouns in gospel accounts. These are cues that the text is directed toward us as audience and is seeking to engage us as participants. Notice that in John 1:1-13, the pronouns are all third-person. We are spectators at the beginning of the account.

All that changes in verses fourteen through sixteen. The pronouns all become first-person plural: us and we. Cornelia van Deventer reminds us that this first-person plural move is also found, for example, at the end of the Johannine account – “This is the disciple, the one who is testifying concerning these things and the one who wrote these things, and we know that his testimony is true” (John 21:24, my translation).

The “we” in John 1 and John 21 seems a bit slippery when I read the verses. On the one hand, the “we” certainly refers to the community which has received, and which communicates the testimony of the Beloved Disciple. On the other hand, the “we” also invites us as the audience and/or readers to become a part of that “we.” Do “we” know that the Beloved Disciple’s testimony is true? And, if so, will we live that way? That is the challenge of the Johannine account.

Remember that the purpose statement of John’s gospel is a direct invitation to us as audience and reader. “But these things have been written in order you (plural) would put your faith in the fact that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and in order that as you put your faith in that fact you would have life in his name” (John 20:31, my translation). The Johannine account is written in order to call forth an active response on the part of the hearer/reader.

Cornelia van Deventer argues that this and other purpose statements in the Johannine gospel urge us as listeners to become a “participating audience” and to enact that participation “by performing what [we] have see and to experience the life that accompanies such belief. The Gospel, therefore,” she declares, “contains a dimension of experiencing, participating and ultimately performing” (page 1).

Van Deventer seeks to describe the “implied audience” of John’s gospel in order to come to a deeper understanding of the author’s intended call to action. She sees the Johannine prologue as a critical part of that call to action and a place to begin to understand that implied audience. The Johannine prologue sets up the audience with a framework for understanding the action that will follow in the body of the drama.

The “we” in verses fourteen through sixteen might refer exclusively to the author and the community which supported that author’s work – including others who might have experienced firsthand the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. However, the use of the “we” also creates what van Deventer calls a “porous” group identity – that is, a group identity that can invite and accommodate us as well. She notes that the “we” in verse sixteen is expanded to “we all” with the effect that the audience is included in the text (page 5).

We, as audience, therefore, have insider information as the gospel account unfolds “The audience is initiated into the Johannine story with a revelation of [Jesus’] divine glory,” van Deventer notes, “the perspective that the ‘we’ brings to the table” (page 5). This first-person plural includes us as listeners/readers and seeks to persuade us that we too witness the glory of the Logos and the truthfulness of the story.

Van Deventer observes that this invitation is extended to all of humanity in verses four through nine. The question is whether people will embrace that invitation or reject it. Those who embrace the invitation are called “children of God.” They are the ones who are continuing to believe in the present and into the future. For the Johannine author, the time for responding is now. And the scope of that response is into God’s future.

The drama of the story is whether the characters will be “receivers” or “rejecters.” That drama is then offered to the implied audience as a personal drama as well. The gospel is filled with stories that enact this drama at very personal and intimate levels. The drama is culminated in the testimony and response of the Beloved Disciple, the real model for the faith response the Gospel author seeks to elicit.

“The reality is, however,” van Deventer writes, “that the Johannine audience has not simply been empowered to evaluate the ethos of the various characters in the story, but, according to the purpose of the author, they have the mandate to now evaluate their own” (page 13). That’s an interesting and challenging preaching focus on the first Sunday of a new calendar year. We, who have been believing, are invited to reflected on whether we will continue that life of faith into the future.

“The Fourth Gospel, therefore,” writes van Deventer, “supposes an audience of individuals who were intended to become,” in the words of another scholar, “participators and propagators” of Jesus’ life and words (page 13). That’s what it means to “perform” the Gospel – or in the words of the Johannine author – to continue to put our trust in Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God.

The Johannine account leaves room for doubt, struggle, questions, thick-headedness, and even rejection on the part of the listeners. We shouldn’t assume that this “believing” comes easily or is merely a once and for all sort of decision. We have only to read the gospel accounts to see that this is an ongoing challenge for any and all disciples.

“The participatory nature of the Fourth Gospel,” van Deventer observes, “is therefore a double-edged sword: it is both encouraging and challenging” (page 14). “We” are invited into the drama as participants. The “fourth wall” of the gospel theater is “porous,” as van Deventer names it, and we can find ourselves passing through it and on to the stage. If that happens, the gospel account has done at least a part of its work.

“By pointing its finger to the audience,” she continues, “the Fourth Gospel makes it clear that it has not fashioned an audience of uninformed bystanders, but an enlightened audience of performers: what they now perform is entirely up to them” (page 14).

I wonder if one simple way to make this experiential in worship is to turn the reading of the Johannine prologue into a sort of call and response experience. Perhaps the liturgical reader could “solo” on verses 1-13 and 17-18. And perhaps the congregation could read/perform verses 14-16. This might be most effective if the participatory and performative nature of the gospel account were pointed out to the listeners in advance of the reading.

Van Deventer offers these conclusions. She “argues that the Fourth Gospel creates a self-conscious audience from the prologue and that this audience is invited to become performers of a certain ethos through the creation of an ideal and porous group of receivers of the Logos and his revelation” (page 14). In addition, the gospel account creates and offers various characters who perform that belief, culminating in the Beloved Disciple. And the gospel account climaxes with the purpose statement that poses the challenge of continuing to believe directly.

This perspective offers a refreshing alternative to tortuous dissertations on the nature of the Incarnate Logos. And it challenges us as preachers to allow the gospel text to do what it was intended to do – to call and recall listeners to active and ongoing trust in Jesus as the Source of abundant life for us and for the cosmos.

References and Resources

Johnson, Elizabeth. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-christmas-3/commentary-on-john-11-9-10-18-9.

Lewis, Karoline M. John (Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.

van Deventer, Cornelia. “Performing John: the participatory nature of the Fourth Gospel.” Neotestamentica 53.3 (2019): 517-534.

Text Study for John 1:1-18, 2 Christmas C, 2022

Still feeling ill today, so I’m running some previous commentary on the upcoming text. Blessings!

Preachers will tackle this text when people are still more aware of endings than of beginnings. The posts and tweets and memes describing 2020 as a sack of garbage inside a dumpster fire have been shared now for months. The urgent desire to put that calendar year in the rearview mirror has only grown in its intensity. The sighs of relief, the “Phew! Glad that’s over!” declarations will be ubiquitous.

We are surely glad to be done with that year.

Of course, the difference from December 31, 2020, to January 1, 2021, is twenty-four hours, just like any other diurnal cycle. The ending is, quite literally, all in our heads. We have great hopes that vaccines will be effective, that policies will be forthcoming, and that normalcy will return. But really, most endings come gradually, not with a whoosh.

For most of us, by this time Christmas has been over for a week and a half. But liturgically, the Christmas season isn’t quite over when we get to this text. We still have a couple of days to go before we get to Epiphany. The season will sort of peter out in the middle of the week, and few people will even notice. The text itself dwells not a word on endings. It is about The Beginning – not just any old start-up, but rather The Beginning of all things in The Word made flesh.

First off, I would never read only a portion of John’s prologue. Read it all, or don’t read it. But don’t split it in half. If you’re going to do justice to the text, you’ll end up referring to something you didn’t read anyway. So, just read it all. Every time. “While John 1:1-9 is optional,” writes Karoline Lewis, “verses 10-18 make little sense without the premises set out in the opening verses. The Prologue to John’s Gospel is John’s birth story of Jesus.” Lewis reminds us. “To view these 18 verses as such is both homiletically and hermeneutically helpful.”

Second, no one can preach a sermon that takes in the depth and breadth, the beauty and majesty, the poetry and power of John’s Prologue. You can’t do that in a ten (or twenty) minute sermon. You can’t do that in an hour-long Bible study. You certainly can’t do it in a few thousand words of amateur commentary. So, pick your spot and remember that this text comes around again.

“In the beginning was the Word,” John writes. The “Word” has central place in these opening verses and yet seems to disappear in the rest of John’s account. Some scholars have suggested on this basis that the Prologue was therefore not part of the original gospel account. There is, however, very little manuscript evidence to support this contention. Instead, I appreciate the take we get from Malina and Rohrbaugh in the Social Science Commentary on the Gospel of John:

“One term that appears prominently in this opening poem, yet seems to disappear through the rest of the Gospel, is ‘Word.’ To think of it disappearing, however, would be misleading. In v. 14 we are told that this Word becomes ‘enfleshed’ in Jesus of Nazareth. Hence, it is as the story of Jesus that the ‘Word’ appears in the rest of John.” (page 30).

They note that in the Hebrew scriptures, God’s Word is connected with God’s action of and in Creation, and God’s self-disclosure to and through the prophets. We can see those two works of the Word in the Prologue as well. The revelation in the Hebrew scriptures is not contradicted or superseded by the Word.

Instead, this is another place in the Christian scriptures that notes how Jesus fulfills the Word spoken to the prophets. We can read similar language, for example, in Hebrews 1:1-4. “The Word that was with God in the beginning,” write Malina and Rohrbaugh, “refers to God’s total utterance that has resulted in everything created, visible and invisible” (page 35).

Jesus is not plan B. And the Law was not a mistake. “The law indeed was given through Moses,” John writes, “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Holly Hearon writes, “it is important to notice that the word ‘but’ never appears in the sentence. In other words, John is not claiming that grace and truth belongs to Jesus but not to the law. Both grace and truth are found in the law.”

J. Ramsey Michaels puts it this way in his commentary: “God’s gift of the Jewish law, he says, makes way for grace and truth, the gift of the Spirit through Jesus Christ. The distinction is not between law and grace as contrasting ways of salvation, but between two gifts of grace: the law and the Spirit (cf. Paul in 2 Cor. 3: 7– 18).” (page 24).

“The difference, from John’s perspective,” Holly Hearon continues, “is between reading a book and going directly to the author. Going to the author neither sets the book aside nor negates its contents. For Christians, the book (or the ‘law’) anticipates the direct revelation we experience in Jesus Christ.”

John makes an early appearance in this Gospel, not as Baptizer but as Witness. Karoline Lewis notes this as she writes, “Yet the presence of John here, particularly for our Christmas preaching, suggests that a critical response to Christmas is witness. Christmas,” she reminds us, “is not over when the trees are put out to the curb. Christmas is just getting started for those who confess Jesus as God who has become flesh.” Malina and Rohrbaugh note that John is only the first of many witnesses to Jesus in John’s gospel (see page 32).

“The Word became flesh and lived among us,” the NRSV translates, too tame by half. It is astonishing beyond words that the One who dwells beyond the categories of being and becoming should enter into our limited and transient existence for our sake and for the sake of the whole cosmos. That coming into existence was not a tourist excursion.

The Creating Word “pitched his tent” among us (the literal translation) and settles in for the long haul. Malina and Rohrbaugh suggest that the term “may have been intended to draw associations with Israel’s exodus story, in which the tent (or tabernacle) symbolizes the presence of God in the midst of Israel” (page 33).

John’s prologue emphasizes the cosmic dimension of the Incarnation. “The purpose of the Gospel writer is to place the story of Jesus in a cosmic perspective,” Michaels notes. “The light that came into the world in Jesus Christ is the same light that illumined every human creature from the beginning.”

In just a few chapters, we will hear that God loves the cosmos by giving the only-begotten Son so the whole cosmos may be saved. The context of the prologue, according to Michaels, “strongly suggests that in a wider sense Jesus’ own country is the world to which he was sent and his own people are human beings of every race or nation, all those on whom God’s light shines (cf. vv. 4, 9). These wider implications will become apparent when Jesus comes to Jerusalem for the last time (cf. 12: 19, 32) and when he confronts Pilate and the authority of Rome.

Within this cosmic framework, there is a relationship of infinite intimacy between the Father and the only-begotten Son. It is not the Father’s “heart” that describes the relationship of Jesus to the Father. The Greek word is “kolpos” and would be better translated as “bosom” or “breast.” Karoline Lewis writes, “Jesus, as God’s unique expression of God and God’s son, dwells at the bosom of the father. The meaning conveyed in this picture of Jesus at the bosom of God is extraordinary tenderness. One would be hard-pressed,” she concludes, “to secure a description of relationship more intimate than the nursing of a child.”

“Thus, the poem ends where it began,” observe Malina and Rohrbaugh, “the close personal relationship between Father and Son is what makes it possible for the Son to reveal the Father. As the Gospel proceeds,” they suggest, “it will also be the bond that creates and enables bonding among the group members to Jesus and to each other” (page 34).

In the beginning was the Word. There is meaning, purpose, order, life and light underneath and in the middle of the chaotic darkness. Humans, at our worst and at our best, ask, “So, what’s the point?” We seek meaning. We find meaning. We make meaning. Or not.

But the promise at the beginning of John’s Gospel is that, whether we know it or not, the point is there. And the point is love beyond deserving, light no darkness can hem in or snuff out. I can’t cram all that into my little brain, my mini-mind, my haunted heart, my stifled spirit. Sometimes I can glimpse or sniff or taste a bit of it. Sometimes I shiver as the mystery brushes the back of my neck. Mostly I trust that the point is there somewhere, and it is enfleshed in Jesus.

References and Resources

Hearon, Holly. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-christmas-2/commentary-on-john-11-9-10-18-3.

Lewis, Karoline. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-christmas-2/commentary-on-john-11-9-10-18-5.

Malina, Bruce, and Rohrbaugh, Richard. Social Science Commentary on the Gospel of John. Minneapolis, MN.: Fortress Press, 1998.

Michaels, J. R. (2011). John (Understanding the Bible Commentary Series) [Kindle Android version].

Wright, N. T. “The Letter to the Ephesians.” Address to the Scottish Church Theology society conference, January 2013, and published in Theology in Scotland.

Saturday Sermons from the Sidelines — “Cracked and Broken”

The Second Sunday after Christmas, 2021; Jeremiah 31:7-14, John 1:1-18

“Adversity does not build character,” said James Lane Allen, “but reveals it.” This is perhaps a kinder, gentler version of the oft-cited line from Nietzsche that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Regardless the source, we have had quite enough character revealing, thank you very much. If current events are any clue, the truth is different. Whatever doesn’t kill you may still get you in the end if you’re not careful.

So, before we go on, let’s acknowledge how hard and scary the past nine months have been for us. Let’s grieve the losses of people and community and tranquility we experience. Let’s admit our distress, disruption, and despair. Until we look inward with clear eyes, we can’t look forward to ways that give life.

Photo by Matthias Groeneveld on Pexels.com

Adversity may reveal character. It also reveals the cracks – the flaws in ourselves, in our systems, and in our safe and settled views of the world. We may not be as brave and resilient, as selfless and compassionate, as we thought. Racism, sexism, classism, egotism, and moral cowardice may be harder to root out than we had assumed. Life may be less reliable and more dangerous than we had hoped.

There’s a lot in this life that wants to kill us. It doesn’t care if we get stronger or not.

The first reading for this second Sunday after Christmas comes from people who know all about what wants to kill us. Their homeland was invaded and conquered. Their cities and farms, their homes and schools, their temple and capital were destroyed. They were scattered in exile among the nations. Many of them would never see their homes and homeland again.

The chaos and crisis of the last nine months have been challenging. But it’s been a picnic in the park compared to the trauma of the exiles in Jeremiah. But now, for them, God is on the move. Rescue and redemption are on the way. The scattered flock will be gathered. The captives will be released. The hungry will be fed, and the farms will flourish.

The Lord says, “Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob, and raise shouts for the chief of the nations; proclaim, give praise, and say, ‘Save, O Lord, your people, the remnant of Israel.’” God tells the exiles to ask for salvation because it’s already coming. Don’t just ask, the Lord says. Advertise it to the nations so they can spread the word. “Hear the word of the Lord, O nations,” God tells them, “and declare it in the coastlands far away…”

Adversity reveals character, all right. But it reveals God’s character, not just ours! In the midst of the distress, disruption, and despair, there is a declaration of hope – “for I have become a father to Israel,” God tells them, “and Ephraim is my firstborn.”

Adversity reveals our cracks as well as our character. Jeremiah’s people know all about the cracks.

Their world became so fractured and fragmented that it fell down around their ears. Their greed separated them from one another and left the vulnerable to die in the dust. Their lust for privilege separated them from their own humanity and blinded them to the political realities around them. Their worship of self turned them away from God and left them hungry for a meaning they could not make on their own. Their pursuit of empire left them naked to the games of world power, and they lost.

The thing about cracks is that they also let things in. I return over and over to the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s song, “Anthem.” The lyrics contain such wisdom.

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

Cracks are how the light gets in. Adversity can break us down. It did that to Jeremiah’s people. But it can also break us open. We can, as Parker Palmer writes, “imagine the heart broken into shards and scattered about—a feeling most of us know, and a fate we would like to avoid.” Or, he says, we can “imagine the heart broken open into new capacity – a process that is not without pain but one that many of us would welcome.”

Jeremiah’s people had their hearts broken – first down, and then open. When their hearts were broken open, then God’s light could shine into their hearts. It’s not surprising that the most vulnerable lead the redemption parade – those far from home, the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor. They come weeping for their losses and singing with joy. The vulnerable are the first to lose their illusions of invincibility. They are the first to recognize God’s rescue and redemption.

We are broken down in many ways. We can be broken open, if we’re willing. The cracks in our hearts are how the light gets in. We celebrate that Light in the season of Christmas. “In him was life,” the Gospel text reminds us, “and the life was the light of all people.” Sin, death, and evil seek to break us down, but they cannot win. “The light shines in the darkness,” the Gospel declares, “and the darkness did not overcome it.”

Jeremiah promises that hearts broken open are hearts made new. Later in chapter thirty-one, he finishes his prophecy. “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

The law of God’s love will shine through us and into a world wrapped in darkness. If we let ourselves be cracked open by life, the light will shine through us. If we let our hearts be broken open to love, we will grow and learn and flourish.

We stand at the beginning of the end of this particular crisis. I pray that this will prompt a time of reflection in our community, our state, and our nation. Will we return to a time of retreat and rejection, of paranoia and pain, of competition and complicity?

Or will we take this as an opportunity to grow in compassion and courage, in humility and honesty, in partnership and peace? Our society faces a billion small choices and a thousand large ones in that process of reflection.

More to the point today, we church people also have a choice. We can retreat once again into the cold darkness of the safe, secure and stable ways of the past. If we do, I believe we will continue our gentle slide into decline and death. There is no “going back to normal.” There is going toward life or toward death. Times of adversity simply make that clearer.

Perhaps we can stay open to the new possibilities this time in history has created. As our pastor often says, it’s a shame to waste a good pandemic. So, I hope we are praying and reflecting together on some important questions.

1. What can we learn from our own history and from other organizations about surviving and thriving after organizational trauma?

2. What strengths have we seen in ourselves and the church and our community and our world that we need to keep, to ponder, to build on and build out from?

3. What have we done without over the past nine months that we didn’t miss? What did we miss that we can’t do without?

4. What have we remembered or learned about our mission as a congregation that we didn’t see or confess, or appreciate a year ago?

5. What hopes and dreams, plans and promises, do we need to uncover as we prepare to go forward into God’s future?

I believe that congregations that see where they’ve been broken open to the future will find new joy and gladness in the journey. I pray that we and many other Christian communities will celebrate our cracks and choose to be broken open to God’s grace and love.

Let’s pray. Save, O Lord, your people. Bring us from our isolation and desolation into the light of your faithfulness, hopefulness, and lovingkindness. Use our cracks and brokenness to reveal your redemption in us and to the world through us. Fill us with songs of joy for the journey. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

God Comes to Stay: Christmas 2020

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us…” (John 1:14a).

What does the Incarnation mean?

God is not a tourist. God comes to stay. God embraces all the pain in the universe in order to stay connected. We who follow Jesus do not know a detached deity. That’s the Epicureans, and the free market capitalists (probably the same crowd). As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said from a Nazi prison cell, “Only a suffering God can help.” Bonhoeffer should know.

We would prefer a detached deity if it were really up to us. When I say “we,” I mean most white American Christians. We desire the god who remains at a distance. We like the god who refuses to get involved. We want a god who minds his/her/its/their own business. We assume this god leaves us to our own devices. We settle for the god who doesn’t jump in or judge. This is the god we really like.

If we are honest, we must confess that God has not willingly left the scene. When I say “we,” I still mean most white American Christians. Instead, we have pushed God out of this world and onto the cross. We want a god who does not interfere, who makes no demands, who causes no disruptions. We can then blame God for being unavailable.

We live as functional atheists and then wonder why God is not present. We prefer autonomy and isolation, and then we weep over our spiritual desolation. We live as if there is no god, and then wonder where God has gone.

The Incarnation means that we worship the God who has “skin in the game” (by the way, that skin is brown, in historical terms). Colossians, chapter two, verse nine, puts it this way: “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority.”

The Incarnation means that God comes to us as we are. In Romans, chapter five, verse eight, Paul reminds us that “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

The Incarnation means that we are not God’s “project” to be abandoned once we are “fixed.” God comes to remain with us—to make us God’s children, friends, partners. The Incarnation declares to us that God’s love for the world is steadfast. In Romans, chapter eight, verse thirty-nine, we remember that nothing in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

God is not a tourist. God comes to stay.

So, what does the Incarnation mean today? A confirmation student once asked me, “Why isn’t Jesus doing any good stuff today the way he did two thousand years ago?”

We have failed that young person. The church is the body of Christ. The church is the ongoing expression of the Incarnation of Jesus in the world. So I answered that student in this way. Jesus is doing that good stuff today—through us, the church!

The church is one of the ways that God comes to stay. If it fails at that role, the Church should dissolve and give the building to someone who will do some actual good. No, this isn’t a cute Christmas homily with friendly beasts, smelly shepherds, noisy angels, and no teeth. Sorry (not really).

Nathaniel Ayers was cellist trained at the Juilliard School of the Performing Arts. He was also a homeless man on the streets of Los Angeles, battling paranoid schizophrenia. Steve Lopez, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, saw him on the street one day, playing a broken violin. Lopez felt compelled to help him. The story was captured in the 2009 movie, The Soloist. The movie becomes a parable of the Incarnation.

Lopez gets Ayers a real cello. He tries to secure housing for him. He even arranges for more musical training and support. But Ayers’ illness remains. At one point he attacks both the music instructor and Lopez when he suffers a paranoid delusion.

As Lopez sits raging and bleeding, he has an epiphany. Michael Frost describes it this way. Lopez “realizes his mistake in trying to perform some miraculous therapeutic act in Ayers’ life and get out as quick as he can. Ayers’ presence in his life isn’t a simple project to be completed; it is an opportunity for true friendship—messy, frustrating, joyful and unending.” And we might end up raging and bleeding along the way…

Steve Lopez put it this way. “I’ve learned the dignity of being loyal to something you believe in.” (Michael Frost, Incarnate, page 83). That dignity is part of God’s heart. That dignity takes on flesh in the Incarnation. That dignity is the highest expression of God’s image in us. A side note, of course, is that any number of “secular” people get that a lot better than many “church” people do.

Jesus does continue to do the good stuff in the world. Jesus chooses to do at least some of that good stuff through us, the church.

God is not a tourist. God comes to stay. What does the Incarnation mean for us church people?

It means that Christian faith and practice are inherently and intensely communal. This is hard for churches and people who still hang with the bankrupt assumptions of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is supposed to make us all free and some of us rich. That happened for a very few of us because it leaves the rest of us naked to the power of giant corporations. Christians have historically been part of building and sustaining mediating social structures that provide love, cover and support for the most vulnerable in a society.

Christians are called to be critical of any and every human system which claims god-like powers. The “market” is such a system and cannot stand up to the scrutiny. I read somewhere that you cannot serve two masters…And by the way, non-Christian (which is different from anti-Christian, use your brains SBC seminary presidents) analyses like Critical Race Theory that get us to the same theoretical place are not opposed to Christian theology but rather complementary to it.

At this point in life and history it means that Christian faith and practice are inherently and intensely political. If I have not lost most church people by this time, they’re probably headed for the exits now. But “political” is what incarnational looks like, especially in a system that is supposed to be about “we the people.” “Political” in our setting means involved in the work of social justice for all. And all means all.

By now, a lot of traditional Christians have left the building and the parking lot as well. Fortunately for me, I’m retired and don’t depend on those people for my mortgage money. That’s a privilege I acknowledge, and I better use it for something besides myself. So, here we are.

At this point in life and history, it means that Christian faith and practice are inherently institutional. We need to work to make the institutions healthy. My love/hate relationship with the organized church tilts far too heavily to the “hate” side most of the time. When you work in the sausage factory for forty years, you lose your taste for bratwurst (metaphorically speaking).

But it’s easy to just blow it all up and say we’ll start over. As a veteran of such demolition efforts, I’m inclined to try to salvage the good and remodel the rest. So, no matter how pissed off I get at the institutional church, I want it to work, and to work the way it’s supposed to.

I can’t be part of that if I take my marbles (and my money) and leave. So, crabby old curmudgeon that I’m becoming, I’ve found a perch and I’m staying. That’s as close as I’m going to come to divinity, I suspect.

C. S. Lewis once wrote, “the central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation…Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this.” (Miracles, page 112). How will you be part of the miracle this week?

God is not a tourist. God comes to stay. Blessed Christmas!