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dmmowers · 7 years

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The Word Became Flesh

"I don't believe in that God either." I was in a hospital room in Shakopee, working as a chaplain intern at St. Francis' Hospital a few years ago as a part of my training to become ordained, and those words came out of my mouth. Here's a little chaplain pro-tip for you in case you were wondering: when you're a chaplain and you go to visit someone, people do not expect you to say that you don't believe in God. I was visiting a fifty-something man who had come in with diabetes-related complications. He hadn't asked for the chaplain to visit, but his condition was serious and I had a few minutes, so I thought I'd just pop by. I go into the room and introduce myself as the chaplain, and immediately, the patient grimaces and says, "Well, I'll talk with you if you want, and thanks for coming by, but I don't believe in God."

Now, for most people the conversation would be over right there. Maybe I'm a little stubborn, or a little persistent, or just a bit dense, but I shrugged, pulled up a chair, raised my eyebrows and said, "Oh really? What sort of a God don't you believe in?" He was a little surprised by the question, but he went with it. "I don't believe in an old man sitting up in the clouds, blessing some people and sending other people to hell, just sitting around, doing whatever he wants while the world falls apart."

I leaned forward, looked him right in the eyes, and said, "I don't believe in that God either."

What kind of God do you believe in? My patient didn’t believe in a God that was faraway and distant. When we hear the Gospel passage for today read, it’s easy to think that distant God is what the passage is talking about. All of this talk about the Word, the Word becoming flesh, feels strange and foreign. We don’t talk like this, and so we wonder what this passage might mean. And, apart from this gospel, for a lot of people, when they think about what God is like, they think about the old-bearded-man-in-the-clouds. Or we think about our parents, especially if your parents happened to be stern disciplinarians who crushed you if you stepped out of line, and you figure that God is just that only bigger and meaner.

We hear politicians invoke God at the end of speeches frequently, and surveys tell us that something like 80% of Americans believe in some kind of God. But that is not the same thing as believing that God became human, that Jesus – whom John calls the Word – became human on Christmas Day. If you asked the politicians who say God Bless America what they meant by that, what do you think they would say? If you polled everyday American Christians and asked them, “What are the top 5 most important beliefs that are held by the Christian faith?” How many of them would say, “Jesus Christ became a human being just like us on Christmas Day.”

I bet that doesn’t make the top 5. In fact, twelve years ago, a major sociological survey was made of American teenagers asking about their religious faith. You might think, “Well, sure, but that’s just teenagers.” Let’s hear the top 5 beliefs those teenagers listed, and I won’t ask anyone to raise their hands, but I’d ask you to see whether you find any of these matching something that you believe.

Number one: “God made the Earth and watches over it.” Number two: "The Bible teaches that we should be good and kind to each other, and pretty much teaches the same thing as the other world religions." Number three: "God just wants all of us to be happy and to feel good about ourselves.” Number four: “God doesn’t really need to be involved in our lives unless we really have a big problem.” And finally, number five: “Good people go to heaven when they die.”

Most of those statements are only half-true, and some of them are untrue, but these are what Christian teenagers said that their faith believed. But you’ll notice that none of them mentioned God becoming human as being important, and so they miss the point. The central claim of Christian faith is that, without ceasing to be God, God came to the earth and became human to reach into all the places our world in order to make us whole. God came to earth and became human to bring justice to all of those who have wronged. God came to earth as an act of judgment against anything that would stand against his making the world right. Jesus making himself human remakes our world.

II.

Christmas morning is one of those times when we can count on seeing lots of visitors as well as lots of people who don't attend Sunday services at St. Martin's regularly. Similarly, there are a few people here who are here pretty much every Sunday. But no matter which category you might fit into, I imagine that you probably are asking yourself, "Isn't this Christmas? Where is the Christmas story? If this is Christmas shouldn't we have Linus standing up in the middle of the stage telling about angels and the shepherds and the baby Jesus?”

But instead, this morning, we read John’s account of the Christmas story. In the beginning, Jesus existed; he was with the God, and he was God. Nothing that is outside of God has come to be without Jesus - alongside his Father, Jesus is directly responsible for the creation of the universe. And then, in the very last verse of the reading, comes the stunner: the word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only Son, full of grace and truth. This is the Christmas story - Jesus Christ became human, and we have seen his glory.

But that glory is not like any other glory that we have ever seen. When we use the word glory we think about military units parading down the street, or about Michael Jordan dunking over his much taller opponents, or about musicians who can get football stadiums full of people to chant their names. But Jesus does not come to Earth as a conquering hero. Jesus, the Word, the one through whom all things were created, comes to Earth as a tiny, crying, vulnerable baby, born to two refugees far from home, laid a camel's feeding trough. God's glory looks like Jesus setting aside everything the power to create the universe, the intimate relationship with his Father, to come to Earth to be born from a virgin mother as a baby, a tiny, vulnerable, crying baby.

In this week's New York Times Sunday Review, columnist Nicholas Kristof asks New York City pastor Tim Keller about his own doubts in the virgin birth and the resurrection. Keller points Kristof to this very passage in John, "this taught that the power behind the whole universe was not just an impersonal cosmic principle but a real person who could be known and loved. That scandalized Greek and Roman philosophers but was revolutionary in the history of human thought. It led to a new emphasis on the importance of the individual person and on love as the supreme virtue, because Jesus was not just a great human being, but the pre-existing Creator God, miraculously come to earth as a human being." (NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/opinion/sunday/pastor-am-i-a-christian.html)

This taught that the power behind the whole universe was not just an impersonal cosmic principle but a real person who could be known and loved. And not just a real person, but a baby, snoozing against his mother's chest. And not just a baby, but a man. And not just a man, but a friend of the depressed. Not just a friend of the depressed but a fierce advocate for the poor and for every person who suffers. Not just an advocate for the poor but a friendless, abandoned criminal, executed for a crime he did not commit to conquer death, to conquer illness, to set us free from the places we get ourselves stuck in that we cannot get out of.

Jesus came to earth as a human being and saved the world.

III.

And because Jesus came to earth as a human being and saved the world, we can trust him with our own lives, not because he just wants us to be happy, but because he promised to be with us and to help us become like him.

In that hospital room in Shakopee, when I said to my patient that I didn't believe in a distant, faraway God who sits on his clouds and zaps people who arbitrarily blesses some while damning others, far removed from the pain and the chaos in our world. That is a god that we are good and right to deny. Because Jesus didn't come into our world with some buffer against the pain and the chaos: he entered into it. Just in what's written in the gospels, Jesus' friends die and he grieves, he gets angry about people taking advantage of the poor. He came as a baby, and he was just as apt to get hurt or sick as our babies, and as he grew up, he was just as apt to be stressed out and tired out and angry about how messed up the world is as we are.

But Jesus' mission wasn't limited to his own life. He rose again, and Jesus is alive, and he is just as willing to enter into our pain and chaos today as he was all those years ago. Lots of people think that they have to get their lives put together and cleaned up before they can come to trust in Jesus and follow him. But Jesus didn't enter into a world that was put together and cleaned up at Christmas. He entered into a world that was a total mess. And just like that, Jesus enters our lives not when they are put together and cleaned up, but when they are a total mess.

If we're being honest, I imagine that all of us, your preacher included, have areas of our lives that are a mess, things that we hope that Jesus will overlook or that we can hide before Jesus finds out about them. We all do things that are opposed to the saving work of Jesus, that hurt ourselves or other people, and we hope that they will somehow go away. Jesus doesn't just sit up on a cloud somewhere waiting for us to get our stuff together. If we look for him, what we find out is that in the most out-of-control part of our lives, in the part of our lives that we can't get put together for anything, Jesus is already there, in the midst of our chaos, in the midst of our pain. Jesus goes to the chaos to bring it into order, Jesus goes to the pain to bring healing, Jesus goes to those whose lives are most out-of-control and says that he loves them.

This is what the glory of God looks like. "[We see] the glory of the only-begotten of His Father, full of grace and truth. But [we see] only indirectly. What [We see] directly is only the little child in His humanity; [We see] the Father only in the light that falls upon the Son, and the Son only in this light from the Father. This is the way, in fact, that the Church believes in and recognizes God in Christ." (Barth, CD, I/2, 125). There is no other God other than this God, who has freely entered our world to come into our pain and our chaos and to as close to us as a nursing mother to her baby. There is no God other than this God who comes to the world as a human.

What pain do you bring with you to church this morning? Maybe it's your dysfunctional family, maybe it's aging parents, maybe it's the cancer that everybody you know seems to be catching. What chaos do you bring with you to church this morning? Maybe your life is out of control and you're drinking too much. Maybe you're going to those places on the internet where you know you should not go. Maybe you've just been dragged down by life. Jesus came to Earth on Christmas day to meet you right in the middle of the pain and the chaos, and he is faithful to keep his promise.

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