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“God’s Body Language”
Christmas 2
January 4, 2009John 1:1-18
In the Name of Jesus. Amen.And the Word became flesh and lived among us...full of grace and truth.” That is the sum total of John’s nativity scene. After several thousands of years of mighty acts and mighty words, many of them recorded in the Old Testament, “the Word became flesh” – that is, God decided to use body language. The divine Word which brought universes and subatomic particles all into being; the divine Word which created beauty and order out of chaotic nothing; this powerful, all-knowing and eternal Word was translated into a human being. God’s entire self, God’s eternal spirit, God’s sacred life force was enfleshed into one human life on earth, and nothing has been the same since. Not because everyone listened the first time, because everyone did not. Nothing has been the same because the eternal Word of God took human form. God’s message of unconditional love – grace – was no longer an intangible concept. It now had a face, a voice, and a pair of hands; and instead of a name spelled YHWH (unpronounceable), God now had a very common, pronounceable name – Yeshua, or Jesus. This is the miracle of the Word made flesh: that God decided to deliver the message in person, by becoming one of us. John’s hymn to the Word in the first chapter of his gospel is hard to hear. Most people who try to read it out loud get a little tongue-tied, partly because it is poetry, but chiefly because it is mystery. If you were asked by someone, “Describe to me this ‘incarnation’ thing,” how would you answer? That is the task John faced when he sat down to write his good news about God. How do any of us find words to adequately describe the Word who is beyond all words? From the beginning, human beings have found it almost impossible to speak about God. The closer you get to the mysterious realities of God, the less you can concisely say about God. Even John has trouble. Light, he says. Glory. Grace. Truth. “In the beginning was the Word,” John says, but even that is hard for us to hear because we think of a word as a unit of human speech, something said or written down, and we live in a world that is flooded with words, even words that don’t mean what they say. Here is where this Word made flesh is different. In Him, “the Word” is not a unit of speech. It is a way of life, a certain way of being that speaks louder than words. This Word doesn’t deliver medical lectures to sick people; this Word heals them. This Word doesn’t hand out neatly printed recipes to hungry people; this Word feeds them. This Word doesn’t leave inspirational tracts lying on the bedside tables of those who are dying; this Word raises them from the dead. To attend a typical Sunday morning worship service just about anywhere in the United States is to experience something odd. The invocation, praises, hymns, confessions, sacred biblical texts, blessings all indicate that this event we call “worship” celebrates a sacred presence. But many of our modern worship practices trivialize the sacred presence of Christ: comfortable sanctuaries (complete with carpeting and padded pews); casual, chatty liturgy and sermons -- humorous, pleasant, and at times even cute. This mood and atmosphere is a sign not of a sacred reality but of our own personal preferences, our own comfort levels – which is fine, as long as we’re truthful about it. If the saints and angels gathered around God’s throne assumed this Sunday morning mood, they would be addressing God not as “Holy, holy, holy,” but as “Comfy, comfy, comfy.” What’s lacking is a sense of the powerful mystery, the utter holiness of God which silences chattiness, which brings us off our personal preferences, to our knees in awe and trembling. It’s disconcerting to think how much of our worship is focused on ourselves – how I feel, what I like, whether what Scripture says or the pastor preaches agrees with what I already think. When that is the case, the concern of this hour in church is something other than God, something other than worship. The focus becomes ourselves, and having our own personal needs and desires met. However, our presence, our feelings, our preferences and wants are not the source, nor object, of worship. The sacred, mysterious presence of the one, holy God, embodied in Jesus, is both the source and the object of worship. When someone says the word “worship” we tend to think of liturgies and hymns and prayers. But those things are merely a means to an end. Worship does not mean making our way through a liturgy. Worship means “adoration.” Think of it in much the same way we do when we say about a man in love, “He worships the ground she walks on.” That description conjures up the picture of a man on his knees, looking imploringly at his beloved, willing to do just about anything to put “flesh” on his declaration of love. That’s a pretty fair picture of worship, or adoration, of our reverent response to the presence of God among us. How would it change our worship experience if, on Sunday mornings, rather than saying, “I’m going to church,” we each said, “I’m going to gather with other believers, to kneel in the presence of the living Lord God, to worship and adore God.” One of the holiest moments of the worship service is – anyone want to guess? The announcements. Yes! If the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us is no more than a beautiful, poetic thought we read in the Bible, and has nothing concretely to do with you or me or this congregation, then that’s all Christianity is – a beautiful, poetic way of thinking. The announcements is precisely where the rubber of our worship hits the road:
The conviction that God refused to float in sublime isolation above time and space, but became flesh and blood, sweat and earth in Jesus Christ, is the doctrine of the incarnation. What it means, among other things, is that we do not escape the world of flesh and unpleasantness and discomfort and sacrifice to encounter the living God. Indeed, the announcements in worship become symbolic of the Christian truth that it is in the “fleshy” details of life, the working and the serving, the community projects and the committee meetings, the being born, the marrying, and the dying, that we encounter the God become flesh, Jesus Christ. The incarnation of God in Jesus Christ announces that holiness isn’t found “out there” in some kind of spiritual outer space, but in you, in us, and in our working and serving together – God’s work, our hands. John insists that God is experienced not only in spirit, but in flesh. However profound our inward, private experience of God in prayer or meditation, eventually God leads us out to the world, where we are called to meet Christ and serve with Christ – to serve as Christ – in human community – “the Word becoming flesh and living among us.” There is no corner of human experience, our experience, so hidden that God’s grace cannot find it. There is no moment so dark that it can extinguish the light of Christ which even now shines in it. Christians do not bubble around celebrating life. They celebrate God who, literally using body language, enters the life of the world in order to redeem it. What does this mean for all of us old sinners, who are so often so afraid of praying in public because we may not use the “right words,” who are so often so afraid to speak to another about our faith, because we may not be able to quote the words of Scripture flawlessly, who find it so much easier to use the sacred name of God, of Jesus, as an expletive than as the object of awe and reverence? It means this: because in Jesus Christ the Word became flesh, it is not only the words, the units of speech that come out of my mouth, that God listens to; but the entire grammar of my life, my incarnate word – my kindness and cruelties, my hits and misses, my sarcasm and prejudice, and my encouragement and compassion, my truths and my lies. They are all there in God’s plain sight, as visible as the headlines of a newspaper. It means: because God chose to use body language, because in Jesus Christ the sacred Word became human flesh, God’s truth and grace are at work in every place, and every moment, whether we sense them or not. If we wonder where those places might be where God is so hard at work, two good places to begin looking are by reading the headlines of the daily newspaper, and by listening in worship to the announcements. Amen. Rev. Joan Gunderman, Senior Pastor
Lutheran Church of the Cross, Nisswa, Minnesota |
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