The First and Second Incarnations

Grace, peace, and mercy to you from God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus the Christ, and from the Holy Spirit who unites us in faith. Amen.

If you are playing trivia and you hear the question, “How many of the four Christian gospels include the story of Jesus’ birth?” the only answer you will receive credit for is two: Matthew and Luke. However, that answer is not entirely true. John’s gospel also includes an account of the birth of Christ. In what is referred to as the Prologue of John, we hear:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

The Prologue of John is the story of the birth of the Christ – the second person of the Trinity – otherwise known as the Word. The Christ is the divine person who has always been in relationship to God the Father. The Christ is the animating presence of the Creator God. The Christ has always been; but when God created the universe, the Christ became incarnate in creation. The Christ is the Big Bang and Genesis’ creation poem – the beginning of the creation of the billions-year-old universe. This is the first incarnation.

Incarnation literally means “enfleshment,” or the “meat-ing” of God. As long as there has been a physical universe, God has been present in it through the Christ. Every tree, drop of water, dinosaur, blade of grass, oxygen molecule, insect, every cell, and every single person who has ever lived exists and is sustained through the Christ force. Everything and everyone is holy because everything and everyone is an incarnation of God the Christ. This truth is one of the great gifts passed down to us from our Hebrew faith ancestors.

So, what then of Jesus? What makes this one person in human history so significant?

Let me ask a question, have you ever known something but forgotten it? Or not just forgotten it, but forgotten that you ever once knew it? Please tell me this happens to someone besides me. Every day I wander into a room and just stand there for a minute or two trying to figure out the reason why I entered. Similarly, my bookcases are filled with books that I have actually read, but if you picked one randomly and asked me to explain it, I am certain I would not be able to do so. My wife or my parents will start telling a story about something that happened and claim that I was there, but I rarely recall the story exactly the way they tell it. Sometimes I can not remember being part of the story at all. This happens to you too, right?

This phenomenon, on a global scale, is what necessitated the second incarnation – the enfleshment of the Christ in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was born to help the first incarnation (i.e., all of creation, including us) remember the truth of our existence – that we, too are vessels of the divine, lovers of truth, and harbingers of grace and love.

Today a rapidly increasing population around the world would agree with the sentiment, “I love Jesus, but I hate the church.” Jesus, it seems, is just as popular, relevant, and attractive as ever. This is because as much as the church has mucked things up through every abysmal and immoral behavior imaginable, the church can never completely extinguish the truth that Jesus revealed.

Jesus was born to remind all people of our divine connection with God, one another, and all of creation. That is a message people want to hear because it confirms what God has put into their hearts and minds from the very beginning. People love Jesus because Jesus reminds us that our lives are good, meaningful, full of potential, and abounding in grace. In Jesus all of creation is reunited with a God it longed for but had grown distant from.

Nothing I can say this evening can fully express what it feels like to be reintroduced and reunited with the God who created you and loves you forever. I do, however, have something to show you that will depict just what God was up to with the second incarnation of the Christ. This is a video of a 53 year-old man with Down syndrome being reunited with his 88 year-old father after spending one week apart from one another.

This is just a glimpse of how much God loves you. This video resonates with people because it speaks to our Christ-likeness. The incarnate God in us witnesses moments of beauty in the world and fills our hearts with love. This interaction between a father and son reminds us of why we celebrate Jesus’ birth, why we are restless when we are distant from God, and why we must go out into the world and live realizing that that kind of love is the gift we absolutely must share with God and with all of God’s creation.

May your Christmas be one of reunification with the source and sustainer of all life, truth, love, justice, and hope. Amen; and Merry Christmas.

The Gift of a Dark Christmas

Luke 2:1-16 (NRSV)

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger.

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Six months from now I will be in Norway with my family. Each day will be filled with over 19 hours of direct sunlight, with over 3 hours of twilight each day. That will leave approximately 1 hour of darkness. The summer solstice in the nordic countries is a big celebration, typically referred to as Midsummer. In Sweden, friends and family gather on Midsummer to sing and dance around the maypole and drink a potent spirit called aquavit, while young women place seven wildflowers under their pillows at night in hopes that they will dream of their future husband. In Norway, huge bonfires are built and burnt in the twilight hours under the auspices of warding off evil witches.

Many of the countries where Midsummer is celebrated have roots in the Celts. The Celts were people from around 1,000BC to 1,000AD that extended from Ireland all the way into Turkey with a shared language, culture, and religion. The Celts were heavily influenced by nature, with their festivals drawing inspiration from and celebrating the natural world. As an agrarian economy and culture, they profoundly understood their dependance on the land, the sun, and the seasons. As you can imagine, having entire days filled with light would have been taken as a tremendous blessing worth celebrating and being thankful for.

In much the same way, the Celts had a unique way of understanding the days of December and January, filled as they were with upwards of 20 hours of darkness each day. For the Celts, the dark days of winter were also a gift. Those days were a time of slowing down and resting, much like the crops and animals for which they cared.

Often an oak tree (the most sacred symbol of the Celts) would be located in the center of each village. The tree, barren through the winter, would be decorated with produce leftover from the previous summer, namely oranges and apples strung from the branches of the oak. These decorations were hung as an offering to the sun, imploring it to shine once more. (Their limited astronomical knowledge meant they never knew with certainty that the hours of daylight would increase again).

Their major winter celebration, the winter solstice, was observed on December 24, which is three days after the actual date of the solstice. They waited three days because the third day after the winter solstice is the first time the sun can be observed to shine for longer than the day before. Three days after the solstice was the first time they knew for a fact that another summer was on its way.

As Christianity spread north from Asia and Africa, missionaries encountered the mythology of the Celts and noticed the profound truth and beauty of their culture. The Celts, primarily influenced by the sun, moon, stars and earth, had identified the truths that:

• light is a blessing,

• darkness is instructive and necessary,

• hope can exist in darkness,

• and sometimes you have to wait three days after the darkest night in order to see the rays of sunlight stretch out further across the earth.

Rather than destroying and replacing the culture of the Celts, the Christ-followers added to their story to it. When they saw the sacred tree in the center of the village they told the stories of the tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden as well as the Tree of Life from the book of Revelation. When they learned of the winter solstice feast that came three days after the darkest night, they told the story of the Easter feast that came three days after Jesus was crucified. They were so inspired by this connection to the winter solstice that the Christian church moved its Christmas celebration to December 25.

The Celts and the Christians shared their stories and each were left profoundly impacted by them. However, today much of the influence of the Celts has been lost. We no longer have a deep connection to the land. We take the movement of the sun and planets for granted. Trees are removed from the center of our towns (and everywhere else, for that matter) in order to make room for new buildings of wood, concrete, and steel. Even the Christmas tree has gone from a symbol of thankfulness, with its decorations of last year’s harvest, to a symbol of consumerism, with the presents under the tree. And now our lives can be filled with artificial light 24/7/365. We have lost the intrinsic balance of light and dark both in our world and in our hearts.

Christmas done well and Christmas done right is a celebration of darkness. Yes, it is a celebration of light in the darkness; but it cannot only be that. Christmas cannot only be strings of lights and a future hope of God’s promised presence. Christmas is the celebration that God comes to us in the midst of the darkness, in the midst of our rest, in the midst of our despair and anxiety that maybe the darkness will overtake us. All this happens right now.

My friends, the darkness can be scary. I don’t think negatively of anyone who acknowledges that they are scared of the dark, whether literally or figuratively. But let’s not be so quick to fill the darkness with artificial light, for by doing so we can blind ourselves to the true source of light in our lives – the loving presence of God that is always present, even in the darkness.

The Christmas story, particularly as it is influenced by the mythology of the Celts, reminds us that the darkness is not the playground of monsters and boogeymen; but the darkness is the place where hope and grace are born.

As theologian and author Alexander Shaia reminds us,

“We know that every time we go into the deepest dark that the grace of the fresh radiance will come forth in us through our courage to walk into the dark. The deepest dark is not the place where grace goes to die but the deepest dark is the place where grace goes to be reborn.” *

There is a good chance that many of us here tonight are dedicating a lot of time and energy to avoiding the darkness within us. We know something is there, just under the surface, but we’re afraid to wade too deep into those dark waters, less we end up trapped there forever. Perhaps it is grief over a loss, disappointment with someone or something in your life, feelings of failure or inadequacy, or emotional or physical trauma that never quite healed. Despite the origin and nature of your darkness, it will ever and always be the place where God can come and be the light.

Fear not, I bring you good news of great joy, for to you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. Go with courage into the dark and there, in the darkness, expect to encounter the light of God, born anew – a light no darkness can overcome.

Amen.

** “Alexander Shaia on the Mythic Power of Christmas” The Robcast, Dec. 10, 2017.