Sermons

When God Took on Our Human Frailty 

Christ Jesus, break into our hearts today as you have broken into the world as a child born in a manger. Amen. 

Merry Christmas! 

Today, we celebrate the first Sunday of the Christmas season. This is a year when the 12th day of Christmas will fall on a Sunday, so we will also get to finish the season together next week, and we’ll be hearing from our rector Michele. But this evening, I have the privilege of reflecting with you on the doctrine of incarnation. 

And so I want to start, as all good Christmas sermons do, talking about some internet slang. Before I left for seminary, I worked in an office where most of the staff worked in a headquarters, and the remainder worked from home. This seems like it will be more the norm moving forward, but I’m talking about it before the pandemic. We used a web-based platform called Slack to coordinate across these several locations. And probably some of you know Slack and can conjure up the sound of the iconic push notification. But sometimes, a meeting or conversation would take place in person, which those who were only connected to the office online wouldn’t have participated in. And someone would clue them in by saying, “We talked about that in meatspace.” Now that’s meat, M-E-A-T-space. Like the meat you might buy at the supermarket. Meatspace is how we half-jokingly referred to the real-life location of our physical, awkward, limited bodies. It’s the opposite of cyberspace, where you might be completely disembodied. Meatspace. Here. Now. In the flesh! I have wanted to preach a sermon about the incarnation and meatspace for years. Because what does in-carn-ate, en-flesh-ment, mean if not that? Through the incarnation, God takes on our meat-ness, our flesh-ness, our limitedness, and dwells among us. 

For me, the incarnation is the most stunning of Christian doctrines. The whole Christian story can be summed up in God’s desire and love for us. The former Archbishop of Canterbury and renowned Anglican theologian Rowan Williams says it like this, “The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ’s body tells us that God desires us as if we were God as if we were that unconditional response to God’s giving that God’s self makes in the life of the Trinity.” 

In creation, God invites us to be his creatures. But we fail to live up to God’s promise. In the covenant of Israel to be God’s people, we again see God yearning for communion with his creation. But we failed to live into his law and his way. We say it this way in the Eucharistic prayer that we are about to hear, “But we failed to honor your image in one another and in ourselves; we would not see your goodness in the world around us; and so we violated your creation, abused one another, and rejected your love. Yet you never ceased to care for us and prepared the way of salvation for all people.” God seeks us and desires to be with us so that we can live into the fullness of creation and be who we were meant to be. 

And so, seeing our brokenness and misguidedness, God takes on flesh and joins us here in the world, here on the concrete planet, in meatspace. I am lucky enough to have traveled to Israel and Palestine before the elevation of violence we’ve seen in the last 15 months. My biggest takeaway from that trip was about the incarnation. There is something about walking the same paths that Jesus walked in the old city of Jerusalem, sitting among the thousand-year-old olive trees on the Mount of Olives, and watching the water lap up on the bank of the Sea of Galilee that made me appreciate the physicality of Jesus in a new way. God took on the form of a human being, a body that walked, ate, bathed, laughed, cried, and was killed. 

To have a body is to be vulnerable. Most of the ways we discriminate against each other are based on the kind of body we inhabit and where it is located in the physical world. We come up with complex systems to decide whose body is worthy of value. We design a world that is only accessible to some. We assess the refugee’s skin color before taking them in. And in Jesus’ time, it was no different. Are you a leper? Do you have sight? Do you have a withered hand? Are you a eunuch? Are you enslaved? To have a body is to be vulnerable. God takes on that vulnerability in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. And through taking on our humanity, God reaffirms what he told us in creation: our bodies are good. And, even though I admit I cannot conceive of all the details, we believe that our bodies are so important that they will continue to be a part of our experience after the resurrection. It’s the awareness of the goodness of creation and our bodies that makes suffering, war, and death so heinous. 

Unlike Platonic dualism, which taught that bodies are the less necessary half of the mind/body union, Christians affirm that bodies are good and necessary. Our corporal bodies gather each week around the altar of God and sing with the angels “holy, holy, holy.” Our physical bodies hear the word and carry it out into the world. And during the COVID lockdown we learned the value of taking communion in meatspace, of hearing your neighbor’s voice raised in song, of feeling a congregation say “AMEN” in a single voice.

This week between Christmas and New Year’s is the closest thing we have to a collective break. Many of us are off work, spending time with families and friends, taking a much-needed rest period, tending to our physical bodies. I spent the last several days with my brother, sister-in-law, and 2-year-old niece. Even though their trip was delayed by two days and complicated by Airbnb mishaps and a trip to the doctor’s office, as we gathered around a table to share a meal, I was overcome by how much it meant for our physical bodies to share space together. And although my parents were absent from that table, having died 2 and 5 years ago, their presence around that table was very real. We experience the same when we gather around this table every week, with those present in physical space and those who join us in the great cloud of witnesses. 

My prayer for us this week is that we, ourselves, are able to be embodied, to remember that bodies are good and that God became human just to be with us.

Amen.