Be Born in Us Today
August 30, 2009
August 30, 2009
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
August 30, 2009
Texts: Micah 5:2-5a; Luke 2:1-20
Today we are celebrating the Feast of the Incarnation, generally known as Christmas, and usually celebrated in late December. [Don't worry – we'll celebrate it again in December...!] Why are we celebrating it today? There are a few reasons: first, there is a consensus among Biblical scholars that the birth of Jesus, if it happened as described in Luke's Gospel, could not have happened after September. Sheep are only tended outdoors when the weather permits it, and by October 1, it is getting pretty chilly. By October 15 at the VERY latest, shepherds would not be in the fields, and more likely they would be gone to shelter by the end of September. We've tied Christmas to snow and cold, but those are actually clearly not a part of Christmas. So today is a more reasonable day to celebrate Christmas than anytime in December.
Second, I've long thought that a long of the interesting theology around Christmas gets lost at Christmas – we have so much extra going on: our family celebrations, traditional decorations, extra events in school and community...and all of these are wonderful, but they typically don't have much to do with the actual event being described in the Bible story. We celebrate family, we celebrate light at the darkest time of the year, we celebrate the warmth of togetherness during the cold of winter, we celebrate with shopping, with pageants, with wonderful music, and family get-togethers, we celebrate with thoughtful and creative gift-giving, and I enjoy all of this as much as anyone, truly I do, but I think we miss a lot of what is classically known as the Feast of the Incarnation at Christmas. As I've said before, it's ironic that we celebrate God bursting into human history in a new and astonishing way by our doing the same thing year after year after year.
Third, earlier this summer I traveled to Israel, and visited Bethlehem on the West Bank, and found it to be a very moving experience and ever since then I've been wanting to share some of that with you – although there isn't too much of it in today's sermon.
But how can we really celebrate Christmas at the end of August, and who would want to? It just doesn't feel right, even though coincidentally the tbs channel had Christmas movies on yesterday afternoon, which I only noticed after the sermon was finished. It's actually kind of helpful, I think, to realize how much of our religious experience is dependent upon our mood, or the setting. For example, there were a couple of people during the last week who told me I wouldn't see them this morning – they aren't fans of Church in the Park. Many of us love it, and for this congregation, it has become an important recurrent celebration which has included Alex Reynolds' baptism, the wedding of Doug Henderson and Susan Gingrasso, and our annual remembrance of Orland and Marge Radke's anniversary. For some of us, it sets a good mood for worship, and for others, it breaks the mood.
I remember when I was in my student ministry, and as part of that internship, I preached once a month. Each month as I prepared my sermon, I would go to my study, reflect on the scripture readings, get into a good spiritual mood, and write. Our kids were pretty young then – they were 5, 8 and 11, and as boys of those ages will do, they often got into arguments of one sort or another. I'd be in my quiet place, in the spiritual zone, and suddenly the door would burst open: “Mom! He just--” and I'd hear a tale of woe and injustice. So I would leave the study, go mete out justice, return to the study, find that my spiritual mood was gone, and I'd go yell at the boys again, now for my own grievance.
Well, fortunately, that was a real learning experience for me – I quickly learned that my preaching can't flow out of a mood...it needs to have more integrity and depth than my moods. So I learned to reflect, study and write in a variety of circumstances – in our last home, my study was in the dining room. Because the boys have been involved in all sorts of things, I've also learned to write in all sorts of places – on a band bus surrounded by percussionists and their practice pads, in the bleachers during a baseball tournament, or yesterday, at the kitchen table with Corey's music playing. My faith, and my thinking about faith, has to be about more than my mood.
So let's think about Christmas, even though the mood is all wrong. Actually, when we think about it – our white Christmas with snowfall and a fire on the hearth may be the way that northern Europe, the British Isles and lots of North Americans celebrate Christmas, but in the southern hemisphere, it comes in the early days of summer and is a holiday that speaks of new life. Certainly not what we tend to think of as the Christmas mood. But Christmas needs to be about more than our moods if it is one of the central celebrations of our faith. These two celebrations, the feast of the incarnation and the feast of the resurrection, while they are connected to cultural celebrations and holy days of other faiths – are definitive celebrations of Christianity. And yet, so often our celebration of these holidays is an effort to set the mood.
But today, the mood is not here – and therefore, it may be a great time to consider Christmas, and incarnation, and what they give us and ask from us.
Incarnation is the theology that for most Christians is at the heart of our faith – it is a doctrine that says that Jesus Christ came among us, as God in human form, fully God and fully human, God-with-us, as the ancient Hebrew Emmanuel means. Incarnation means, at its most literal, enfleshment – in the flesh, and so the general understanding of incarnation is that it is when we see God, in the flesh, as a human, with the thoughts, feelings and experiences that humans have. This is the miracle that is celebrated at Christmas – and what a miracle! That God would take upon God's very self our limitations, our pain, our flesh, and share life with us – this is, indeed, a miracle worth celebrating.
And for some people, it's a miracle that is too hard to believe – some feel that it's just too impossible. How can anyone ever think that God could be present in human form? And so there are many people who believe that Jesus was simply a human being, a truly wise and good human being, perhaps a human who understood far better than almost all human beings what life is all about, and how to live with God, and as God calls us all to live. Actually, that's pretty worthy of celebration too. Just as Muslims and Jews traditionally view Jesus as a good and wise man, many Christians cannot believe that Jesus was God in the flesh, but believe instead that because of his relationship with God, Jesus shows us what it means to be fully human, and to live as a spiritual person in the world. If this is what you believe, incarnation is still a viable concept, because you see in Jesus an incarnation of God's intentions for human living, and Jesus lives out Emmanuel, God-with-us, in his own mystical experiences of God, experiences that are thus accessible to any of us, especially if he is just a human.
In either view, we see in Jesus what being fully human looks like – and we understand that it is in living as God calls us: as relational, loving, human beings who love God and love each other, that we see the enfleshment of God's dream for humanity.
And so Bethlehem is the place where the life of Jesus is supposed to have begun. We should understand that the four Gospels treat the beginning of the life of Jesus in four ways: Luke's story is the one we read this morning, probably the one that is most familiar to us. It is the one that Linus recited from memory in the classic TV special: A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Matthew tells a story that is as different as it is similar: Matthew does tell the story of a virgin birth, but unlike Luke, Matthew remembers Joseph, and tells the story from his perspective as well. In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus is born in Nazareth, and is visited by the wise men, the magi, and the gospel neither calls them kings, nor says how many there were, nor refers to Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar – those names became part of the story around the eighth century.
In John's Gospel, the origin of Jesus is told metaphorically and poetically, not as a narrative and therefore without the kind of details associated with narrative: 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.
And Mark ignored the birth, starting his account from the beginning of the ministry of Jesus. There is not the consensus around the birth of Jesus that there is about many stories of his life, or his death, or his resurrection; nonetheless, it continues to be an important celebration for many of us, not only because of the cultural details which are all missing today: family in from out of town, Christmas gifts and a turkey dinner; but also because the doctrine of the incarnation has something very important to say to us today, whether you believe that he was born in Bethlehem or Nazareth, whether you believe Jesus was God, or a very good man, a wise teacher or a radical nonviolent activist: incarnation is the doctrine that says Christianity is a faith that occurs in the flesh. It's not merely a body of belief, it's a way of life; it's not enough to talk about it, we need to live it. Both Christianity and the Judaism out of which it grew are religions of practice – where we are called to live a different way of life and are named as co-creators with God in the ongoing work of bringing a just world into being.
So when I hear people talk about Christianity and say it's all about forgiveness and it doesn't matter what you do because God forgives us and we're all, or at least some of us (depending on your understanding) going to heaven, then I know I'm hearing a version of Christianity that has very little to do with Jesus, no matter how you understand him, because if there is one message that comes through in his message it is that what we do matters.
That's part of what we celebrate in Christmas and the doctrine of incarnation – it's what is known also as the 'scandal of particularity' – that our lives matter to God, not abstractly in that humanity is something God cares about, but in particular because each of us matters to God. And what we do matters because the doctrine of the incarnation teaches that as we incarnate God's intentions in the world, the kingdom of God becomes more evident. If the kingdom is where God's will is done, then as we live in harmony with the dreams of God, the dreams of God come true.
And so Bethlehem really matters. Not because it is where Jesus was born – I'm not sure we know where Jesus was born, and I'm not at all convinced that the spot below the Church of the Nativity, where there is a starburst on the floor marking The Very Place is actually where he was born. Bethlehem matters because each and every place matters – and especially if we are going to honor a place and mark it as the place where God came to earth. Bethlehem is on the West Bank, and it is behind a wall that Israel calls the wall of security and Palestine (including Bethlehem) calls the Wall of Separation. Bethlehem matters because it is a place where injustice is living – where the Palestinians are walled in, and walled out of Jerusalem, where Israel is settling for easy answers to its very real security issues, and where Christians and Muslims don't have access to medical care, and can't get to their jobs, and in some cases cannot see their family members, if any of that is on the other side of the wall. In Bethlehem, as everywhere, life is complex and the obvious solutions are likely inadequate.
So when we sing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” let's remember that it's in real life that our faith matters, that it's in our lives that incarnation has to happen if Christmas means anything at all. When we sing “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight” let us remember that that is true tonight, and and every night, and right now in Bethlehem, fear is winning over hope. When we sing that “God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven” let's remember that God's favorite working material is the human heart, and that as we let God change us, the a new world comes into being. As we sing, “Be born in us today” let's sing it as a prayer that God really brings something new into being, both through us and in us, and let us honor God's work by participating with it in the ongoing birth of a new age. Peace on earth, good will to all. Amen.
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
August 30, 2009
Texts: Micah 5:2-5a; Luke 2:1-20
Today we are celebrating the Feast of the Incarnation, generally known as Christmas, and usually celebrated in late December. [Don't worry – we'll celebrate it again in December...!] Why are we celebrating it today? There are a few reasons: first, there is a consensus among Biblical scholars that the birth of Jesus, if it happened as described in Luke's Gospel, could not have happened after September. Sheep are only tended outdoors when the weather permits it, and by October 1, it is getting pretty chilly. By October 15 at the VERY latest, shepherds would not be in the fields, and more likely they would be gone to shelter by the end of September. We've tied Christmas to snow and cold, but those are actually clearly not a part of Christmas. So today is a more reasonable day to celebrate Christmas than anytime in December.
Second, I've long thought that a long of the interesting theology around Christmas gets lost at Christmas – we have so much extra going on: our family celebrations, traditional decorations, extra events in school and community...and all of these are wonderful, but they typically don't have much to do with the actual event being described in the Bible story. We celebrate family, we celebrate light at the darkest time of the year, we celebrate the warmth of togetherness during the cold of winter, we celebrate with shopping, with pageants, with wonderful music, and family get-togethers, we celebrate with thoughtful and creative gift-giving, and I enjoy all of this as much as anyone, truly I do, but I think we miss a lot of what is classically known as the Feast of the Incarnation at Christmas. As I've said before, it's ironic that we celebrate God bursting into human history in a new and astonishing way by our doing the same thing year after year after year.
Third, earlier this summer I traveled to Israel, and visited Bethlehem on the West Bank, and found it to be a very moving experience and ever since then I've been wanting to share some of that with you – although there isn't too much of it in today's sermon.
But how can we really celebrate Christmas at the end of August, and who would want to? It just doesn't feel right, even though coincidentally the tbs channel had Christmas movies on yesterday afternoon, which I only noticed after the sermon was finished. It's actually kind of helpful, I think, to realize how much of our religious experience is dependent upon our mood, or the setting. For example, there were a couple of people during the last week who told me I wouldn't see them this morning – they aren't fans of Church in the Park. Many of us love it, and for this congregation, it has become an important recurrent celebration which has included Alex Reynolds' baptism, the wedding of Doug Henderson and Susan Gingrasso, and our annual remembrance of Orland and Marge Radke's anniversary. For some of us, it sets a good mood for worship, and for others, it breaks the mood.
I remember when I was in my student ministry, and as part of that internship, I preached once a month. Each month as I prepared my sermon, I would go to my study, reflect on the scripture readings, get into a good spiritual mood, and write. Our kids were pretty young then – they were 5, 8 and 11, and as boys of those ages will do, they often got into arguments of one sort or another. I'd be in my quiet place, in the spiritual zone, and suddenly the door would burst open: “Mom! He just--” and I'd hear a tale of woe and injustice. So I would leave the study, go mete out justice, return to the study, find that my spiritual mood was gone, and I'd go yell at the boys again, now for my own grievance.
Well, fortunately, that was a real learning experience for me – I quickly learned that my preaching can't flow out of a mood...it needs to have more integrity and depth than my moods. So I learned to reflect, study and write in a variety of circumstances – in our last home, my study was in the dining room. Because the boys have been involved in all sorts of things, I've also learned to write in all sorts of places – on a band bus surrounded by percussionists and their practice pads, in the bleachers during a baseball tournament, or yesterday, at the kitchen table with Corey's music playing. My faith, and my thinking about faith, has to be about more than my mood.
So let's think about Christmas, even though the mood is all wrong. Actually, when we think about it – our white Christmas with snowfall and a fire on the hearth may be the way that northern Europe, the British Isles and lots of North Americans celebrate Christmas, but in the southern hemisphere, it comes in the early days of summer and is a holiday that speaks of new life. Certainly not what we tend to think of as the Christmas mood. But Christmas needs to be about more than our moods if it is one of the central celebrations of our faith. These two celebrations, the feast of the incarnation and the feast of the resurrection, while they are connected to cultural celebrations and holy days of other faiths – are definitive celebrations of Christianity. And yet, so often our celebration of these holidays is an effort to set the mood.
But today, the mood is not here – and therefore, it may be a great time to consider Christmas, and incarnation, and what they give us and ask from us.
Incarnation is the theology that for most Christians is at the heart of our faith – it is a doctrine that says that Jesus Christ came among us, as God in human form, fully God and fully human, God-with-us, as the ancient Hebrew Emmanuel means. Incarnation means, at its most literal, enfleshment – in the flesh, and so the general understanding of incarnation is that it is when we see God, in the flesh, as a human, with the thoughts, feelings and experiences that humans have. This is the miracle that is celebrated at Christmas – and what a miracle! That God would take upon God's very self our limitations, our pain, our flesh, and share life with us – this is, indeed, a miracle worth celebrating.
And for some people, it's a miracle that is too hard to believe – some feel that it's just too impossible. How can anyone ever think that God could be present in human form? And so there are many people who believe that Jesus was simply a human being, a truly wise and good human being, perhaps a human who understood far better than almost all human beings what life is all about, and how to live with God, and as God calls us all to live. Actually, that's pretty worthy of celebration too. Just as Muslims and Jews traditionally view Jesus as a good and wise man, many Christians cannot believe that Jesus was God in the flesh, but believe instead that because of his relationship with God, Jesus shows us what it means to be fully human, and to live as a spiritual person in the world. If this is what you believe, incarnation is still a viable concept, because you see in Jesus an incarnation of God's intentions for human living, and Jesus lives out Emmanuel, God-with-us, in his own mystical experiences of God, experiences that are thus accessible to any of us, especially if he is just a human.
In either view, we see in Jesus what being fully human looks like – and we understand that it is in living as God calls us: as relational, loving, human beings who love God and love each other, that we see the enfleshment of God's dream for humanity.
And so Bethlehem is the place where the life of Jesus is supposed to have begun. We should understand that the four Gospels treat the beginning of the life of Jesus in four ways: Luke's story is the one we read this morning, probably the one that is most familiar to us. It is the one that Linus recited from memory in the classic TV special: A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Matthew tells a story that is as different as it is similar: Matthew does tell the story of a virgin birth, but unlike Luke, Matthew remembers Joseph, and tells the story from his perspective as well. In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus is born in Nazareth, and is visited by the wise men, the magi, and the gospel neither calls them kings, nor says how many there were, nor refers to Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar – those names became part of the story around the eighth century.
In John's Gospel, the origin of Jesus is told metaphorically and poetically, not as a narrative and therefore without the kind of details associated with narrative: 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.
And Mark ignored the birth, starting his account from the beginning of the ministry of Jesus. There is not the consensus around the birth of Jesus that there is about many stories of his life, or his death, or his resurrection; nonetheless, it continues to be an important celebration for many of us, not only because of the cultural details which are all missing today: family in from out of town, Christmas gifts and a turkey dinner; but also because the doctrine of the incarnation has something very important to say to us today, whether you believe that he was born in Bethlehem or Nazareth, whether you believe Jesus was God, or a very good man, a wise teacher or a radical nonviolent activist: incarnation is the doctrine that says Christianity is a faith that occurs in the flesh. It's not merely a body of belief, it's a way of life; it's not enough to talk about it, we need to live it. Both Christianity and the Judaism out of which it grew are religions of practice – where we are called to live a different way of life and are named as co-creators with God in the ongoing work of bringing a just world into being.
So when I hear people talk about Christianity and say it's all about forgiveness and it doesn't matter what you do because God forgives us and we're all, or at least some of us (depending on your understanding) going to heaven, then I know I'm hearing a version of Christianity that has very little to do with Jesus, no matter how you understand him, because if there is one message that comes through in his message it is that what we do matters.
That's part of what we celebrate in Christmas and the doctrine of incarnation – it's what is known also as the 'scandal of particularity' – that our lives matter to God, not abstractly in that humanity is something God cares about, but in particular because each of us matters to God. And what we do matters because the doctrine of the incarnation teaches that as we incarnate God's intentions in the world, the kingdom of God becomes more evident. If the kingdom is where God's will is done, then as we live in harmony with the dreams of God, the dreams of God come true.
And so Bethlehem really matters. Not because it is where Jesus was born – I'm not sure we know where Jesus was born, and I'm not at all convinced that the spot below the Church of the Nativity, where there is a starburst on the floor marking The Very Place is actually where he was born. Bethlehem matters because each and every place matters – and especially if we are going to honor a place and mark it as the place where God came to earth. Bethlehem is on the West Bank, and it is behind a wall that Israel calls the wall of security and Palestine (including Bethlehem) calls the Wall of Separation. Bethlehem matters because it is a place where injustice is living – where the Palestinians are walled in, and walled out of Jerusalem, where Israel is settling for easy answers to its very real security issues, and where Christians and Muslims don't have access to medical care, and can't get to their jobs, and in some cases cannot see their family members, if any of that is on the other side of the wall. In Bethlehem, as everywhere, life is complex and the obvious solutions are likely inadequate.
So when we sing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” let's remember that it's in real life that our faith matters, that it's in our lives that incarnation has to happen if Christmas means anything at all. When we sing “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight” let us remember that that is true tonight, and and every night, and right now in Bethlehem, fear is winning over hope. When we sing that “God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven” let's remember that God's favorite working material is the human heart, and that as we let God change us, the a new world comes into being. As we sing, “Be born in us today” let's sing it as a prayer that God really brings something new into being, both through us and in us, and let us honor God's work by participating with it in the ongoing birth of a new age. Peace on earth, good will to all. Amen.