Sermon: "Incarnation - Affirming the Human"

A great mystery, was the title of the choir's anthem. The mystery is "incarnation" - the unverifiable teaching of the Christian community that in this child Jesus,
God becomes flesh - human.

As with all sacred myths - in the Bible and elsewhere - the story is told in such a way that we are alerted: God is active here.
Hence the angel, the star, and the virgin birth. The prophecies are fulfilled.
All serve as traffic signs cautioning the reader: slow down, pay attention, here God is at work.

As children of Enlightenment & its scientific ways, we find this language disturbing.
We're better at facts than we are at truth;
we prefer news reports to poetry;
we have the scientific mind that says:
prove it, or I can't believe it - forgetting that if you can prove it, there's nothing really to believe.
Those who haven't experienced angels, discount the truth they stand for;
and since we're all well-versed in astronomy, we know stars don't stop over any particular house. And Virgin births - that's another thing altogether.

So if we let our secular selves go, the story becomes hollow, one-dimensional, flat. Easy to dismiss.
You could regard the story and the Bible as just the whistful musings of primitive people.

With that sense of intellectual confidence and superiority, God is easily rejected as just another figment of fertile imagination. Who needs God, especially when things are going well for me?

But the more thoughtful sense that this presumed Enlightenment actually begets obscurity.
Something large is lost when reason becomes God.
If the living God is dead, humanity's heart begins to die.
And there is no little evidence revealing just that.
When we no longer hear the Holy One calling us into community, humans devolve into self-concerned individualists, competitors and adversaries trying to secure me and us from them.

In the days of Christ's life, the Roman empire and its elites subjugated the world at the expense of common humanity. It was a relatively peaceful time, the Pax Romana. If there had been trains, they would have run on time. But peace was enforced by the sword and spear - used whenever there was even a hint of challenge.

In our day it is more complex, but the situation is still the same:
people with power still abuse, injure, kill people without power, the earth itself is a victim of this unjust drama with human gouging out as much as they can from a groaning earth..
It is tempting to think that pursuing Al-Qaida and bombing Afghanistan is really a "war to destroy evil."
It would be satisfying to think that once bin-Laden and Saddam and Taliban's leaders are killed or captured, then the soldiers can retire and the weapons can be de-commissioned. Wishful thinking.

We all know that the seeds of the next battle are rooted in the fractured earth of the previous battle; the next killing comes from the blood of the previous; the eye and the tooth of the last victim, demand the tooth and the eye of the next. With God absent, the spiral of vengeance, hatred, fear, and violence deepens and broadens.

It is the conviction of Christian faith that God can't stand it. God rages over human evil. And into this perpetually spiraling scene, God comes not to convict and destroy, but to bless the human and to affirm the earth - matter.
This is incarnation, embodiment, enfleshment, God become flesh - human - Emmanuel - in the life of Jesus. Embodied love comes to save the earth and its peoples.

I find this teaching of the Christian faith pretty incredible. There is not much to convince you hear. There is no proof. But I believe it.
I haven't been to Bethlehem, but I have been to Afghanistan. And I can't think of any country that is more like the Israel of Jesus' day, than today's Afghanistan. What an absolutely ridiculous place for incarnation!

We were there 28 years ago. Even then before the Russian rape of the land and the current devastation by American bombers, it was a poverty-stricken land - more sand and rock than soil; a first century tonga - two wheeled horse-drawn taxi - or a boy on a donkey, a camel hauling a load of straw, side by side with anachronistic 20th century vehicles and airports; workers sitting in the town square as in Jesus' day waiting for someone to come and hire them for the day; in villages no electricity just mud houses to keep out the cold and the wind.

Health was all relative. The survivors are a hardy lot. But the young teen pumping gas in Kabul had lost his nose to leprosy - one of leprosy's many victims. Masoom the houseman for the people we visited had a family where only five of the ten infants born survived and the odds are even less in rural areas. And now of course we have countless landmines and cluster bomblets waiting to blow off even more people's limbs. A people who know suffering, but endure.

Afghans eke out a living in the harsh dry climate by begging "bahkshish" - mothers in burqas begging to help their children survive; young lads braving a swift kick to beg for their families. Men offering to guard valuable property in return for an Afghani note or two. People in the market of this Bethlehem-like village selling their produce and their crafts. We bought this galeem rug for a pittance. Lapus lazuli - a deep blue stone - fetches a larger price among travellers.

These people know how to create out of virtually nothing - our hosts had car trouble in Mazar-e-sharif and a local mechanic fixed the Landrover by shaping raw metal into an effective engine part. In areas where water was accessible, intricate irrigation canals had for centuries allowed food to be grown.

I believe that God couldn't stand it then in Bethlehem's region and can't now in Afghanistan and wherever human suffering gives birth to cries for relief. And in pain and frustration, in pained compassion, God decided to be there in the midst of all the woe.

In the misery and the abuse, the oppression and the poverty, the suffering and the ingenuity - God comes, incredibly.
That's what incarnation - embodiment - enfleshment is about. God immersed in the human condition - born in a stable to softened hardened hearts, to heal the world.
God immersed in life to stop the hurting and the hating, the suffering and the indignity. God identifying with our humanness to renew creation.

Can you believe that? Even if you can't, could you identify with the story, with the vision, with the ideal? It's a lot better vision than a many of the others seducing us. Even if you can't believe that in Christ God became human, the vision is worth pursuing.
It's worth transforming our lives to make the suffering end, to make peace rather than war, to nurture justice rather than revenge, to foster sharing rather than greed.

But if you can believe that God was in Christ becoming human in order to reconcile humanity to God - then the story becomes a powerhouse. It allows us to celebrate our full humanity - to revel in body AND spirit; to rejoice in mind and matter; to prize soul and flesh.

The Christian teaching on Incarnation flows from the Christmas story and it frees us to utterly affirm our humanity and to appreciate earthiness.
It invites us to share with Christ in being really, fully human - body, soul, mind, heart, spirit - our whole selves dedicated to the joy of being human like Christ -
sharing with Christ in God's great mission to save the earth and to redeem humanity.
By identifying with Christ we don't just pray in front of the manger. We commit ourselves to Christ's struggle to restore God's reign of peace.
We put ourselves on the line for the fullness of life. We use our resources for healing and wholeness.

At Christmas I always find it a challenge to make concrete the reality of Christ.
So this year, I'm inviting you to add to your outpouring of love, Afghanistan's poverty. Today let Afghanistan be the birthplace of Christ. Include the land in your prayers. Add the country to your list of gift recipients.

You can use the envelope marked "Afghan Relief" for that purpose. Speak up or write to those in authority for relief and reconstruction in that tortured land.

God knows how much is needed there. God knows how much we have to share. God knows Afghanistan is exactly the kind of place where Divine Love must be incarnated.
Let our self-giving be like God's self-giving in the birth of Jesus.

Incarnation is a mystery. It is a mystery of faith to know that God dwells among us. It is a mystery to experience God's dwelling among us - when self-centred people become self-giving people; when swords turn into ploughshares and spears into pruning hoods.

It is a mystery when the birth of a Jewish child in the rudest of circumstances, transforms our Vancouver, Canadian hearts to love God and seek a new world.

May it be so. AMEN