Incarnation: Embodied God
Advent, 2022
Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister
Advent. The season of dark, of quiet, of waiting. The story most often told during these weeks in December is that of Mary, a pregnant woman, travelling home with her love, waiting for her baby, anticipating a whole new stage of life as a wife and mother. For millennia, Christians have been living into this story as we inch through the month toward Christmas. It’s part of the Christian paradigm, defining these December weeks, beckoning us deeper into the dark of the season, promising joy and good cheer when Christmas comes, when we celebrate the birth of Jesus, the birth of God into the world.
The entire story- pregnancy, travel, birth, visitors, a baby – the whole thing is so human, so, familiar in its normalcy, so embodied as we all are. Some of us get pregnant, some give birth. We all travel to some extent, all get tired, get sick, experience our bodies injured and aging. In its simplest form, this is a story of bodies.
Mary was pregnant. Nine months. Her feet are swollen, her back is aching. Simple things like getting up from a sitting position were painful and complicated. She and her husband were back in their hometown when she went into labor. Cramps turned to contractions to cries of pain and pushing, blood and tearing, sweat, tears, breathing, squeezing people’s hands while letting out primal screams. It’s hard to imagine a more embodied experience than birth. And then a child. A baby boy. Slimy, crying, getting air into his lungs, cold, bright, eyes closed, screaming. He’s handed to his mother, also crying- a mix of joy and pain and relief.
They were in a manger, meaning they were on the bottom floor of a home where the animals lived. People usually went upstairs to sleep in the lofts, but there was no more room there, so Mary and her betrothed, Joseph, stayed downstairs. When we were in Jordan, we got to see a village more than two thousand years old. The doorways and stone frames and sometimes staircases still stood, letting us stand on the same ground, in the same rooms as people did millennia ago. Our guide casually noted as we visited one of the houses that the alcoves on the ground floor where we stood were the manger, the part of the house where the animals fed and slept. The stairs or ladders led to the second floor, the upper room, where the people stayed. Mary and Joseph would have been downstairs when their baby was born, down in the manger because so many travelers had come to town, there was no more room upstairs.
Advent isn’t the time to talk about Jesus’s birth. I’m ruining the entire spirit of waiting! But every year we talk about anticipation, and then we skip a few weeks focusing on the Jewish and Pagan traditions and land on Christmas when we sing and celebrate, but don’t dig into the theology of the story, so this year I’m exercising a little preacher-privilege to use this Advent sermon to talk about incarnation. What exactly are we waiting for? Why are we on the edge of our seats?
I’ve spoken before about the corners of truth, those particular insights that each religion of the world offers the rest of us. Religion, by definition, is how communities face mystery together, how we live into the big questions of the world. Having done that for centuries, or millennia, those communities have stumbled into wisdom they can offer the rest of us, even if we don’t adhere to all the tenets of the entire faith. Christians offer the world a profound truth related to the nature of humanity, and of what it means to be both human and divine. To demonstrate, or maybe to balance, that for all of us, they tell the story of Jesus’s birth. Stories about gods abound, but stories about children, about tiny, vulnerable babies who are also divine, are a gift offering us an unusual insight.
The image of Jesus as a baby is one of the most profound spiritual images offered by any of the world’s religions. That’s a big statement, so let me explain. Ignoring the infinite ways Jesus has been painted or drawn or sculpted as a child-king, as an infant-idol, with an adult gaze and halo, I’m talking about the actual image of a baby. A real infant. Tiny. No language. Very little sight at first. Sounds are too loud. Crying is the primary mode of communication. Eating, pooping, sleeping. No way to move around. Rolling over from back to front is a big deal. Then crawling. Walking, holding on to a table. A few independent steps. It’s some time before that child can successfully get food into his mouth on his own. This is God.
I’ll say it again because it’s mind-blowing- This is God.
What a profound Truth, what a theological offering, given to us through this Christian story. This is God. The baby. The one whose diapers his grandmother changed, the one who used his tiny hand to grab his grandfather’s finger for balance, the one who is washed and fed and rocked and scolded. This is God.
The idea that Jesus, a human being, was god, was dismissed as part of our original Unitarian founding. I’ve preached on this history before and if you’re interested, I will again, but for now just a quick reminder – There was a debate after Jesus died about whether he was god and because of a variety of political forces, it was decided that the doctrine would include this god-man, fully human and fully divine. Plenty of people believed it and even those that weren’t so sure understood that in a Greco-Roman world with plenty of other god-men in the mythology, this was likely the path of least resistance. The Council of Nicaea declared it doctrine in 325, but the controversy lived on and it was again determined at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Jesus is one being with 2 natures.
As final as church leaders thought they were being, the question remained. Having added the Holy Spirit, the official doctrine was of a Trinitarian God. One God, Three Faces. It was complicated and debated and embraced and dismissed through history, including by our Unitarian forebears in Europe. In the early part of the 19th century, our own Rev. William Ellery Channing formally preached on Unitarian theology, recognizing that Trinitarianism didn’t prioritize reason which would clearly recognize Jesus as human, a truly great human and model for other humans, no more god than anyone else. Letting go of all supernatural implications, Channing and the Unitarians who went after him, removed Jesus from the realm of a deity.
Which makes sense. Totally reasonable. But with that declaration, we lost the brilliance, the genius, the earth-shattering insight that is the core of the Christian offering. Jesus was god. Jesus, that tiny newborn, fragile, vulnerable, dependent baby born to a young woman on the ground floor of an ancient home surrounded by sheep and camels, was god.
I’d like to suggest that we got sidetracked with that original Unitarian declaration and forgot that the theology of Jesus’s divinity didn’t elevate one man as much as it elevated all of us. We got distracted by one story – his story – and forgot that it’s all our stories. We are all born, we are all dependent, we are all human. Christianity became a cult of One instead of a cult of All. While theologians throughout history were trying to capture Jesus, to enlarge him, they forgot that we are all equally human, all equally divine.
Jesus wasn’t the only one. He was one of the people who became awake to the magnificence of what it means to be alive. He lived communally, he loved unconditionally, he valued life over material things, valued health over money, believed we are all here to break ourselves open and pour ourselves out in service to each other.
Those early Unitarians rejected the idea that Jesus was god, claiming that there is only one God. They upheld Jesus as a role model, a good person who had a strong and necessary message about how we treat each other. They declared a humanist Christianity that focused on serving the poor and feeding the hungry and healing the sick and visiting the imprisoned and generally caring for and being responsible to each other. There was no reason to get involved with complicated trinitarian theologies or questions about salvation after life; there’s certainly enough to keep us busy here and now without ever asking questions for which we’ll never have the answers. This made sense to thousands of people, and here we are to prove it.
But rejecting that insight, removing Jesus from the realm of incarnate god, of embodied god, separated divinity from humanity for all of us. We’ve done it in the rest of the natural world, too. Removing god from the body of Earth and sending god into the world of the stars separated from our embodied-ness, all of Earth became a collection of objects rather than a communion of subjects. We have made it our habit to remove or deny divinity, separating it from the bodies of our lives.
Russian soldiers have been executing Ukrainian civilians and dropping their bodies into mass graves. Iranian women are being imprisoned for as little as letting a lock of hair show. Unhoused Americans are sleeping and starving on city streets across the country. China is enslaving Uyghurs in an attempt to convert them from their Muslim faith.
We don’t do this when we see the face of god in each other’s eyes.
When I know you are god, that you are part of the great divine mystery, I do not let you starve. I do not let you suffer at my hand. I do not forget you, neglect you, abandon you.
And when I know god is tiny, fragile, embodied and becoming like the rest of us, I know I’m responsible for being god’s hand, god’s eyes, god’s feet. I know I am called to living a life of partnership with Love.
The divine spirit is embodied in each of us. Each of us born. Each of us as children, as teenagers, as young adults, as reproductive parents, as working people, as aging people. We are divine in our wrinkled skin and graying or thinning hair, in our aching knees and failing sight.
Waiting for the birth of god is waiting for us to know that god is here, in each of us, that hope is here because we are here. There is joy already alive. Advent is the time for waiting- but maybe it’s time for us to stop waiting and wake up to the magnificence of who we are, so fully human, so fully divine.
We are waiting for each of us to become awake. We tell the story year after year, and we keep thinking it’s a story of someone else. Mary and her baby 2000 years ago. But it’s our story. It’s the story of humans who are born, who are vulnerable, who are dependent. It’s the story of god who is born, vulnerable and dependent. It’s the story of loving so well and so much people celebrate your birth every year for ever. It’s the story of learning how to love that well, of being that love for each other. Advent is our time to be born into our own magnificence, and to see that same divine spirit in the eyes of everyone around us, no matter how broken or frightened or angry or lost they are.
Because they are god. And we are god. And until we all know that, we wait.
