Human Becomings, Looking for Incarnation
Sermon preached by the Rev. John Elliott Lein at St. Thomas à Becket Episcopal Church on Dec 24, 2019 (Christmas Eve, Year A) on the following texts: Isaiah 9:2-4,6-7, Psalm 96 or 96:1-4,11-12, Titus 2:11-14, and Luke 2:1-14(15-20).
One of the root concepts in Christian teaching is that of transformation. It is expressed in different ways by different traditions in the church, and there are diverse ideas about the agents and means of this work, but all agree that in the work of Christ God is in the business of transformation.
One major branch of our faith, the traditions we generally group under the term Eastern Orthodox, teaches the doctrine of theois, a “transformative process whose aim is likeness to or union with God.” For them, theologians are those who attain this unity through purification of body and heart, and illumination of the mind into the vision of God, which cannot be merely an intellectual pursuit. It is understood to be the whole purpose of the human life. If we dig into the roots of another word in Christianese, “the Atonement,” we realize that many this isn’t so foreign an idea after all, since the word itself is simply the three words “at-,” “-one-,” and “-ment” stuck together: At-one-ment is about the process of becoming one with God—as good Christians, our theologians have all begun by agreeing on the basic idea that Jesus brings about Atonement and then have fought vehemently about what it means and how it works for millennia.
Returning to this theois way of understanding at-one-ment, the great church father Saint Athanasius of the 4th century once summed up the faith by saying,
“God became man so that man might become God.”
He wrote these words in a book called n the Incarnation, and it is the Doctrine of the Incarnation which we are here to celebrate today and which is the greatest transformation on which all the rest of our discussions of transformation in faith are based.
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We Christians are People of the Book just like Jews and Muslims. We share a largely common worldview as compared to the major Eastern religions. But the Incarnation is our great scandal, and may be considered the single largest break with our sibling religions.
The word incarnate comes from the Latin incarnare: “in” for "into” and “caro or carn” for “flesh". We affirm this basic meaning when we say something like, “this organization has gone through several incarnations”—ie, referring to how something theoretical has come into form in a way that it can then dissolve and form again in a different way. Or it can be used as a way of indicating something taken to its utmost, such as “evil incarnate.”
So here’s the tricky thing that one of my favorite theologians, Peter Rollins, once pointed out in a talk: if we take the orthodox teaching that the purpose of humanity is to be transformed into the fullness of the image of God, and then we layer on the teaching of the incarnation which says that God’s ultimate purpose led him to be transformed into the fullness of humanity, then what we’re left with is this:
We are to be transformed into the image of the God who became human; therefore, “to become like God is in a sense is to become fully human.”
For some who have never encountered this branch of Christian teaching before, it may sound vaguely heretical. But to most of us I imagine it’s confusing. I mean, we’re all already humans, right?
Yet we betray a different understanding in our language. Let me quote Peter Rollins’ illustration on this point:
There is this sense in which we are in-human. We have this interesting term the "inhuman". You don't say that about other animals. You don't look at your dog and say, you know, "Leopold Münchhausen the Third is very 'indoggish'". That doesn't make sense.
Peter mentions that he’s currently living in LA, and that people there “have crazy names for their small dogs.”
You don't say this cat is very "incat". Cats are cats, dogs are dogs. But humans aren't just human.
When we say that Jesus is fully God, that's kind of like saying "Jesus is as far from ourselves and further than the earth is than the farthest star." But if we say that Jesus is fully human, perhaps that's like saying "Jesus is as far from us as the earth is from the smallest quark." That actually the problem is our lack of humanity.
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Jesus wasn’t shy about this at all, though our translators from Greek and Hebrew into English haven’t always made this easy to see. Our favorite titles for Jesus tend to be the grandest and most transcendent ones, such as quoting from Isaiah, “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” But his favorite title for himself, the one that he used almost exclusively, was “Son of Man”. This phrase appears over one hundred times in the Old Testament, and 87 times in the New Testament. And in 84 of those 87 uses in the New Testament it’s on Jesus’ lips.
To be “the son of” in this ancient idiom meant “pertaining to the following genus or species;” therefore the “son of the quiver” is an arrow (Lam. 3:13), a “son of the herd” is a calf (Gen. 18:7), and a “son of wisdom” is a wise person (Isaiah 19:11). Jesus literally called himself “the human being,” or “the Human One.” That was his claim, and it seems simple enough. But if you really think about it, this is an audacious statement. To be truly human, a pure transmission of the divine image into earthly flesh, is no little thing.
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Look around our world today. How many true humans, fully participating in the image of God as we hold we were created to be, are around us? How many societies are based on God’s values?
It’s a sobering reflection. Some might say, well that’s just “original sin” and all that can be expected—there is no real hope for this planet or its people.
But that’s not what I see the prophets of the Old Testament claiming about God’s plan. Over and over, they call both governments and religious institutions to task for oppressing the poor through explicit actions and systemic injustices. There is an assumption that a better way is possible. Even in the giving of the Mosaic Law, which to us may seem onerous and impossible, there is a clear expectation that it is life-giving and eminently possible to live by, as Judaism continues to profess and live out in its goal of Tikkun Olam: healing the world.
A sin-based fatalism does not seem to underlie what Jesus did, taught, and asked his disciples to believe in. He confidently assumed that they could, and would, continue his work of healing, feeding, and working against injustice. Over and over, Jesus described his true followers as those who do the work, not those who merely claim the title or simply profess to believe him without changing their course. The central proclamation of Jesus’s gospel is that “the kingdom of God has come within our reach” (Mark 1:15) and he asked us to pray that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus is our True Human, not as a replacement for us humans or as an unattainable and despair-inducing contrasting judgement against us, but as a model for our own transformation and mission in the world.
That’s hope. It’s a daunting hope, because it asks so much of us, but it promises so much more. This hope promises that God is with us in our struggle for true humanity. It promises that Jesus is our _exemplar_ and has given us a true image for how to be fully human.
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I would like to end by quoting another great theologian of our recent times, a New Testament scholar whose teaching and writings about the Biblical witness of non-violent resistance against the Powers of oppression in the world bore fruit in his activism from joining the protests in 1965 Selma, Alabama to the 2004 G8 summit in Georgia. Walter Wink’s last book was a sort of autobiography that he entitled, Just Jesus: My Struggle to Become Human, and on page 102 he wrote:
“And this is the revelation: God is HUMAN … It is the great error of humanity to believe that it is human. We are only fragmentarily human, fleetingly human, brokenly human. We see glimpses of our humanness, we can only dream of what a more human existence and political order would be like, but we have not yet arrived at true humanness. Only God is human, and we are made in God’s image and likeness — which is to say, we are capable of becoming human.”
Our pledge of faith is that Jesus was truly a human being; we are merely human becomings. And it is also that Jesus’ Incarna-tion is what enables our Incarna-ting. As we celebrate the scandalous birth of the Christ Child 2,000 years ago, let this also be a reminder to seek the birth of the Christ into our hearts, minds, bodies, and community every day, so that each and together we may become fully human as we were created to be.
AMEN.
