Some Semi-Final Thoughts On Incarnation
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- Created on Sunday, 19 December 2010 00:00
- Written by Gary E. Smith
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From a Sermon of December 22, 2002
Years ago, Jenny passed on to me a piece of a poem she had found, by Wendell Berry: “In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, wars spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillsides sowing clover.” That twenty-nine word line of poetry is the sermon; all that follows is postscript. “In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, wars spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillsides sowing clover.”
We are but six days before Christmas, and the word for today is “Incarnation.” Sowing clover on a rocky hillside is an act of incarnation. It is an act of faith. It is an act of hope, in the face of it all. If you are one who likes to investigate the etymology of words, there is no way of getting around the “carnate” part of the word “incarnation.” It means flesh itself, as in carnage, as in carnal knowledge, and now anyone dozing off has just awakened. Incarnation, in the flesh, as in “God in the flesh,” as in Jesus in the flesh, as in this whole Nativity tableau.
“The oxen in their stalls,” says Frederick Buechner, “the smell of hay. The shepherds standing around. That child and that place… This story that [the Christian] faith tells us in the fairytale language of faith is not just that God is… but that God comes… naked, totally helpless, not much bigger than a loaf of bread… Is it true?” Buechner asks, a question to which we have returned for years and years here. Is it true? Did God come? Does God come? Did it happen only once? Does it happen over and over? How can this happen?
I believe the answers to these questions, and questions like them, are found more in poetry than in logic, more in the possible than in the actual, more in the right brain than in the left. The Christian orthodox, the fundamentalists, the Biblical literalists, they hold on to the actual: there was a star, they would say, there was a stable, there was a birth, the mother was a virgin, there were angels. It is a package deal. Say yes to all of it, and you’re in. So no to any part, and you’re out. But we folks in this room are a choosy lot. We listen to it, and then we may say, “But wait a minute! Could this have happened? That star couldn’t have been in that particular place. How could the shepherds have heard about this obscure birth so fast? Bethlehem is way too far to go, on a donkey, with a pregnant and tired woman. And what about the facts of human reproduction? We’ve enrolled our young people in ’Our Whole Lives’, we’ve seen the slides, we know about the birds and the bees, and we’ve got a problem here.”
All of this leads, of course, to one of your relatives asking you with a smirk, as they do every year, “Do Unitarians really celebrate Christmas?” I want you to be ready this year. “Why yes,” you will say. “Incarnation is at the center of our theology. It is who we are. It is the faith we practice. We practice incarnation over and over, returning to no person evil for evil, strengthening the fainthearted, supporting the weak, helping the suffering, honoring all beings.”
Tell your skeptical relatives that we embrace the poetry of Christmas, and that Christmas is part and parcel of the notion that God has become flesh, Jesus’ flesh for this holiday, but our flesh, too, and “our flesh” is the important part, your flesh and my flesh, your body and my body, your heart and my heart, your hands and my hands, your loves and my loves, what we do in our humanity to take the part of a living God in this life we are given. “God is love,” we are told. “Read it backwards,” we answer. “Love is God.”
Here is the theology behind Christmas and Macy’s 40% sale and Amazon “no shipping charges” and the tired Santa at the Burlington mall: Jesus of Nazareth, preaching somewhere around the Sea of Galilee; I’ve stood there and tried to imagine it. “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick or in prison and you visited me,” and here’s the kicker, “as you did it to the least of these you did it to me.” That’s the theology we try so hard to embody here in our life together. Do Unitarians celebrate Christmas? It’s right at the heart of our lives!
“In the Christmas story we see God become helpless,” writes an unnamed Benedictine sister, “become like us, become subject to the tensions of growth, become flesh so we might have the confidence to recognize that we have the stuff it takes to become like God… The flesh, in other words,” she says, “is all we have. It is our glory. It is our power. It is sweet. It is beautiful. And it is the clay out of which we shape a better tomorrow.”
“And the Word became flesh and lived among us,” writes John in the fourth Christian Gospel, and John knew poetry and he knew metaphor, and this word “Word” has room inside it for me to move past all my old baggage of a personal God with a capital “G” to a “Word become flesh” that can help me see the God in you, see the God in your flesh and in your touch and in your kindness.
Holly Bridges Elliott writes about just such a moment: “I remember this illumination happening to me one noontime as I stood in the kitchen and watched my children eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We were having a most unremarkable time on a nondescript day… I wasn’t feeling particularly spiritual. But, heeding I don’t know what prompting, I stopped abruptly in mid- bustle, or mid-woolgathering, and looked around me as if I were opening my eyes for the first time that day.
The entire room became luminous and so alive with movement that everything seemed suspended—yet pulsating—for an instant, like light waves. Intense joy swelled inside me, and my immediate response was gratitude—gratitude for everything, every tiny thing in that space. The shelter of the room became a warm embrace; water flowing from the tap seemed a tremendous miracle; and my children became, for a moment, not my progeny or my charges or my tasks, but eternal beings of infinite singularity and complexity whom I would one day, in an age to come, apprehend in their splendid fullness.”
And maybe you’ve had moments like this, too, when you’ve caught someone you love in the light, just so. These are moments of incarnation, something transcendent caught up in the shape of flesh. “Time stands still,” we say in moments like this; small wonder that T.S. Eliot speaks of incarnation as “the still turning point, the intersection of time and timelessness.”
This is what the season celebrates: those moments when time stands still, and we are able to recognize the divine among us. Open the newspaper this month (does anyone still do that?) and the stories are filled with miracles: a homeless man returning a cash-filled wallet to its rightful owner, the tireless energy of the ones who work on “Christmas in the City,” bringing joy and hope and love to those who find joy and hope and love way too scarce. You know these stories: children asking more for coats than candy, more for mittens and boots than toys or games. Thanks to all who participated in our own Secret Santa, gifts for Concord Prison inmates, Open Table.
I kept a column Brian McGrory wrote eight Christmases ago, a column about a homeless shelter in Quincy and the priest who ran it then, Father Bill. “The sparse hair atop his head hasn’t had the benefit of a comb in years,” Brian writes. “The words lurch from the side of his barely open mouth, kind of like Jackie Gleason in ‘The Hustler.’ He’s a religious smoker. He missed half his chin in the morning shave. His name will probably never be uttered in the Vatican. No matter… His devotion remains a simple one: help those who fallen through the cracks.” Father Bill is God among us, make no mistake about it, Father Bill is “Word become flesh,” an incarnation of the faith he holds.
“O Come, O Come, Immanuel,” we sing, “Immanuel,” God with us, God among us, the holy among us, the holy with us, the transcendent calling out the best that is in us. This has been a month to exercise our hearts, make them bigger, turn around and put a big bill in that red kettle, sing in a nursing home, yield to that car in front of you. We are all striving in this season to match the meaning of the Christmas story, to “assert the divine in ourselves,” the Benedictine sister writes, to see if “we have the stuff it takes to become like God.”
Somewhere after all the grand plans of the Garden of Eden, sometime after Adam crunches into the apple and blames it on Eve, sometime after God thunders around like some out-of-control parent, losing it, God does not just wash his (or her?) hands of the whole enterprise and retreat into the heavens to dangle us around on strings. Lutheran Bishop Stephen Bouman says God does not move on, God moves in. God does not give up or give in. God does not abandon the whole enterprise. What does God do (and remember this is poetry)? God tries something else. God moves in, through a baby, in a stable, with the animals, among simple people.
And then Stephen Bouman takes T.S. Eliot and says, “incarnation is ‘the still turning point’ of the ministry of the… church. It means we never ‘move on’ from the dance of human life. It means we are ever moving more deeply into the battered yet holy humanity in which Jesus was pleased to dwell. It means moving into humanity at its most vulnerable… Incarnation means no ‘moving on’ past the poor and the strangers among us, but moving in toward those [poor, hungry, sick, imprisoned, strangers who are always at our door]. Incarnation means that a body is God’s body,” Stephen says, “whether it is buried at Ground Zero or buried in the rubble of a bomb in Afghanistan; whether it is broken by a suicide bomber [in a bus or riddled by ground fire on the West Bank;] whether it is ravaged by AIDS in Africa or dying in a nursing home in Long Island.”
“In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, wars spreading, families dying, the world in danger,” Wendell Berry writes, “I walk the rocky hillsides sowing clover.” May you and I walk these hillsides, too. May we sow the clover in the face of hunger and thirst, nakedness and sickness; may we walk these hillsides, sowing love in the face of darkness and death, of war and of danger. May we become the word become flesh, the word of hope become flesh, the word of love become flesh, hope become real, hope embodied, love become real and embodied. May we walk the walk in these days and in all the days to come.
Merry Christmas! Happy Solstice! Happy New Year! I am honored to have walked these hillsides with you.