John 1:14
Christmas Eve 2000
James R. Gorman
Incarnation - what an odd word really. Incarnation. It literally means "enfleshment". Carné in Latin means both flesh and meat. One my favorite canned meals as a kid was "Chile con Carne" which means simply "Chile with meat." The central text for the incarnation of God is the Gospel of John, Chapter 1 verse 14: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."
It is this enfleshment of almighty God with which we have to do this holy night. God is "Immanuel." God is "with us."
Gail Godwin in her novel "Evensong" tells the story of the Rev. Margaret Bonner, who has a parish in a little town in North Carolina. Margaret accepts an extra responsibility for something called "Night Prayers" at the boarding school nearby where her husband is the headmaster. If any of the children in the orphanage would like to have prayers at night, they would put the letters "NP" on their door and Margaret would go down the hall and have prayers with each of the children. They would quietly capture the remains of the day in prayer and close with a short prayer and then Margaret would be on to the next room. These were mostly children whose parents never tucked them in at night or reviewed the content of their days with them.
One night Margaret came to the room of a new girl named Josie. "I've never prayed in my life," Josie said. Yet she had painstakingly nail-polished a big N.P. and a circlet of pink flying angels on a piece of paper and taped it to her door. "But," she continued, "what else is there to do in this spooked wilderness at night? How do you start?"
First Margaret showed Josie the Lord's Prayer. They said it together. "What else have you got?" Josie said, "like a practiced young consumer being introduced to a new kind of merchandise." Margaret tried the 23rd Psalm. "Could you run through that again? I've got an attention problem since I went off my meds," Josie said. Margaret ran through the 23rd Psalm again. "Well, I like it better than Our Father." Josie said. "Really? Why?" "You're not begging for anything and you've got company. Someone's going with you." It didn't seem to be all that important that it was God who was going with Josie, just that someone was going with her.
Josie became an avid reader of the Psalms over the course of their nightly prayers. She hated the violent ones and she loved the one's that assured her of God's enduring presence in the aching loneliness of her teenaged years.
"Now I liked that psalm that goes, 'you put my tears in your bottle.' You know the one?" " '...and recorded them in your book.' That's one of my favorites, too," said Margaret. Margaret and Josie agreed that they both like the Psalms "where there's someone to go with you." (Evensong, pp. 75-76)
Well, you don't have to be an orphan or a kid sent off to a boarding school by parents too busy to raise you, to like the Psalms that proclaim the radical "withness" of God. The radical enfleshment of God. The radical incarnation of God. We all yearn for such as that. And there we discover the central theme to this story we tell on this silent and Holy Night. God is Immanuel, which is Hebrew for "God with us." Not as a celestial wizard come to fix all our problems, but rather as a child to share our common lot.
A life well lived, I think, is a life lived in full cognizance of the incarnation of God in every human encounter.
Last Friday, we said goodbye to a good friend, Bill Schultz. Bill was a member of our parish who was ordained into the Christian ministry in 1943. He pastored in three churches in Wisconsin, his longest tenure in the city of Madison. Bill's wife Ruth remembers a Thanksgiving meal when Bill received a call from someone who knew of a woman (not a member of the congregation) who had taken up residence in a Madison hotel and was preparing for her suicide. Bill left the Thanksgiving table and sat with the woman in her hotel room until her family from "up north" could be with her. Bill arrived back home well past midnight; the table cleared, dishes washed, leftovers in the fridge.
In the encounter of one person in need of companionship, there is God Immanuel. There is God incarnate in human flesh.
The theologian John Calvin had a favorite phrase for the Church. It was the "company of the faithful." The word company, he pointed out, is from the French compagnie, which means those who share a loaf of bread. It is no accident that the town in which the Christ Child was born was called Bethlehem, which means in Hebrew, "House of Bread." In the breaking and sharing of bread, we are in company with one another and our God is more radically "with us."
So, on this Christmas Eve our hearts are stilled by the magnitude of God's great love for us. And we have been taught by this Christmas story to expect God's presence in the unexpected times and places of our lives. A little out-of-the-way town called Bethlehem becomes the focus of the world's hope; a baby comes to oppose the forces of Caesar and fear; and human flesh and human life are dignified and made whole as never before.
The test of God's power is not in his capacity to move mountains or his power to perform tricks or rebuke nature and nature's laws. God's power lies in his capacity to make much of little. Of a still small voice in a quiet moment teaching a little girl to pray. In the hotel room of a woman who chose Thanksgiving day to end her life. That is finally how God is made manifest and dwells among us.
The gift of God's incarnation continues in the fellowship that we have with Christ and with one another around the table of hope where we break bread together."Every time a baby is born, the old legend says, God endorses his world.... The miracle of Christmas: What is it? Is it the star, the singing angels, the wondering shepherds, the lovely mother, the exotic Magi? Is it the cold night, the hopes and fears? Not really. The Miracle of Christmas is that God cared enough to send the very best, and that he continues to do so in the gifts now given to us in one another."
(Peter Gomes, Minister of the Memorial Church, Harvard College, his Christmas day sermon in his book of Sermons [Morrow and Sons])