Creation and Incarnation

(A sermon preached at Hilton Church of Scotland, Inverness on 23rd June, 2013)

Bible reading John 1:1-14 

Just a wee meditation tonight on two words, Creation and Incarnation – particularly on the second, and a reflection on what the truth of the Incarnation means for us.

Whatever their views on evolution, Christians are agreed that God is the Creator of all things as described richly in the first two chapters of the book of Genesis, which leave us in no doubt that God is extremely enthusiastic about what’s been created. We are reminded repeatedly that ‘God saw that it was good,’ and at the end of creation, after the creation of the human race, the most precious of all the objects and beings God created, we are told ‘God saw all that he had made and it was very good.’ (Genesis 1:31)

Many of us know the joy of creating something – a dress, a meal, a carving, a garden, a poem.  We are to imagine God holding the cosmos in the palm of his hand and dancing for joy. ‘I like it! It is so good!’

And the Bible continues to emphasise God’s concern and care for creation. ‘Your heavenly Father feeds them,’ Jesus said of the ‘birds of the air’ (Matthew 6:26); ‘God clothes the grass of the field’, he added (Matthew 6:30). God is engaged in his creation. ‘The land is to have a year of rest,’ Israel was told in the instructions about the Sabbath year which was to be observed every seventh year. (Leviticus 25:5) The implication is not simply that the land will produce a better yield for the Jewish people if it is allowed to lie fallow one year out of seven – but that God applies the principle of rest to the very ground we walk on. God loves creation.

But we know very well the story of the Fall, and the impact of sin on humanity, and those terrible words ‘The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth and his heart was filled with pain.’  (Genesis 6:6) We can’t understand what it means to talk of God being ‘filled with pain’, but somehow as he saw the darkness in human hearts, and the shadow which that darkness cast over the whole cosmos God suffered. The beautiful thing God had made was corrupted.

And so followed the terrible story of judgement and flood. But that is not the end of the story, for we believe that God was not taken by surprise when men and women opened their hearts to darkness, and that already before the beginning of time, God had in place a costly strategy for restoring and healing human lives and the whole of creation.

It involved Incarnation – it involved God becoming man in Jesus Christ. Fully God, yet fully human in some way we can never understand. The Word became flesh

In Philippians 2:6-8 St Paul quotes an ancient Christian hymn about Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant. And being found in appearance as a man he humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross!

In Jesus, God walked on to the stage of his own creation. He became one of us and died and rose to undo the effects of sin, to deliver humanity from the shadow of darkness and from the fear of death. How did it work? What is the mechanism? How did Christ’s death save us? Again, something beyond our understanding, but a core understanding in the New Testament is that Jesus took our place.

There was no other good enough to pay the price of sin, He only could unlock the gate of heaven and let us in

as the old hymn puts it.

Or as Cardinal Newman wrote:

O loving wisdom of our God!
When all was sin and shame,
A second Adam to the fight
And to the rescue came.

O wisest love! that flesh and blood,
Which did in Adam fail,
Should strive afresh against the foe,
Should strive and should prevail.

This draws on St Paul’s insights in Romans 6, contrasting Adam and Christ:

If by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

That’s the theology. God became man and so rescued us. Can we believe it? Or is it a myth like the other stories of gods coming down to earth?  Is the story of the Incarnation something teaching us truths about God’s empathy without itself being factually true? Or did it actually happen?  And does it actually matter?

I have come to believe that it did happen, that God did come among us in Christ, that he died our death, and rising, fills us with his life. And I believe it matters – only in what happened to Jesus could God be both ‘just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Christ.’ (Romans 3:26)

What are the implications of all this for us?

1.   Because of the Incarnation of Jesus, we are accepted by God

The King James Version translates Ephesians 1:6  ‘he hath made us accepted in the beloved.’

Jesus died for us; Jesus lives for us. When Jesus came and died we believe that it was not an impersonal action for a great mass of humanity. Yes, we need a great vision of the cosmic scale of the effect of Jesus’ death. But the God who knows and provides for individual birds and lilies knows and cares for us as individuals. 

Jesus became Incarnate for you, for me.  So now each of us can we have confidence that we are, in that lovely phrase ‘accepted in the beloved.’ Jesus is loved by his Father. The Father accepts us, each of us, as individuals because of our relationship to Christ with the same warm, loving acceptance. The goodness of Jesus, the goodness he showed when he lived sinlessly on earth, is somehow credited to our account. It’s as though God looks at us and sees not our failures and flaws and blemishes, but the goodness and perfection of Jesus.

God accepts us. And yet, do we hold back, so conscious of our imperfections? God loves us as we are. God has done so much to make our salvation possible. Is God going to give up on us now? Not a bit of it! Nothing can separate us from the love of God, who first of all accepts us in Christ, and then works in our hearts in partnership with us to make us more Christlike.

2.   The Incarnation reminds us that our bodies are precious

The human body was part of God’s creation which God said was ‘very good.’ Jesus had a physical body. Bodies are good!

Over the centuries, some people have seen our bodies as intrinsically bad news, perhaps because it’s through our bodies that lust and temptation come to us. But that’s unfair to our bodies. Our bodies are good. Our bodies are part of us – we are creatures of both spirit and body. God doesn’t simply love our souls – he loves us as total human beings.  He comes in his Spirit and takes up residence in the the palace of our bodies. ‘Do you not know,’ says St Paul, ‘that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.’ (1 Corinthians 6:19)

 And yes, we recognise that temptation comes to us through our bodies, but by the choices we make, and by the help which God gives we seek to live our lives in these bodies increasingly as Jesus lived.

• we need to joyfully acknowledge that we are sexual beings. It’s the way we’re made. Jesus was a sexual being. Sexuality is part of God’s ‘very good’  

• we need to take care of our bodies physically, and in terms of the food we offer our mind

• we need to learn to sit lightly to the pressures of society and advertisers to conform to images of the perfect body

• we need to recognise that some of us punish our bodies because something is grievously wrong with our souls, and some of us damage our souls because we are misusing our bodies, and some of do both. But because of the Incarnation of Christ there is wholeness for body and for spirit

• we need to look at ourselves in the mirror, and perhaps there are wrinkles and the marks of ways we used to live of which we are not now proud, but there looking back at us is a body, designed by God, loved by God, the body of someone who has been accepted in the beloved

3.    The Incarnation means that God has experienced life in a human body

God knows what it’s like to be human. God has an insider’s view of humanness!

Speaking of the Christian Church, the book of Hebrews says ‘Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity,’ (Hebrews 2:14) And therefore ‘Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.’ (Hebrews 2:18) And again ‘We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet was without sin.’ (Hebrews 4:15)

God ‘remembers that we are dust’ (Psalm 103:14). But this side of the Incarnation we know that God knows from the inside what it feels like to be human. In Jesus God knows what it’s like to be rejected and exhausted, to see your friends ill, to feel the pressure of too much to do,  to wrestle with your destiny, to feel the pain of bereavement, to suffer, to know you are going to die, to feel God only in God’s absence. And in Jesus God already knows what it feels like to come out at the other side into the bright joy of resurrection’s morning.

We sometimes say when people try to comfort us ‘You can’t possibly know what it’s like until you have stood here yourself.’ The Incarnation means that God has stood where we stand, wherever we are standing tonight. Whatever our pain God knows, God understand, and God reaches out and offers us hope, and strength to overcome the temptations, to bear whatever burden we feel on our shoulders. And when we know that God is with us, the burden often seems lighter, for God is a bearer of burdens.

4.   The Incarnation reminds us that God speaks to us through the physical

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. (Psalm 19:1,2)

O Lord, our Lord how majestic is your name in all the earth (Psalm 8:1)

Let me read you this, from Leaving church by the American Episcopalian priest Barbara Taylor Brown. Here she is describing a childhood memory:

As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God,  I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seemed to embrace me as surely as my mother’s arms. The Divine Presence was strongest outdoors, and most palpable when I was alone. When I think of my first cathedral, I am back in a field behind my parents’ house in Kansas, with every stalk of prairie grass lit up from within…. The smell of the grass is so sweet that it perfumes me from within, while the sun heating the top of my head brings out my own fragrance too.

And then she adds:

Because I was not brought up in church, I had no religious language for what happened in that golden-lit field

Fascinating! The verses from the Psalms remind us that first of all the wonder of creation speaks to us about God as we use our minds and analyse and reflect and say ‘The being who made all that must be wonderful!’  but Barbara Taylor Brown prompts the question ‘Does God speak to us and call us to himself through creation, even before we know his name?’

We won’t all have Brown’s intense interaction with creation, but I believe that the God who came to us in a physical body in the Incarnation, the God who has chosen water and bread-and-wine to speak to us in the sacraments of baptism and communion, also speaks to us, if we will listen, in ordinary things. And this is the theme of another book by Barbara Taylor Brown which Duncan read from a couple of Sundays ago, An altar in the world.

And so we can look out for God’s voice in the ordinary – in books and people and conversations and poems, and objects, and everyday events. And in creation.

Humanity is the summit of God’s creation, but we are part of God’s creation, and we’re not doing ourselves any favours if we cut ourselves off from that creation, always in cars and houses and offices and high streets, and even when we go out jogging we have our ipad and earphones filling our heads with sound. God speaks in cars and offices and high streets too, but kneel by a flowerbed in the garden, sit in the countryside, climb the mountain and let the stillness of creation steal into your soul. ‘Life is better outside’ says the current Lakeland catalogue. In one sense, advertising guff, but in another a pointer to a world alive through the creator who constantly animates it. God still speaks in the garden. 

‘Be still and know that I am God,’ (Psalm 46:10)

It’s always troubled me that I am unable to experience the beauty of nature. I can look at hills and mountains, and describe in clinical terms why they are beautiful, but my emotions are untouched. Until that is, I ask them ‘What are you telling me about God?’ and in my clearer-thinking days, I see them as an expression of a creator’s artistry and that insight brings joy and gratitude.

We are surrounded by sacraments.

5.     God seeks to incarnate himself in us day by day

Remember St Teresa of Avila’s words:

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

Compassion on this world,

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,

Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,

Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

Christ has no body now but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

Compassion on this world.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours

When he was starting his ministry, Jesus quoted from the Old Testament prophecy: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ (Luke 4:18-19)

And as Christians we are called to the same ministry – every last one of us. We called to share the good news about a coming kingdom which we can enter now. To preach not just, or even not primarily by words, but by embodying its truth, by incarnating its Spirit and its values, by bringing through our words and actions joy, hope justice, peace, courage, humility, by forgiving ourselves as we forgive others in Christ, by seeking to be creative as God was creative, by using our gifts, producing work which we and God can delight in. By being ourselves sacraments and living sacramental lives through which others can sense the whisper of God.

Do you remember Jesus’ famous parable about the sheep and the goats?

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ The King will reply ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’ (Matthew 26:37-40)

The Christ in us as we serve others ministers to the Christ in those we serve.

God seeks, therefore to incarnate himself in us, not in the unique way in which he was incarnate in Christ but nevertheless in a very real, and transformational way.

I came across an interesting phrase in an article a couple of weeks ago. It’s the words ‘Skin in the game’, which I believe originated with the American business and investment magnate Warren Buffet. This phrase refers to executives who buy in to the company they work for, investing their own money in it. They are personally on board. Personally committed. They have ‘skin in the game.’

It’s a powerful phrase which resonates with us as Christians. For in us, Christ has skin in the game. Through us, Christ seeks physical presence in, and invests himself in his world.

In conclusion, we remind ourselves of how the ancient hymn St Paul quoted in Philippians 2 concludes:

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:9-11)

And we look forward to an unimaginable future when the kingdom will fully come, when a flawed creation will emerge perfect from the fires of re-creation, when Jesus is universally acknowledged as the Son of God.  

And in that future we who have allowed him to embrace us will not be disembodied spirits. We will be incarnate. We will have skin in the wonderful new game of unadulterated kingdom living. And all because of the Incarnation, all because for us, in Christ, God had skin in the game.