Christmas is about Incarnation
December 2nd, 2006 by JimmyT
What does Christmas mean to you? I want us to start thinking about these things we we get ready for Christmas and the Porch. We will have a Christmas Porch gathering December 23 and then be with the WCUMC family on Christmas Eve for a community service. So, how are you thinking about Christmas this year? How has Jesus’ words in the “Sermon on the Mount” affected you this season? I am going to start recording some of my thoughts here, adding to them this month. Would you please add your comments , too? (Click the comment link below)
One thing Christmas means to me is incarnation: God With Us. God invading culture, time, space, context, and humanity. I like to think of it as God con carne, “God with meat”. This is profound and controversial and sets following Jesus off from all other endeavors.
When the ancient Jews were wandering around in the wilderness after leaving Egypt, they had two powerful models always before them to help them understand who God is: God who dwells right here with us and God who transcends all of our space, culture, and reality.
- The tabernacle, a kind of tent where sacrifices were made to get forgiveness of sins. In this, they saw God as someone completely other than themselves, to whom they were ultimately accountable and from whom they could receive ultimate forgiveness. God the “transcendent”
- The Ark, a sort of box that contained the tablets with the 10 commandments and other important artifacts. In this, they saw God as dwelling with them in their context, helping them all the time. God the “immanent.”
Christian groups and other religions have tended to emphasize one or the other over the years. We don’t get to do that: in Jesus, we have someone who is both completely with us and completely other than us, someone who is both “100% God and 100% human”. How? I dunno, but it was true.
Jesus as my Lord is the transcendent God to whom I am accountable and through whom I receive forgiveness.
Jesus as my brother is the immanent God who calls me to live God’s loving kindness and kingdom with all I encounter and in ways that speak to my culture. To dwell with my culture.
At Christmas, we celebrate that immanent God, who comes to dwell with us.
The Two Natures of Christ
Here is something written in 350 AD by a guy named Athanasius about the nature of Christ: fully God, fully human.
Being God, he became a human being: and then as God he raised the dead, healed all by a word, and also changed water into wine. These were not the acts of a human being. But as a human being, he felt thirst and tiredness, and he suffered pain. These experiences are not appropriate to deity. As God he said, “I in the Father, the Father in me”; as a human being, he criticized the Jews, thus: “Why do you seek to kill me, when I am a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from my Father?” And yet these are not events occuring without any connection, distinguished according to their quality, so that one class may be ascribed to the body, apart from the divinity, and the other to the divinity apart from the body. They all occured in such a way that they were joined together; and the Lord, who marvellously performed those acts by his grace, was one. He spat in human fashion; but his spittle had divine power, for by it he restored sight to the eyes of the man blind from birth. When he willed to make himself known as God, he used his human tongue to singify this, when he said, “I and the Father are one.” He cured by his mere will. YUet it was by extending his human hand that he raised Peter’s mother-in-law when she had a fever, and raised from the dead the daughter of the ruler of thte synagogue, when she had already died.
3 Responses to “Christmas is about Incarnation”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I thought that you all might enjoy this. It’s an excerpt from the liner notes of Sufjan Stevens’ newly released Christmas album. I’m going to post some personal thoughts on Christmas as well, but in the meantime here’s this:
“In December of 2001 (the Year of Epihanies), I decided to record a collection of Christmas songs at home in Brooklyn, as a kind of musical benedictions to a tumultuous year. It would be something to give as gifts for my family and friends, something with which to appease the apprehension of everyday life, which had been uprooted by all the extraordinary events in the world.
What did the angels renounce in the wake of the shepherds’ trepidation? “Have no fear,” they petitioned with trumpet blasts and a garish display of constellations. But that’s like waving a gun in a bank lobby and demanding: “Everbody stay calm!” Music, of course, works much differently. The most discriminating of chord progressions can disarm the most arrogant of men, including myself. Christmas music does this to the highest degree. It intersects a supernatural phenomenon (the incarnation of God) with the sentimental mush of our mortal lives (presents, toys, Christmas tree ornaments, snow globes, cranberry sauce), leaving in its pathological wake a particular state of mind one can only describe as “that warm, fuzzy feeling.” Was this what I was after? The search for existential significance in all that sentimental oatmeal? Perhaps, but I’m not so ceratin “Silent Night” and “Jingle Bells” can be used as an exegesis for the big questions in life.
Or can they…”
Sufjan has much more to say about what Christmas means to him, and there’s many interesting and moving tidbits written in the liner notes. It’s really been making me think. I love the comparison between the Angels saying “Have no fear,” and the bank robber saying “Everybody stay calm!”; I laughed out loud when I read that the first time.
[…] And that is part of this experimental church we call “the.porch.” For some other thoughts, see the post on Incarnation […]
Hey, checkout this post on the “church and postmodern culture” blog. The author has some interesting ideas about how the events that surround the birth of Christ might influence the way in which we engage our culture.