musings.from.the.porch

here are notes for conversation at the Porch Christmas Eve Eve party. Please add your comments…

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with a friend about the state of the world and culture and life. Good, deep stuff. John is part Chickasaw and a deep thinker. He observed that in traditional societies, you think about yourself in relation to the community. You are part of a connection between the generations. A life well lived is one in which you contribute to the community and to future generations.

Contrast that with the more consumerist, Western model in which we find ourselves. We tend to see ourselves as individual units, are individual economic units. There is a primary focus on the accumulation of wealth, acquiring and consuming.

I suppose this is nothing new, but John’s remarks really struck home with me during this Christmas season. What is the most common question you hear right now? “What do you want for Christmas?” We hardly even think about it. And lest I come across as a Scrooge, I am not against Christmas gifts. Gift giving expresses our belief in, and celebration of, God’s gift, Jesus.

Santa sells. Madison Avenue takes the essential message of the nativity and makes me feel good about stuff acquisition. The noise overwhelms the message. I have to work really hard, to swim up the marketing river, if I am going to hear the message of the little baby Jesus.

I think it is really valuable to hear this critique. To be intentional about loosening the consumerism that afflicts our culture and engage with the community and contribution message that is part of the coming of Jesus.

Perhaps the most unique part of the story of Jesus is the incarnation. God con carne, God coming in the flesh. To give blessing to us. To communicate himself to us. To have community with us. And to create a community of people who will do the same, empowered by him, sacrificing themselves like him, for the benefit of others.

This is the most unique and most controversial thing about Christianity: Jesus is fully God and became fully man, too. The early church thought hard to try understand this. A guy named Athanasius penned his thoughts about it back in 350 AD.

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?”

There was an obvious connection between these events. You cannot assign one action to his body and another to his divinity. They are all joined together. He is one complete being.

• He spat just like a human. But his spit 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 signify this, when he said, “I and the Father are one.” 
• He cured by his mere will. Yet 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 the synagogue, when she had already died.

There was no “spiritual” Jesus and “human” Jesus. He was fully engaged. His entire self was involved in where he lived and what he did. 

And let me share a couple of thoughts from John Stott.

God had this great truth to reveal to people – that he wanted to be in relationship with all peoples – and he chose to do it through the vocabulary and grammar of human language, through human beings, human images, human culture. This is what we believe about the Bible. And the incarnation is the ultimate way that God communicated himself. John says climax of the self-communicating God. The Word became flesh (John 1:14). God’s eternal word became a human being, a first-century Palestinian Jew. He became little, weak, poor, and vulnerable. He experienced pain and hunger and exposed himself to temptation. Yet, he did not cease to be himself.

He identifies with us without surrendering his own identity.

This is what he did. But this is not all. At the end of his time on earth, right after his resurrection, Jesus spent time talking with his disciples. He told them (John 20:21), “As the Father sent me, so I send you.” He says that this model of incarnation – of person-to-person, mixing it up in the culture, identification with others, practical service – applies to them, too. And to all who want to follow him. He is not creating a philosophical system but real life, where people are.

What does it entail? Self-emptying and self-humbling – sacrifice and service.

• What does it entail? Self-emptying and self-humbling – sacrifice and service
• Renouncing rights, privileges, power, status
• Not insisting on control, but partnering with others in ministry
• Focusing more on community than on independence
• Befriending the poor and sick and powerless, risking reputation by associating with the outcast

What would happen if we adopted this incarnational model? What would we discover about ourselves and about our world? Would you learn something new? I would not have thought so, but I do now. I have seen it these last 2 months at The Porch. Learning together with those who have been involved, I have seen just a bit of what community life is like. I have seen powerfully and personally just how much more I can learn and grow when I am collaborating with others, each contributing what they have been given to make the community grow.

I have been challenged just how much I have been a “consumer” of church – passively acquiring experiences. I come, receive, evaluate, critique. And even how some church work is like trying to sell me something. A new twist to change my life.

I have gotten the taste of something more. I want to be part of community. I want my life to be about what I can contribute to others. To be part of that community of people who are trying to follow Jesus. What we call the Body of Christ. And that is not one group, but is worldwide and is here.

And that is part of this experimental church we call “the.porch.” For some other thoughts, see the post on Incarnation

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