In the Christian Tradition, today is the 3rd
Sunday of advent, a time of waiting for Christmas, or really, a time to
celebrate the birth of Jesus, and to prepare for Jesus to come again.
What does Advent mean to UUs, some of whom are Christian and
some of whom are not Christian? Christmas is, ultimately, about incarnation and
so today, as part of this year’s sermon series on a “Language of reverence” I
wanted to think a bit about this word that we UUs don’t use very often. “Incarnation”
is word that comes to us from middle English meaning “made flesh” (that Latin
root “Carn” means flesh). In the Christian tradition, Christmas is about God
taking on flesh. This is special not only because it is miraculous, but also
because it is a gesture of deep compassion. It is about God reaching out to humanity
by taking on flesh like ours, being with us in the most intimate way.
Experiencing our pain, in his nerves and sinews. In a theology where God and
the world are separate, this represents a tremendous reaching out to be present
with us in the world as we know and live it. When we sing “O Come O Come
Immanuel” we are welcoming, beseeching God to be present among us here in the
real, nitty gritty, imperfect world. Immanuel is a name coming from the Hebrew
meaning “God is with us” [Sing]“O Come, you Day-spring come and cheer our
spirits by your presence here.”
The Latin American liberation theologian, Ivone Gebara, is
one of those Christian theologians who see a larger meaning of the word “incarnation”.
She writes :
“I believe that to affirm the
incarnation, or bodiliness of the divine does not necessarily require that
Jesus have some unique metaphysical character. Jesus is also “our Sacred Body”
For this reason, the incarnation, the presence of the greatest of mysteries in
our flesh, is more than Jesus of Nazareth. In this sense, we could say that
Jesus is for us a metaphor of the divine presence, the unfathomable mystery,
the unutterable in the human flesh in which we are all included” [184]
This theology sings in harmony with words by UU Religious
Educator Sophia Lyon Fahs -- indeed, words we will hear again at our Candle
Light service on Friday “Each Night a Child is Born is a holy night”
Sally McFague, an Anglican Theologian, challenges us to
expand even further what an incarnational theology might look like. She writes:
“An Incarnational Theology gives us permission to love the body of the world and through the world’s beauty to find intimations of God… What is this body that we are to praise and love? It is the universe, all matter/energy that has constituted physical reality since the Big Bang billions of years ago. It is not any one body and certainly not the human body (the model is not anthropomorphic or apthropocentric.) The body of God is all of creation, all of nature, all that “is,” all that exists. To imagine the world this way – as being in and of a God – and to imagine God this way --- as being the matrix of all that is – means that sharp lines between the world and God are erased.”
So for McFague, we can
understand God’s relationship to the world in an incarnational theology is that
the world is God’s body or McFague offers another model for an incarnational theology
“the world is in God as a baby is in the womb” [McFague p. 114-115]. That’s a
pretty radical image—we are not used to hearing such an intimately female image
of God in Christian Theology. Rebecca Parker, who holds dual fellowship as a
minister in both the Methodist and UU traditions, challenges us in her
beautiful advent poem, to remember that a time waiting for Jesus to be born is
also a time when Mary was waiting to give birth to her very first child. I know
of no other experience more really, nitty gritty and imperfect than giving
birth to a child. Could the image of giving birth, with all it’s mess and pain
and terror and exhaustion be a theological image for us?
I have
mentioned here before that for me Universalism means that if any person is an
incarnation of the divine, then God is present in all of us. God is, as Parker
suggests, in the pregnant woman and in the child, in Joseph, in the animals,
and even in Herod. God is incarnate in the lowly and the high, in the nitty
gritty and in the sublime. “We are the dwelling place.” And, to spread
Universalism out across the whole interdependent web of life of which we are a
part, I believe that not only those animals in the stable that storied night,
but every ant, every tree, every mountain
are part of the body of God as well. This is a theology that arose as a
knowledge of systems theory has become part of our way of looking at the world.
It is a theology that moves us from a theology of parts to a theology of the
What would it mean to live knowing that the world is the body
of God? Usually we think of the world as being kind of ordinary, not really
very special, the word “mundane” comes from the Latin “mund” or “world.” Says
McFague:
“An incarnate God is exactly that; mundane. I think this God cares about entire species of animals becoming extinct because humans grab all the land; God cares about children who do not have fresh water to drink; … An incarnate religion demands an incarnate spirituality; one could call it a ‘spirituality of the body.’ Hence issues of global warming become religions issues: clean air and water, food and shelter, become ‘works of the spirit.’ When life is seen as intrinsically valuable and all life exists in networks of interrelationship and interdependence then there is no split between spirit and flesh, with religion concerned mainly with the spirit… the material condition of others is a spiritual matter.” [McFague p 155].
Today our hearts are heavy with reports of this massacre of
children in an elementary school in Connecticut.
It is unimaginably horrible. [pause for a moment of silence] moments like this have caused so many
people in the twentieth century and today to turn away from the idea of God. It
seems to me that the God we are turning away from is the God who is separate
from us, the God whose unknowable will sometimes causes such suffering for our
bodies, and the bodies of our children. But if we are all part of the Body of
God, then this horrible event is a rending of our body, a wound to the body we
all share, a wound to the Body of God. God is not separate from this event. God
feels this event as we feel it. This is what incarnation means. To take on flesh
means to take on the capacity to feel great pain, to be wounded. It also means,
and this is the hardest part of an incarnational theology, that the capacity to
wound, the capacity to do great harm is part of our body as well. It does not
belong to “the other” who must be routed out and destroyed, but it is, in the
largest sense, part of us.
How then shall we live? An incarnational theology means that
we must go about the work of healing
knowing it is our own body we heal. It also means we must strive to live lives
that are compassionate and just, because harm is not just something other
people do, the capacity to harm is in each one of us, and in the social,
economic and ecological webs in which we are intimately bound. This is familiar territory for UUs. For at
least a hundred years we have known that tending the body of the world is holy
work. In our chalice lighting this morning Jack reminded us that “Service is
our prayer.” We know that washing the coffee mugs after service on Sunday
morning is a prayer. We know that bringing food to the House of Hope for Thanksgiving
is a prayer. We know that turning down the heat and turning off the water
heater when we leave the church building is a prayer. When we care for the
bodies of loved ones or strangers, when we care for the body of the earth as a
mother would care for her child this is a spiritual act even when our
intentions are very mundane.
What does it mean to celebrate Advent, if God is already
incarnate, right now in every facet of our universe? Or what if,
as Parker writes:
The birth cry in the night
is your child,
falling into the dark,
and your arms holding her.
Perhaps instead of preparing ourselves for the divine to come
from far away, from divine realms we are preparing ourselves to birth something
brand new, something as holy as anything incarnate in this world can be. Perhaps it is a time for us to unearth that
deep true part of our self that sometimes gets covered over by business, by
social convention, by habit. This is a time to allow our hearts to shine, our
souls to shine, even knowing that at this time of year when the world is dark
and cold our hearts are extra tender. We must be at our most compassionate with
ourselves and with one another through the hard days of waiting “to
render every act a prayer.” Who knows, maybe despite the dark, the grief, the
cold, even despair, something new and precious will be born in us this season.
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