Incarnation-December 30

Hebrews 2:10-18
For this Christmas season Sunday, we spent time contemplating the mystery of the incarnation. As a church, I believe we are more comfortable envisioning Jesus as fully God than fully human. The problem of this emphasis is that as we follow this overly divine Jesus, we over emphasize our need to be divine ourselves. We hide our humanness, our frailty, our weakness. We are ashamed of our weakness, the ways we fall short, the ways we fail each other, and in our shame we stitch together fig leaves to hide behind. The problem with fig leaves is that others can see right through them, so our attempts to hide ourselves do more to hide ourselves from ourselves than others. It’s a holiness game the saints often play with devastating consequences.

But our frailty is nothing to hide. Paul wrote to the Corinthian Church that the parts of the body that are un-presentable we treat with special modesty. Jesus quoting the Hebrew scripture blessed the meek, declaring that they would inherit the earth. God allowed a thorn to vex the apostle Paul declaring that God’s strength was perfected in Paul’s weakness.

So, we turn to the scriptures which chronicle the mystery of the almighty becoming weak, the all knowing giving up his omniscience, the omnipresent contracting into the tiny form of a newborn. So that weakness might overpower the mighty, the foolish confound the wise. So that hope might enter into the bleakest, darkest, most forsaken of God’s creatures, and so enter into those places in ourselves as well and find redemption.

With hope for us all,

James