The Wonder of Incarnation
Sermon by Steve Edington
December 17, 2006
A couple of days before Thanksgiving I was asked by the Director of Harbor Homes, Peter Kelleher, if I would come and offer a brief blessing for the meal Harbor Homes was serving persons in our Nashua area who otherwise would not get a good Thanksgiving dinner - due to either homelessness or just a lack of financial means. I was glad to do so. The meal was served at one of the newer facilities Harbor Homes has obtained over on High Street. Peter gave me a tour of the place when I arrived showing me how they'd relocated much of their office space from the facility they have on Amherst Street; and how other parts of the building are being used to house some of the programs they offer to the community. The way this organization has grown and developed over the past 25 years is quite amazing. I served on their Board of Directors for a time in the mid-1990s.
Harbor Homes' primary mission, for those of you not familiar with it, is to provide living quarters for persons whose mental capabilities are not so diminished that they need to be institutionalized, but who still need some level of care and assistance in order to live with an appropriate measure of independence. As the organization has grown they have offered other kinds of outreach and assistance in this community. Their latest project, Buckingham House, is being erected next to the Nashua Post Office. It appears to be nearly finished; and it will provide living quarters for homeless veterans when it opens and gets into operation.
My Thanksgiving visit to the Harbor Homes' High Street facility came just about a week or so after Lee Page and I had been having a conversation about how this very organization got started over, as I say, 25 years ago. As Lee told it, it began with a conversation she and my predecessor - and our Minister Emeritus - Don Rowley, had just down the hall a ways from where we are here in my office, which was Don's office then. She and Don were discussing the need to which I just alluded: The need for supervised, quasi-independent living facilities for mentally challenged persons who did not need to be permanently housed in an institution. It was just, at that point, an idea; words floating around in the air in that ethereal realm of "wouldn't it be good if..."
But the words didn't just stay in the air. They were shared with other people in the Nashua community - with various care-givers and mental health providers. And the words generated some energy and commitment among some of those who heard and spoke them, and an organization was created to give the words some reality; and funds were generated, and a Director and a staff were hired, and facilities were purchased and prepared for use, and 25 years later Harbor Homes provides a great and needed service in this community. At one time it was nothing more than an idea floating around in a room several yards away from the room we're in here - words in the air that became flesh.
I'm guessing there are other creation stories about Harbor Homes out there in addition to the one I've just told. There probably were other people in addition to Lee and Don who were having conversations similar to the one they had at the time.Who actually thought of it first isn't nearly as important as the fact that it happened. The important thing is that an idea, a concept, a hope, a dream, a "wouldn't it be good if..." didn't just stay up in the realm of the spirit, as it were, but become concretized; became flesh and blood and bricks and mortar. And countless lives have been strengthened and helped because of it.
Well, that's a good, and true, story. But I can see where it might seem like an unlikely lead-in to my Christmas sermon for this year. You need to stay with me on it for a few more minutes, though. The Harbor Homes story I've just told is actually a variation, a re-telling even, of my favorite version of the Christmas story, as found in the New Testament gospels. That gospel's account has none of the things we generally associate with the Christmas Story: No Mary, no Joseph, no angels, no shepherds or sheep, no Magi, no stable, no Bethlehem - and most of all no baby Jesus. Arguably, it's not even a Christmas story. [Yes, we will do Mary and Joseph and the babe in the manger next Sunday night on Christmas Eve - it's just not where we're going today.]
The Gospel I'm referring to is the fourth one - the Gospel of John. Who this particular author named John was is basically unknown, but it's as good a name as any. This Gospel - this particular take on Jesus' life - wasn't written until early on in the 2nd century, several decades after the other three were written. By now the fledgling church had grown beyond being a small sect within Judaism, as it was originally, and was making inroads into the larger Greco-Roman world of that time. It's target audience, to put it in marketing terms, was no longer just the Jews in and around Palestine, but the people in the lands along the northern rim of the Mediterranean Sea clear over to Rome. For these people the claim that Jesus was the fulfillment of the "House and lineage" of the Jewish King David, as Luke's Gospel puts it, meant nothing since they'd never heard of any King David. So, the writer of the Gospel of John decided he'd better speak the language of this larger world if he was going to relate to them in any way.
He leads off with some rather mystical and esoteric language about something called "The Word." "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God..." and on like that for awhile until several verses later you read, "And the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us..." And then a few verses after that Jesus is getting baptized and starting out his ministry. Think of it: If John's Gospel had been the only one that made it into the Bible, we'd have no Christmas. While I'm just as glad it didn't go that way, at least then we wouldn't have to put up with all this nonsense about a "war on Christmas" that FOX News is so convinced in being mercilessly waged. But let's not go there.
To get at where the writer of John is going we need to throw in a dash of Greek and Roman worldview here - just a dash, I promise. I'll give you the 30 second version: In the Greek and Roman world-view you had these two "Realms of Reality" I guess you could call them; a two tiered universe, as it were. There was the realm of the Eternal Platonic Ideals, the Eternal Truths and Verities, the realm of the Spirit, where the gods and goddesses also hung out. It was all "up there" somewhere. Then you had the temporal realm down here - the world of messy stuff, of flesh and blood and material things; earthly stuff, that is to say. [End of lesson for today.] So John, as in the writer of John's Gospel, was wondering how do I present this newly emerging religion, which eventually came to be called Christianity, to people who think in these kinds of categories. His opening verses, which I just cited, are what he came up with.
What this author is saying is that these eternal ideals, these eternal truths, these eternal verities that the Greeks and Romans believed in - and which he calls "The Word", and which he equates with God - became real, became actualized, became incarnated, in an honest-to-goodness human being. Incarnated means "in the flesh." The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. That kind of language made more sense to those first hearing it than stories about mangers and shepherds and Magi - beautiful as that story/myth is.
So while I value the traditional story/myth of Christmas for its poetic beauty, the Gospel of John is where the rubber hits the road when I look at Christmas through my religious humanist lens. What is contained in these words, as I have come to read them, is an affirmation of human possibility. The theological standpoint from which John is writing is that the Word - or God - decided to risk incarnation, risk becoming flesh, for the sake of humanity. That which is Ideal and Eternal chose to become real and temporal in order to show us what being fully human was, and is, really all about. While this is not a theology I take literally, it is one I draw a human challenge from nonetheless. And that challenge, or question to me is: To what extent am I, or are we, called to make our words become flesh? What does it mean, on a human level, to risk incarnation? What does it mean on a human level to bring about the wonder of incarnation?
The answer is as simple as it is difficult. It means having the courage to incarnate the values we hold most dear, often in the face of all that would diminish or deny those values. Whenever there is resistance to injustice the word becomes flesh. Whenever a human need is addressed the word becomes flesh. When a simple act of kindness that brings some small ray of hope and joy into a life where hope and joy are in short supply, the word becomes flesh. Whenever one seeks to discern, and then make an effort to overcome evil and wrongdoing, the word becomes flesh. When after discouragement, defeat, or some inexplicable loss, one finds the means to stand up and sing and choose life once again, the word becomes flesh.
For the Greeks and the Romans - to make one more pass at them - it was this ethereal realm of the Spirit, of the gods, of the Ideal that they felt was most real, while the earthly realm was merely transitory and far less real. The theology in John's Gospel turned that notion completely around: The Ideal becomes most real when it gets put on the ground, when it becomes lived out, when it becomes incarnated. The values we hold most dear - whether expressed through our UU Purposes and Principles, or by whatever means we conceive and name them - only become real when we put them on the ground. They only become real when we transform them by the wonder of incarnation. The Ideal that Don Rowley and Lee Page were tossing around down the hall from here over 25 years ago did not become real until it was - in the most literal sense - put on the ground in the form of the Harbor Homes facilities in our community, which embody, which incarnate, the Idea that gave them their birth.
Let me bring these thoughts to a close now by going one more round with this incarnation theme. [I can't help but notice how no one has ever objected when I say "Let me bring these thoughts to a close...] These words are by a UU minister, the Rev. Donald King:
"The real miracle of Christmas is that a person from his peasant class, in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire, should have the insight, the ability, and the character to formulate and proclaim the religion that Jesus did. Here was an (individual) who saw the significance of his cultural and religious heritage in his world and who had the courage to attach the vested interests of his day in order to teach what he saw to be the truth. Here is the real miracle - the personality of this (human being) - not floating stars, angel choirs, or virgin births."
Rev. King then goes on to conclude: "The birth of a child, any child, is a new incarnation and carries the promise of the great miracle of humans becoming divine, or reaching out to the stars."
Let's hear that last line once again: "The birth of any child is a new incarnation and carries the promise of the great miracle of humans becoming divine..." These words echo those well known ones of the UU Religious Educator, the late Sophia Fahs, who said that "Each night a child is born in a holy night." We are each and all born with the power and the potential to touch lives in such a way that they will be transformed and uplifted. We are each and all born with the power and the potential to touch our world in such a way that it will be a more just and humane place for our having been here. That is the promise, and that is the wonder, of incarnation. How much of that promise will be fulfilled depends upon how much of our humanity we are willing to risk sharing and extending.
The story of Jesus, from his birth to his death, and with its mix of myth, legend, and history, is the story of someone who sought to fully live out, and who sought to risk living out, the divine potential with which we are each and all born. His is the story of someone whose Word - or promise or potential - was truly incarnated in the flesh. How much of that story you choose to believe is not near as important as how much you believe in, and feel authentic with, the story you are telling with the life you lead; by how well your story incarnates the Word by which you seek to live.
My hope for each of us in this season is that love and light and truth and wisdom and joy will become incarnated in the lives we are living. I hope we will find transformation in our lives and be bearers of hope and joy and renewal for others. As we hear the stories that are told at this time of year may we find in them our own story as well and see it afresh. In the faces of children, and in the beauty of the natural world, may we each and all find a renewed sense of life for ourselves. May our sense of priority in this season be that we will honor life, beginning with the lives we have each been given and moving out to the life that surges all around us.
Stephen D. Edington
December 17, 2006
