God's Chosen Vulnerability--January 3, 2025

God's Chosen Vulnerability--January 3, 2025

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.... And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth." [John 1:1-3a, 14]

I think it's fair to assume that God is not naïve. That just seems like a given.

Similarly, it seems evident from the Scriptures that God knows what God is doing--in other words, that God doesn't just stumble into a situation unprepared or half-cocked and then later regret not thinking things through. We never get the sense from the storytelling of the Bible that God rushes into a scene, provoked and reckless, without thinking out an endgame strategy.

Just the opposite, in fact: as the scribes, evangelists, and prophets tell it, God is supremely patient, deliberate and thoughtful, and has had from the beginning the consistent goal of restoring and renewing all of creation. From the beginning, God has been about the business of bringing us to life, whether from the chaos of nothingness, or from the darkness of death. And even if God's tactics sometimes seem unorthodox (like, say, sending an army around the walls of Jericho with only trumpets, or sending away most of Gideon's army so that he was vastly outnumbered when he won), you never get the sense that God didn't have a plan in mind in those times. God, as presented to us in the story of the Scriptures, is infinitely creative, using things we think are too broken, too small, too weak, or too dead for the purposes of bringing life.

Neither can we say that God is unaware of just how rotten and crooked things are in the world. The God of Abraham and Sarah, of Moses and Miriam, knows all too well our violence and cruelty, our destructiveness and our deviousness, our apathy and avarice. So there's no way you can read the story of the Bible and coming away saying, "Maybe God is wearing rose-colored glasses and only sees a world of unicorns and rainbows."

So what does it say that God's way of ultimately dealing with the brokenness and bitterness of things is to enter into it, not armed with lightning bolts and angel armies, and not carrying a sword or a gun, either, but naked with our humanity? You can't read it as a mistake on God's part, or a lack of forethought, or an overly optimistic view of humanity. God enters into this creation vulnerably, stripping down all of the invincibility we usually associate with the Almighty (the letter to the Philippians calls it Christ "emptying himself"), and bearing all of our frailty and fragility as God's only wardrobe.

This is not a cosmic accident or an unfortunate oversight. This is not God being naïve and wrongly expecting the world to be a perfectly safe place. The incarnation--God taking on human flesh--is God's chosen, open-eyed response to our cruelty and crookedness, because God is convinced that the way to bring us to life is not for the Christ to protect himself from danger, but to enter into the danger in complete vulnerability. Let us make no mistake about it: God could easily have made another pillar-of-cloud-and-fire appearance, or sent down a legion of angelic soldiers, if that would have been what God chose to do. God could have sent a representative who shot lasers from his eyes the moment someone threatened him. God could have at least let Jesus carry some weapons for self-defense, if that would have been what we needed. But God won't trade our lives for divine safety, and Christ wouldn't rather keep himself out of danger if it meant leaving us in danger. The vulnerability of Christmas is God's chosen strategy. And the nakedness of the Word-made-flesh is just as God intended.

In the midst of all of the speeches that get made in this season about "the true meaning of Christmas," I kind of think we don't go far enough. We probably know to say, "It's not about presents," and maybe we even go beyond, "It's about family togetherness," to say that it's about the baby in the manger. But chances are, we are too nervous to go further and say that the reason for the baby in the manger is that God chooses to be vulnerable, rather than invincible, in order to redeem us. We are afraid of the implications of saying that God's clear-eyed choice is to come, naked and unarmed into a world full of violence and hatred, born a brown-skinned Jewish peasant child in the backwater of the empire, knowing the costs of that choice. We are afraid, I suspect, that if God's way of being in the world is to choose vulnerable love rather than threats and violence, then we will be called to walk in the same path of vulnerable love as the Word-made-flesh, Jesus.

We are right about that.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to love this world vulnerably as you have loved it... and as you still do.

A Series of Scandals--January 2, 2025

A Series of Scandals--January 2, 2025

"For in [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross." (Colossians 1:19-20)

The longer I am a Christian, the more it seems to me that the Gospel is a series of increasingly scandalous notions that nest inside of one another, like a set of those Russian nesting dolls.  Each claim of good news gets more audacious than the one before it, and yet each is more impossibly beautiful and compelling.  That hits home to me as I reflect on these words from the letter to the Colossians this Christmastide.  These are some powerful ideas, and each one has its own way of blowing my mind from a slightly different angle.

Let's start with the widest claim: that there is a God.  Right off the bat that's a claim that speaks hope against the immense darkness and chaos of the universe.  To say that God exists, even before we go any further and speak of Jesus, is to say at the very least that the cosmos is not an accident or a random chance event, and you are not a mistake or a meaningless lump of carbon living on a slightly larger ball of rock spinning around in the vast, cold emptiness of space.  We may well indeed be carbon-based life-forms living on a planet that whirls through the darkness, but if God is real, then our existence is no mere fluke. We are beings of meaning and purpose, created by the One who is the Source of our meaning and purpose.  That by itself speaks good news over against the abyss of meaninglessness we might feel ourselves pulled toward when the world feels out of control and full of meanness.

But the writer to the Colossians is just getting started.  He insists--as the Christian witness has, ever since--that this God who exists and gives us our existence also has come to share our humanity, fully and completely, in Jesus Christ.  This was a mind-blowing claim in the first century--to say that the Creator of all things could (and then would!) live among us, not in costume pretending to be a human, not appearing in some vision, and not as some bullet-proof Superman-type form, but as one of us in the utter vulnerability of this human flesh, blood, and breath.  The idea of God becoming embodied in the same kind of carbon-based mass of muscle and bone that we inhabit is scandalous!  For the ancients, it sounded undignified for a divine spiritual being to traipse around in the same skin and sinew as anybody! One of the perks of being a deity, they assumed, was that you didn't have to deal with messy human needs like hunger or sorrow, like getting a runny nose when you have a cold, or a brain-freeze headache when you eat something cold too fast.  And here in just a few words, the writer of Colossians has pulled down the barrier between the human and the divine and claimed that in Jesus Christ, we have the "fullness of God" dwelling.  The meeting of heaven and earth, it would seem, is not at a point on the map or a moment in time, but in a person--in the human life of Jesus. There is no authentic version of the Christian faith that pictures God staying "safe" up inside the walls of heaven away from the messiness, the suffering, or the sinfulness, of real human beings in the real world that you and I live in.  God comes to dwell with us, as one of us, sharing all the fragility, beauty, finitude, and peculiarities of being human.  That's an even more outrageous claim than saying God exists in the first place.

From there, this passage from Colossians pushes the envelope even further, by saying that this human life, Jesus, in whom God dwells completely, has come not just for a short information-gathering visit or in order to zap us with a heavenly sneak attack, but in order to reconcile all things to himself. It is Good news that the God-human, Jesus, has come, because his reason for coming is to mend the broken relationships across all the universe. Everything and everyone, everywhere, that is out of step with the way of God (which is really what "sin" is all about), is being brought back into right relationship through Christ.  God has come, not to smite, but to save, and it happens in the person of Jesus.  Like the well-known verses from John insist: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.  Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him" (John 3:16-17). These words from Colossians say the same: that God's intention through Jesus is to reconcile with the whole estranged world and to make peace and grant forgiveness all around.  That's amazing, and again, so different from the way, say, the ancient Greeks thought about divine visitations.  When Zeus would take the appearance of a man or an animal in the old myths and pay the human world a visit, it was often to seduce a woman, get something in return, or to play a malevolent trick on some poor unsuspecting schlub.  Rarely was it to be helpful to the humans, and if Zeus did do some kind of favor for them, it was for a select few and it always came with a catch or a price.  The New Testament's claim that God has entered the world as one of us in Jesus in order to save and reconcile with all the universe is utterly mind-boggling.  And yet here the writer of Colossians just comes out and states it plainly like it is the most obvious thing in the world.  I absolutely love it.

And then, maybe most scandalously of all, the letter to the Colossians says that God accomplishes this universal reconciliation between God and all things through... a cross.  God bears the hatred, violence, and rottenness of all humanity's sin, taking it all into the embodied life of Jesus, who chooses to answer our evil with love by absorbing our worst all the way unto death--and on the particularly nasty sort of death that a cross entails.  If it weren't enough to claim that there is a God, or that this God chooses relationship with us in our own humanity, or that this God chooses to reconcile with every last thing in heaven or on earth, then here is the most wonderfully baffling truth of all: God is willing to accomplish this universal reconciliation even though it comes at the price of a cross.  It's not merely a snap of a finger or a wave of a magic wand that sets things right--it is the costly choice to bear torture, rejection, hatred, and death at the hands of the very beings God is committed to reconciling with.

All of that is what has happened through the coming of Jesus.  We have been given no less than the meeting of heaven and earth in him, and more than that, the choice of heaven to give everything for the sake of restoring relationship with the whole world.

Before you and I pack up our Christmas decorations and move on with our plans like it's all over for another year, maybe it is worth sitting with this truth for a bit longer.  This is how you and I are loved.  This is the good news inside the good news inside the good news of the incarnation.  Let it sink in.

Lord God, we are in awe at your commitment to loving us, as one of us, in order to reconcile with all of us.  Don't let us rush past that news in the hurry to get to after-Christmas sales.