God Enfleshed – 25 December 2017 – Nativity of the Lord/ Christmas Day

Christian Christmas is different from secular Christmas. Christian Christmas begins, rather than concludes, on the evening of December 24. It lasts twelve days, rather than twelve hours. It celebrates the light of Christ in a world that remains in most ways exceedingly shadowy. It seeks to discover the gift that is God made flesh, rather than being disappointed that nobody came through with the perfect gift we dropped so many hints about. Christian Christmas is the beginning of joy, not the end of it.

. . . Every year Christmas Eve is about shepherds and angels and the stable. Christmas Day is about the enfleshment, the incarnation, of the Word. –– Paul Bieber

John 1:1-14

On the day that we celebrate the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. . . John's beginning of the story of Jesus does not begin with his birth in Bethlehem, but begins before the creation of the earth. Jesus existed with God and as God before the world was called into being, and nothing was created without him. Therefore, verse 14 reveals the scandal of the story of Jesus: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us [literally tented or tabernacled with us], and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.” What transcendent, eternal, creator God would become flesh and live among the creation? But it is clear that in this confession, the later church's doctrine that Christ is fully human and fully divine is already implicit here in John's writing. –– Carrie Lewis

Isaiah 52:7-10

This Old Testament reading. . . links together joy and salvation. . . with the imagery of a king returning with triumph over his enemies. The feet of the messenger represent not only the messenger and the. . . good news that the messenger brings. . . but they also represent the long, hard journey that the messenger and the king have taken over the mountain. . .  

In the final verse. . . is the promise that not only will this return of God be felt among God's people, but God's holy arm will be seen by all nations and the ends of the earth will know the salvation of God. Although this has a feeling of universality to it (“all the nations” and “all the ends of the earth”), the prophet is probably not extending God's salvation in a universal fashion here, but is letting God's people know that all of the world will see the salvation of God's people. It is not until Third Isaiah (60) that the light is for all nations. –– Carrie Lewis

Hebrews 1:1-4 [5-12]

The poetic opening is used in many traditions as the response to the word within the service of Morning Prayer (Matins). “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son. . .” These words link the revelation of God through Jesus to the revelation of God through the prophets of the Old Testament—it places Christ into the history of Israel. –– Carrie Lewis

Carrie L. Lewis La Plante is pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Indianola, Iowa.

Paul Bieber is pastor of All Saints Lutheran Church, San Diego, California.  

Homily Service 39, no. 1 (2005): 61-71.

Earth’s Water and Baptismal Implications

Again, as with our posting on March 3, we take from Liturgy 31, no. 2 (2016) some of Peter McGrail’s essay on environmental issues related to Christian Initiation. McGrail’s essay deals with Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ on the environment. Here is his analysis of how water, jeopardized by environmental degradation, may be seen through the lens of the incarnation.

As soon as we draw on Pope Francis’ consideration of water, that element’s potential symbolic ambiguity becomes evident. His primary concern is access to fresh drinking water, which he underscores as “a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water because they are denied the right to a life consistent to their unalienable dignity” (no. 30). The use and misuse of water serves as a potent reality that points up global inequality. . . 

 This reality of exclusion contrasts with the lavish exuberance with which the gift of water is celebrated in the Easter Vigil. For example, the fifth reading opens with the cry of invitation, “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters” (Is 55:1, NRSV) and closes with the comparison of the efficaciousness of God’s life-giving word to the life-giving winter rain and snow (Is 55:10–11). Water is portrayed here as a freely given gift from the heavens that satisfies a thirsty humanity and brings fruitfulness to creation. So lavish, so fruitful is it that it serves as an image for God’s word, God’s very will. 

 In the light of Laudato Si’, we are invited to ask what it might mean to proclaim those words in a location of desertification or to hear them as a member of a community with little or no access to clean drinking water. The words may, indeed, express profound hope in such contexts, but perhaps they do so precisely because they also tie into anxieties, evoke painful memories, and reflect present realities. The ambiguities of a symbol soiled by human activity interact subversively with the liturgical proclamation of a scriptural passage such as this. And the tensions thus set up have the potential to generate dissonance on the lips of assemblies in a more affluent part of the world. . . Thus, one of the most joyous sections of the Easter Vigil can plunge us into a discomforting recognition of the meanings that our core symbol of baptism can hold in tension. 

 What, then, does this say to us of baptism itself? Surely there must be more going on here at the level of sign than just an immersion into a compromised symbol of pollution. . . . 

McGrail calls for a careful reading of the Pope’s concern for Earth’s gifts so that we appropriately locate the incarnation of Christ in the midst of both sacraments and creation. We benefit from knowing more deeply the key relationship of the paschal mystery to God-with-us in this finite world and its fulfillment eschatologically.

The renewal of humanity, and indeed the transformation of the whole of creation, is caught up in the dynamism of Christ’s own victory over death and the captivity of the material world to decay and destruction. Baptism is a plunging into Christ’s paschal mystery by which women and men “die with him, are buried with him, and rise with him” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 6). In celebrating baptism, therefore, we are indeed and necessarily acknowledging the extent to which the material world is caught up in systems of death, but are also proclaiming and celebrating union with Christ in his transforming death and resurrection.

Peter McGrail is a priest of the Liverpool Roman Catholic Archdiocese and is head of the Department of Theology, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University, UK.

Peter McGrail, “Initiation and Ecology: Becoming a Christian in the Light of Laudato Si’,” Liturgy 31, no. 2 (2016), 55-62.

God Continues to Create

In a time of grave international turmoil and disturbing news, we see more readily than at other times our need for the gifts of God’s presence in the midst of God’s people.

The January 2014 issue of Liturgy was on Good Worship. The article by Heidi Miller reflects on the respite God offers in worship –– through word and sacrament, prayer and song, offering and being given away as bread for the world.

Out of the chaos, amidst a community of exiles, comes an Advent announcement, “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you perceive it?” (Is 43:19). God continues to create in the wilderness, giving drink to people so that they might declare God's praise (Is 43:21) and enter into good worship, the kind God intended.  

 “The Word became flesh and dwelled among us.” John, the Gospel writer, now calls us to step back and gaze as he reaches into the creation story and introduces God's continuing creativeness that will change the course of history. The Spirit of God rests on Jesus. This creating, incarnational initiative of God comes and makes home . . . with and in us.

. . . Writing during the Reformation, when the temptation toward holding up spirit over matter came to be prized, [the Anabaptist Pilgram] Marpeck offers a theological anthropology, rooted in Christ, that takes the created and creative body seriously: 

Without the revelation of the Son no creature in heaven or on earth can recognize the Father's work (Matt. 11; Jn. 5). … For that reason the Son assumed human nature, to do human, bodily works—speaking words and doing deeds. Thus, physical eyes could see him, physical ears hear him, the physical body grasp and perceive him. 

[Pilgram Marpeck, “Response to Caspar Schwenckfeld,” in Later Writings by Pilgram Marpeck and His Circle, trans. Walter Klaassen, Werner Packull, and John Rempel (Kitchner: Pandora Press, 1999), 82.]

The primary address of God is in, with, and through us, because of Jesus. Good worship calls us, again and again, to see, hear, and perceive the new thing that is re-creating and incarnating among us as the body of Christ.  . . .  

 John shows us that Jesus’ interactions with people in this physical world are messy. They are ask-for-water-from-an-outcast, take-up-your-mat-and-walk, write-in-the-dirt, rub-mud-in-your-eyes, wash-one-another's-feet interactions. They show us that narratives enter the body and have implications for entire communities. We do well to follow Jesus as he walks in the dirt of our world, teaching us to write in the dirt, rub mud on our eyes, to ask for water from the outcast, and wash one another's tired feet.  

 Good worship that walks into the mess of this world attends to the imprinting of the body on a primal level. Rather than absenting the body in favor of a cognitive concept, good worship notices that worship happens in our bodies. We are imprinted as a physical people through physical means. While this may sound obvious, too often we are sitting in pews, passively listening or sleeping, trying to enter a cognitive digestion of the faith.
 “If I am a wise preacher, I will . . . employ language that helps the listeners to feel the bodily weight of the truth, to experience bowing and standing, leaning on God and being the self-responsible people they are called to be.” [Thomas Troeger, Imagining a Sermon (Nashville: Abingdon, 1990), 55-56.]

-- Heidi Miller is assistant professor of Christian worship at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas.

As we pray in these tenuous times for refugees and soldiers, diplomats and peacekeepers, those who are sacrificed and those who rescue, may our worship renew us as communities of mercy toward each other, ourselves, and all who daily make hard decisions.

Heidi Miller, “And God Saw that It Was Very Good: Toward a Theology of Good Worship,” Liturgy 29, no. 2 (31 Jan 2014): 31-36.