Streams of Living Water: The Incarnational Stream
Rev. Nancy Gowler Johnson
Puyallup First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

December 31, 2006
 

The wrapping paper is all put away.  Batteries installed.  Unwanted gifts discretely returned to the store.  Christmas dinner leftovers finished.  A few crumbs of Christmas cookies remain.

For most of our culture Christmas is over and done with.  There may be New Years Eve parties to be thrown, and New Years resolutions to be written and broken, but Christmas is past.

Except here, with us, the church.  We’ve spent the four weeks of Advent preparing ourselves, getting ready for Christ’s arrival, and now Christmas is finally here.  While the world sees Christmas as one frantic day of gift-giving and dinner-devouring, our celebration of Christmas lasts for 12 full days.

Last Sunday after worship some of the younger kids were helping me get out the figures for our crèche in the sanctuary.  Sheep and a cow, Mary and Joseph, shepherds… all were set up with the greatest of care by Ben, Fisher and Oliver.  I grabbed one more figure from the back, “Oh, it’s baby Jesus,” I said, “We can’t put him out yet.” 

“It’s Jesus!” Oliver said indignantly, “It’s Jesus!”  And he looked up at me as if I had just uttered the worst blasphemy he had ever heard in his young life.

I bent down to explain, “But it’s not Christmas yet.  Baby Jesus hasn’t been born… we’ve got just a little bit more time to wait, OK?”

That seemed to make sense to him, so he helped me safely secure Jesus back behind the sanctuary.

And now we find ourselves in the middle of the twelve days of Christmas, celebrating what can only be described as the most unbelievable of mysteries, that in the words of the Apostle Paul, “God was in Christ.”

John Shea wrote a wonderful poem, Sharon’s Christmas Prayer, that tells the Christmas story through the words and imagination of a five-year-old.

She was five,

    sure of the facts,

    and recited them

    with slow solemnity,

    convinced every word

    was revelation.

She said

    they were so poor

    they had only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to eat

    and they went a long way from home

    without getting lost.  The lady rode

    a donkey, the man walked, and the baby

    was inside the lady.

    They had to stay in a stable

    with an ox and an ass (hee-hee) but the

    Three Rich Men found them

    because a star lited the roof.

    Shepherds came and you could

    pet the sheep but not feed them.

    Then the baby was born.

    And do you know who he was?

Her quarter eyes inflated

    to silver dollars.

The baby was God!

And she jumped in the air,

    whirled round, dove into the sofa,

    and buried her head

    under the cushion

    which is the only proper response

    to the Good News

    of the Incarnation.[i]

All of the wonder, amazement, unbelievability of the incarnation can be seen in a young girl burying her head in the sofa.  How could we even dare to believe that God has come to us?  Here on earth, where we’ve managed to make a royal mess of God’s creation, our world, our lives?  And yet it is exactly this mystery we ponder during the days of Christmas - in the person of Jesus we can see the fullness of God.

“The word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory” the author of John’s gospel writes.  Eugene Peterson paraphrases it this way, “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.  We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, Generous inside and out, true from start to finish.

Incarnational spirituality flows from that gift of God in Christ.  God took on human flesh and bones and moved in next to us. 

• Recognizes the blessedness of creation
• The goodness of humankind; echoing the amazing proposal in Genesis that human beings were made in the image of God!!  You and I, all of us, named and blessed as good by our creator.
• There are some traditions who advocate a denial of our physical bodies, that they are somehow unclean, unworthy.  Not so, for Christianity!  The experiences of the body are part of our human existence and God calls them good!
• Incarnational spirituality does not remain rooted in first century Palestine.   Through the words of the Apostle Paul we see that the work of the incarnation continues to reach out through the sacramental understanding of the church as the body of Christ.  It is the church that lives out the incarnation   In second Corinthians Paul writes (2 Cor. 5:18-20) “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:  that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting their sins against them.  And God has committed to us the message of reconciliation.  We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.

 Thomas Tewell, pastor of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York tells of an event at his church’s midnight Christmas Eve service one year. As Tom walked into the sanctuary, he noticed church member Jim seated in the eleventh row.  Jim was a recovering alcoholic who was six months sober, and this was his first Christmas since his family had left him because of his alcoholism.  A family of four sat down two rows in front of Jim.  Seeing that family in front of him laughing and hugging one another at Christmas Eve service crushed Jim.  The feelings that overwhelmed him were more than he could handle – he had to have a drink.  As he came out the center aisle toward the narthex, he ran into Tom, who asked: “Jim, where are you going?”  “Oh, I’m just going out for a Scotch,” was the reply.

All of Tom’s alarms went off; he knew Jim was a recovering alcoholic.  He said, “Jim, you can’t do that.  Is your sponsor somewhere around?”  Jim answered, “It’s Christmas Eve, Tom.  My sponsor is in Minnesota.  There’s nobody who can help me.  I just came to church to try to find some hope, and I ended up sitting behind this family.  If I had my life together, I’d be here with my wife and kids too.”

Tom took Jim into the robing room to talk with a couple of other pastors.  It was time for the service to start, and Tom was due in the sanctuary.  As he welcomed the congregation he added “I have one final announcement.  If anyone here tonight is a friend of Bill Wilson [Bill Wilson was the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and members of AA often refer to themselves as friends of Bill W.] – and if you are, you’ll know it – would you please step out of the sanctuary for a moment and meet me in the robing room?”

From all over the sanctuary, women, men, and college students rose and made their way out.  Tom says, “And there while I was preaching in the sanctuary about incarnation, Word was becoming flesh in the robing room.”[ii]

An Incarnational spirituality recognizes that God is at work in everything we do. Too often we try and separate our religious selves on Sunday morning from our secular selves come Monday.  The Word did not become flesh in the world so that God might have an hour or two of your life on Sunday morning for you to sing and pray, listen to me, and take a bit of bread and juice.  The Word became flesh because God wants all of you!!  Every nook and cranny of your life - the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

Madeleine L’Engle once wrote, “There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the incarnation.”[iii]  That’s why we talk of Incarnational spirituality as discovering the sacramental life.  The Word become Flesh did not spend his entire life in dress clothes sitting in the Temple.  Jesus was out and about with the people, eating and drinking, talking and laughing, healing and listening.  All of human life is sacred, not just the bits and pieces we stingily offer to God. 

One of the aspects of Celtic spirituality I find so compelling is its sacramental understanding of human life and work.  The ancient Celtic Christians lived a life of prayer that was woven into their daily lives.  There were prayers to be said while one was kindling the hearth fire in the morning and putting it out at night, working the fields, milking cows, guarding a flock, hatching chicks, shearing the lambs, weaving at the loom, even a fisherman’s prayer.  Every part of one’s life and work was touched by prayer and with the knowledge that God was at work in the world.

Incarnational spirituality sees that God in all your experiences and all of your relationships (the good ones and the strained ones).  From your hours at work to your time at home.  Your strengths and your shortcomings.  Just as the folks who had experienced grace through AA could offer support to a man deep in despair - God works to bless and redeem all of us, from top to bottom, inside and out.

God hasn’t just moved into the neighborhood, God’s settled down right smack in the middle of your life.  And God wants to transform every piece of you, making you over, molding you into a disciple of Christ.

Christmas is a time of storytelling, and I want to end with one more story from one of the children’s books in our church library:

They say that if you creep into an evergreen forest late at night you can hear the trees talking.  If you listen very carefully to the whisper of the wind, you can hear the older pines telling the younger ones why they will never be perfect.  They will always have a bent branch here, a gap there...

But long, long ago all evergreen trees were perfect.  Each one took special pride in branches that sloped smoothly down from pointed top to evenly shaped skirt.

This was especially true in a small kingdom far beyond the Carpathian Mountains in Europe.  Here the evergreen trees were the most beautiful of all.  For here the sun shone just right, not too hot, not too dim.  Here the rain fell just enough to keep the ground moist and soft so no tree went thirsty.  And here the snow fell gently day after day to keep every branch fresh and green.

Each year as Christmas approached, the Queen's woodsmen would search the royal evergreen forest for the most perfect, most beautiful tree.  The one fortunate enough to be chosen would be cut on the first Saturday of Advent.  It would then be carefully carried to the castle and set up in the center of the great hall.  There it reigned in honor for all the Christmas celebrations.

Out in the hushed forest every evergreen hoped for this honor.  Each tree tried to grow its branches and needles to perfection.  All of them strained to have the best form and appearance.

One tree, Small Pine, grew near the edge of the forest and promised to be the most beautiful of all.  As a seedling it had listened carefully to the older trees who knew what was best for young saplings.  And it had tried so very hard to grow just right.  As a result, everything about Small Pine, from its deep sea-green color to the curling tip of its evenly spaced branches, was perfect.

It had, in fact, already overheard jealous whispers from the other trees.  But it paid them no mind.  Small Pine knew that if one did one's very best, what anyone else said didn't matter.

One cold night, when a bright full moon glittered on the crusty snow, a little gray rabbit came hoping as fast as he could into the grove of evergreens.  The rabbit's furry sides heaved in panic.  From beyond the hill came the howling of wild dogs in the thrill of the hunt.  The bunny, his eyes wide with fright, frantically searched for cover.  But the dark, cold trees lifted their branches artfully from the snow and frowned.  They did not like this interruption of their quiet evening when growing was at its best.

Faster and faster the rabbit circled as the excited howling of the dogs sounded louder and louder.

 And then Small Pine's heart shuddered.  When the terrified rabbit ran near, Small Pine dipped its lower branches down, down, down to the snow.  And in that instant before the wild dogs broke into the grove, the rabbit slipped under Small Pine's evergreen screen.  He huddled safely among the comforting branches while the dogs galloped by and disappeared into the forest.

In the morning the rabbit went home to his burrow, and Small Pine tried to lift its lower branches back up to their proper height.  It strained and struggled, but the branches had been pressed down too long through the night.  Oh well, Small Pine thought, no matter.  Perhaps the woodsmen wouldn't notice a few uneven branches near the ground in a tree so beautiful.

Several days later a terrible blizzard lashed the land.  No one remembered ever having so much wind and snow.  Villagers slammed their shutters tight while birds and animals huddled in their nests and dens.

A brown mother wren had become lost in the storm.  With feathers so wet she could barely fly, she went from one large evergreen to another looking for a shelter.  But each tree she approached feared the wren would ruin its perfect shape and clenched its branches tight, like a fist.

Finally, the exhausted wren fluttered toward Small Pine.  Once more Small Pine's heart opened and so did its branches.  The mother wren nestled on a branch near the top, secure at last.  But when the storm ended and the bird had flown away, Small Pine could not move its top branches back into their perfect shape.

In them would be a gap evermore.

Days passed and winter deepened.  The packed snow had frozen so hard that the deer in the forest could not reach the tender ground moss, which they ate to survive.  Only the older, stronger deer could dig through the icy snow with their hooves.

One little fawn had wandered away from his mother.  Now he was starving.  He inched into the pine grove and noticed the soft, tender evergreen tips.  He tried to nibble on the, but every tree quickly withdrew its needles so the tiny deer teeth couldn't chew them.

Thin and weak, he staggered against Small Pine.  Pity filled the tree's heart and it stretched out its soft needles for the starving fawn to eat.  But alas, when the deer was strong enough to scamper away, Small Pine's branches looked very ragged.

Small Pine wilted in sorrow.  It could hear what the larger, still perfect trees were saying about how bad it looked.  A tear of pine gum oozed from the tip of a branch.  Small Pine knew it could never hope for the honor of being the Queen's Christmas tree.

Lost in despair, Small Pine did not see the good Queen come with the woodsmen into the forest.  It was the first Saturday of Advent, and she had come to choose the finest tree herself because this was a special celebration year in the history of her kingdom.

As the royal sleigh, drawn by two white horses, slowly passed through the forest, her careful eye scanned the evergreens.  Each one was hoping to be the royal choice.

When the Queen saw Small Pine, a flush of anger filled her.  How could such an ugly tree with so many drooping branches and gaps be allowed in the royal forest?  She decided to have a woodsman cut it to throw away and nodded for the sleigh to drive on.

But then... she raised her hand for the sleigh to stop and glanced back at the forlorn little pine.

She noticed the tracks of small animals under its uneven needles.  She saw a wren's feather caught in its branches.  and, as she studied the gaping hole in its side and its ragged shape, understanding filled her heart.

"This is the one," she said, and pointed to Small Pine.  The woodsmen gasped, but they did as the queen directed.

To the astonishment of all the evergreens in the forest, Small Pine was carried away to the great hall in the castle.  There it was decorated with shimmering, silver stars and golden angels, which sparkled and flashed in the light of thousands of glowing candles.

On Christmas Day a huge Yule log blazed in the fireplace at the end of the great hall.  While orange flames chuckled and crackled, the Queen's family and all the villagers danced and sang together around Small Pine.  And everyone who danced and sang around it said that Small Pine was the finest Christmas tree yet.  For in looking at its drooping, nibbled branches, they saw the protecting arm of their father or the comforting lap of a mother.  And some, like the wise Queen, say the love of Christ expressed on earth.

So if you walk among evergreens today, you will find, along with rabbits, birds, and other happy living things, many trees like Small Pine.  You will see a drooping limb, which gives cover, a gap offering a warm resting place, or branches ragged form feeding hungry animals.

For, as have many of us, the trees have learned that living for the sake of others makes us most beautiful in the eyes of God.[iv]