Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 21, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Well, it’s that time of year again. Next Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent. I won’t be here next Sunday. I’ll be in Colorado visiting my brother. Maybe that’s why already this past week I started thinking Advent thoughts. Or maybe it’s because in the retail world that surrounds us it’s already Christmas. Whatever. We are about to enter that time of preparation for the birth of Jesus. That’s a pretty big deal with us. Jesus of course is what—or rather who—Christianity is all about. I recently heard a clergy colleague say that someone once complained that she talked about Jesus too much in church. Which is pretty funny when you think about it, seeing as how it really isn’t possible to talk too much about Jesus in a Christian church, not if it really is Christian. The reason I don’t think I could ever be Unitarian, or Jewish, or anything else but Christian isn’t because there is anything wrong with those other traditions. It’s because I’d miss Jesus. Jesus is central to my faith.

Jesus is central to the Christian faith. It may seem odd that I find it necessary even to say that in this Christian church, but I do find it necessary to say it. I have to say it because I am concerned—very concerned—that liberal, progressive Christianity—our kind of Christianity—is losing sight of Jesus. It is losing sight of who Jesus has been for Christians almost from the very beginning of the faith. To be more specific, progressive Christianity is losing the ancient Christian concept of the Incarnation.

My concern that progressive Christianity in general and the UCC in particular is losing the concept of the Incarnation comes most immediately from my work on the Committee on Ministry of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ. That Committee is the body that, among many other things, approves candidates for ordination. Part of the process for approving candidates for ordination is examining the candidates on their theology. In those examinations they rarely use incarnational language. They speak of Jesus as a great moral teacher, as a prophet, as a model for human life. They rarely speak of Jesus as the Son of God Incarnate, as the Word become flesh. Especially with the candidates from progressive seminaries like Seattle University or Pacific School of Religion (the UCC seminary in Berkeley, California), we are very unlikely to hear incarnational language from them.

We do not require theological uniformity here, and I invite you as always to consider what I have to say and to reach your own conclusions. As for me, I am convinced that progressive Christianity must cling to the Incarnation; and I think that some understanding of the truth that the doctrine of the Incarnation tries to express is vital for Christianity. It is what distinguishes Christianity from the other world religions, in particular from Judaism and Islam. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong about Judaism or Islam. The Christian way is not necessarily superior to their ways for everyone; but the Christian way is different, and it is largely our understanding of Incarnation that makes Christianity different. The concept of the Incarnation expresses a truth that lies at the very heart of the Christian faith. So the questions I want to ask this morning are: What then is that truth that the doctrine of the Incarnation tries to express, and why does it matter?

The truth that the Incarnation expresses is that in Jesus Christians have seen more than a man. It is that Christianity has experienced him from his time to ours as embodying the presence and the will of God in a way that is not only different in degree from the way any other human embodies that presence and that will but different in kind. Jesus is for Christianity a unique expression of God. Christians have always seen God in Jesus in a way unlike how we see God in any other person. The classical creeds use obscure terminology to express this truth. They say he is homoousios, of one substance, with God the Father. They say that he has two natures—physis—in one person—prosopon. In this obscure terminology they are saying in the language of their time that in the human being Jesus of Nazareth we see God. That is the truth that the doctrine of the Incarnation tries to express.

It is no wonder that people today flee from the language of the ancient creeds as fast as they can. The average citizen may have argued intelligently and passionately about those terms in the fourth century. No one does today. No one even understands those terms today. The pitched battles of the fourth century over whether Jesus was homoousios (of one substance) with the Father or only homooisios (of similar substance) strike us today as absurd. That the language of the creeds is obscure to us at best does not mean, however, that the truth that that language is trying to express is no longer valid. It certainly doesn’t mean that that truth is obscure or absurd. It isn’t. It is central to the way in which Christians have always found their way to God in and through Jesus Christ. It expresses the truth that when Christians follow Jesus they experience themselves as following so much more than a man. They experience themselves as following nothing less than God in human form. It expresses the truth that the way Jesus taught us is much more than the way of a man, however good a man he may have been. It expresses the truth that in the way of Jesus Christians see the way of God.

Many people today, including many Christians today, have a lot of trouble with that truth, and I think it is important to consider why they do. There may be many reasons, but I am convinced that one reason why so many people today have trouble accepting the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is that we insist on understanding the Incarnation as fact rather than as symbol. We are out of the habit of symbolic thinking. We have lost the art of symbolic thinking. Without even being aware of it we automatically understand statements, even theological statements like the doctrine of the Incarnation, literally, that is, factually. When we hear someone confess that God the Son became human in the person of Jesus of Nazareth we immediately try to understand that confession as fact, and as fact we can’t make it make sense. We immediately try to understand the Incarnation as physical reality, and as physical reality we can’t make it make sense. If we can get ourselves at long last to understand statements like the doctrine of the Incarnation as symbolic most of the difficulty we have in accepting them will fall away. A symbol is a thing or a word, or in the case of the doctrine of the Incarnation a concept, that uses the things of ordinary experience, in this case words, to point beyond itself to a transcendent reality to which it can point but which it cannot capture, cannot define. The statement “God the Son became human in Jesus of Nazareth” is not a literal, factual statement, it is a symbolic one. It expresses a spiritual truth not a physical one. There is no point in trying to figure out the mechanics of it, for it is not a mechanical statement. The question to ask of the doctrine of the Incarnation is not “did it happen” but “what does it mean?” What is the transcendent truth to which that statement points? And does that transcendent truth speak to us and convey ultimate meaning to us? If it does the question of whether or not it is factual becomes simply irrelevant.

The transcendent truth of the Incarnation is that for us Christians God comes to us in and through the person of Jesus Christ. We Christians know God in and through Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ presents us Christians with as full a revelation of the nature of God as our human minds can possibly comprehend. How it is that God comes to us through Jesus Christ remains a mystery, but the symbol of the Incarnation both preserves that mystery and expresses the truth in the mystery. It invites us not to understand it cognitively but to enter into it spiritually. It invites us not to explain it but to celebrate it, not to parse it logically but to live into it. We are to approach it not with logic but with wonder, not with rational inquiry but with awe. We are not to dissect it but to worship God in and through it. If we can do that we just might feel its spiritual power. We just might feel God reaching out for us through it and find ourselves using it to reach back to God, to make our connection with God in it. As a factual statement the Incarnation may be an impossibility. As a symbolic statement it has the power to save us, to heal us, and to make us whole.

That, in the end, is why it is so important for all Christianity, including also progressive Christianity, to hold onto the Incarnation. It is what makes Christianity Christian. More importantly, it expresses our Christian experience that in Christ Jesus we experience God with us. We experience God entering personally into human life. Into the joy of human life but even more importantly into the struggle and the tragedy of human life. In him we experience God entering even into the reality and the pain of human death. Without the Incarnation we find none of that in Jesus Christ. We find only a very good man, and there have been lots of really good men and women in human history. We find only a man the powers executed because they could not stand his truth telling, and there have been lots of women and men executed because the powers could not stand their truth telling. Most importantly for me, without the Incarnation Jesus’ death has no special meaning. With the Incarnation his death has, for me, meaning that gets me through life and when the time comes, I pray, will enable me to face my death with courage and hope.

So let us cling to the Incarnation. Let us find our connection with God in it. Let us find God’s presence with us in it. Let us find ultimate meaning for our lives and for our deaths in it. As we prepare to celebrate Christmas let us remember that we are celebrating not only the birth of a great man, the birth of a prophet, the birth of a model of human life. We are celebrating nothing less than the coming of God into the world. We are celebrating the birth of Immanuel, God with us. And that, my friends, is worth celebrating indeed. Amen.