Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 27, 2011

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.

It’s Advent, that season of the church year in which we anticipate and prepare for the birth of Christ. Recently one of our number said something at our Sunday morning adult education forum that suggested to me something that it might well be worth spending some time on this Advent season. He said that he had been struggling recently with the question of just who this Jesus is. That is, after all, one of the central questions—perhaps the central question—of the Christian life. Jesus himself put it to his disciples. Jesus asked his disciples who people were saying that he is. They gave various answers. Then he asked them: “But who do you say that I am?” Mark 8:29 We are anticipating and preparing for his birth, but who is he anyway that we should make such a big deal out his getting himself born? Who do we say that he is? That question is so important for Christians that I decided that I would do a three part Advent sermon series on the question “Who are we waiting for?”

That question arises in the context of a Christian tradition that has seen Jesus as God Incarnate and as Savior more than it has seen him as a human being. Yet whatever else he may have been Jesus was a human being, and it is with his humanity that we must begin our effort to understand who he is for us. So today you get part one of this sermon series, Jesus as human.

As we await the birth of Jesus more than anything else we await the birth of a human child. A human baby. A baby boy not different from all the baby boys we have known in our lives. A squalling, pooping, nursing, spitting up baby boy. “Away In a Manger” may say “but little Lord Jesus no crying he makes,” but come on. We’re talking about a human baby here. A human infant at risk for SIDS, likely to get chicken pox, measles, the flu, or worse. A human being who would die one day like the rest of us. A baby born to a poor, unwed, teenage mother. A poor boy of no worldly status, with no real prospects for getting ahead in life. With a human father at the bottom of the social ladder. A real nobody in the eyes of the world, all those stories about his birth to the contrary notwithstanding. They were all written much later by people for whom he had gone from being nothing to being everything. But at first, at his birth, he was just another baby boy of no account in the world. It is certain that when he was born nobody but his parents even noticed.

And I need to ask you: Does it shock you, even just a little bit, to hear me talk about Jesus like that? I confess that it shocked me a little bit when I composed those lines about Jesus as an ordinary baby boy, as true as I think that they are. I think there’s a good reason for that shock. The Christian church has for so long proclaimed Jesus as God Incarnate, as God walking around on earth looking like a human being, that it’s really easy to think of him as God and forget that he was a human being; but before he was anything else, he was a male human being, first a baby boy, then a child, a youth, and finally a young man. Before he was anything else Jesus was a man, a human being like any other human being in his bodily make up. Before he was anything else, he was one of us.

He was one of us, and that really matters. It really matters because his call to us is to follow him. His call to us is to be like him, and if he were only God there’s no way we could be like him. I’m not at all sure I can really be like him even with him being truly a human being, but I know that I couldn’t be like him if he were only God. None of us humans could. We aren’t God, or even gods. In other mythologies of other cultures gods sometimes appear as humans, but they never truly are humans. Jesus is truly human, and that really matters. We can’t follow someone who only appears to be human but is really a god because we don’t just appear to be humans and not gods, we are humans and not gods. The great virtue of Christianity is that it says that in Jesus God didn’t just show up on earth appearing to be human. God actually became human in the person of Jesus. In Jesus we can see a model of what it truly means to be human only if Jesus truly is human. He was truly human, and that is why we not only should try to follow him, we actually can follow him. Robin Meyers, the author of the book we’ve been reading in the Sunday morning group, put it this way in a response he sent me to some questions I had sent to him: “One cannot emulate…that which is categorically different from oneself. Whether it is a sports hero, or a comic book character, we admire as a fan what we cannot possibly be expected to imitate. A human Jesus, on the other hand, takes away our excuses.”

Jesus calls us human beings to be like him, and because he is truly human we can be like him; but of course in order to do that we have to know who he was as a human being. What sort of human being was he? What does it mean for us to follow him? Follow him how? Follow him in what? In that book we read in the Sunday morning group in November I found a phrase that I think might be helpful in answering those questions. Robin Meyers, that author I mentioned above who is also the pastor of a large, progressive UCC church in Oklahoma City, has a term for Jesus that he uses more than any other. He calls Jesus “the Galilean sage.” Sage here doesn’t mean an herb you use in turkey dressing. It means a wise person. As a human being, quite apart from whether or not he was anything more than a human being (more about that next week), and quite apart from whether or not he did things mere humans can’t do (walk on water, raise people from the dead, and so on), Jesus was a wisdom person. He taught wisdom and he embodied wisdom. He taught and he embodied the wisdom of God. Of God yes, but he did it as human being; and that means we can do it too.

OK. Jesus was a sage, a wisdom person; but just what was the wisdom that he taught? There’s no way to give a complete answer to that question in a short sermon, or even in a long book. So let me suggest something that characterized his teaching generally rather than spend too much time on specific teachings, important as those are. We all know something about worldly wisdom. We know how the world works. We know what the world values. The world values power. The world values wealth. The world values success, prestige, and status. The world looks up to those who succeed in acquiring those things, and the world doesn’t much care how they got them or who got used and exploited along the way. The world is organized into nations, and the nations of the world routinely use violence against each other and against their own citizens. They use violence to gain territory, access to natural resources, or other things they think they need; and they don’t much care who dies in their efforts to get them. They use violence against their own citizens. They execute people they believe are criminals. They unleash the riot police and even the military on crowds that are making demands that those in power in the nation don’t like. All of those things are the ways of the world—the ways of Jesus’ world and the ways of our world.

If you want to know what Jesus taught about any particular subject, look first at what the world says about that subject. You’ll be pretty safe in assuming that Jesus taught the opposite. He taught nonviolence. About that there is no doubt whatsoever. He taught justice, and by justice he meant what the great prophets of the Jewish tradition meant by it—care for the poor, the needy, the marginalized, the vulnerable. He meant inclusion of the outcast. He valued the ones the world dismisses and ignores. He made the last first and said see me in “the least of these.” We saw some of that teaching in our reading from the Sermon on the Mount this morning. Jesus taught compassion not condemnation, love not hate, care not purity. In everything he said and did he turned the world’s wisdom on its head and taught the wisdom of God in its place.

And it is so easy to dismiss all of that teaching as some sort of otherworldly ideal that is so impractical as to become impossible in the world. Maybe it’s the wisdom of God, but we aren’t God. Maybe it gets lived out in some sort of heaven on some other plane of existence; but we live in this world, and in this world Jesus’ vision just doesn’t work. It is so easy to come to that conclusion, and that is why Jesus being first of all a real human being is so important. It is so important because the reality of Jesus’ humanity means that living in the wisdom that he taught and that he lived is a human possibility not merely a divine one. His thoughts are not beyond us, for they are the thoughts of a human being. His way of life is not beyond us, for it is the way of a human life. Jesus being truly human and not merely appearing to be human really does matter.

Yet at least since the fourth century CE the Christian church has focused much more on Jesus’ divinity than on his humanity. It has so emphasized his divine nature that his human nature has often been ignored. The church often makes him a God-Man to be worshipped rather than a God-filled human being to be followed. The church has so often made him the magic key to heaven’s gate rather than a model and guide for human life on earth. Yet what we prepare to celebrate is the birth of a real human baby. A baby boy not different from all the baby boys we have known in our lives. A squalling, pooping, nursing, spitting up baby boy. And that, my friends, is very good news indeed; for we await the birth of one who is one of us, one from whom we can truly learn, one whom we can truly follow. Thanks be to God. Amen.