"When Words Become Flesh"

Rev. Ryan Jensen

Jeremiah 31: 7-14; John 1: 1-18

January 3, 2010

January 3, 2010.  This is the third day of the new year.  For those of us who have made New Year’s resolutions, it is also the third day that we have had to break those promises for personal improvement.   You know these kinds of promises:  We resolve to be more pleasant to others; promising that we will talk less, listen more, and finally get around to writing those thank you notes that have long since exceeded the statute of limitations of gratitude.  For church going people, we resolve to be better Christians through daily devotion to prayer or the reading of Scripture.  And there is the big one: we resolve to be more disciplined in our efforts of diet and exercise.  We finally want to fit into those pants that lurk in the dark corners of our closets... those pants that mock us every time that we go for the full fat ice cream or those sausage biscuits from Hardees.

When it comes to resolutions, surely the easiest one is this: resolve to be unresolved.  That way, when someone asks you how things are going, you don’t have to explain your personal failures or shortcomings.  You can simply respond, “I don’t know.”  And being that we have not resolved to be kinder to others, we can just stand there until the other person feels awkward enough to walk away, perplexed and maybe even insulted, but no longer asking those pesky questions about how we are doing.

  But this is not how it works, is it?  There is something inside most of us that demands improvement, especially this time of year.  Our motivation flows from the fact that we have a chance to begin anew.  There is no better time than the beginning of the year to get a fresh start.  In terms of that starting place, perhaps it is no coincidence that today’s text from the Gospel begins with, “in the beginning.”

For God, the beginning is far more reaching than what our imagination can grasp.  We, as God’s creation, have our limits.  As with all understandings of time, our years have a beginning and an end.  In the same way, our space is bound by limits.  This church has walls and we either are found inside or outside of them.  Speaking to our friends and neighbors, we say that we will be in Mobile or on the Eastern Shore.  Where one ends, the other begins.  For God, the beginning goes back indefinitely.  It doesn’t matter if you follow the Biblical creation story or if you are a strict Big Bang kind of person.  Whichever you choose, God was God before it.  And also with God was the Word.  And the Word was God.  And the Word became flesh.

Now, regardless of whether you are theologian John Calvin or physicist Stephen Hawking, this is an incredible series of statements to take in.  We are told that before time began, the Triune God existed.  This means that Jesus, the Word made flesh, has been here before the universe began.  Despite the celebration that we just honored on December 25 and the death that we will remember on Good Friday, Jesus has always been and continues to be timeless.  I wonder what we are to make of that.  Are we thankful that we have hindsight to see the whole story of Jesus or do we wish that we could have lived in that flash of an instant when Jesus walked the earth?  In the year 2003 and with this issue of Jesus’ timelessness, is our sense of belief and faith in Jesus Christ more or less resolved?

Maybe this should be the focus of our hopes and plans while the New Year is still fresh.  Maybe we should spend a little more time wondering what it means that the centerpiece of the Christian faith is a man who walked the earth over 2,000 years ago, yet who still lives on today.  What does it mean that God saw it fit to make God’s self present to us through a person who, physically speaking, would never make the cut on a football team, not to mention make the cut into society as whole.  People who live counter-culturally do not really fit into society, do they?

So why did God do it?  Why did God come to us through the humble servant of Jesus Christ?  Surely a political genius, a world class negotiator or a champion athlete would have been more impressive, right?  Well, maybe, but probably not.  The truth is that those kind of people do not normally hang out with the poor and the meek, do they?  You do not achieve celebrity status by hanging out with lepers.  It is Christ who came to save the poor in heart, poor in health and poor in wealth.  It is Christ who served as the light that darkness cannot overcome.   The Word was made flesh in order that everyone might be redeemed of the things that we cannot overcome.

This is where the flesh of Jesus and the flesh of humanity collide.  Our sins and our shortcomings are covered by the fully human and fully divine person of Jesus.  This is what we remember when we join around the table in the Lord’s Supper when we say to one another, “The body of Christ, broken for you.  The blood of Christ, shed for the forgiveness of sins.”  The flesh of Jesus was broken in order that we, as the Gospel reminds us today, are given the power to become children of God.  Children who were born not of blood or of out of our own willpower, but children who were – and are – born of God.

And so here we are.  Children of God who have received grace upon grace.  With Christmas behind us and still over 360 days of this New Year ahead, how do we receive the Good News that is shared with us today?  Remembering that disciples are people who follow, let us shift the focus of the Word of God to the ways that we consider our own words.  It is here that theologian Barbara Brown Taylor invites us to consider how we might add flesh to the words that we speak ourselves.  Taylor explains that until acted upon, words remain only, “abstract concepts – very good ideas that few people have ever seen.”  It is rather “the moment someone acts upon them [that] words become flesh.”

This can work out for good or bad, can’t it?  Let’s consider the words of love and hate.  When we act upon them, either something horrible or wonderfully powerful will happen.  It stands to reason that when we surround ourselves with words of love and hate that our behavior will be influenced in one way or the other.  Perhaps there is no greater example of how words are used – if not twisted – than during political elections.  Looking at campaign slogans from the last few years, we have heard words from both sides: Yes we can!  Real plans for real people.  Prosperity and progress.  A Kinder and Gentler Nation. What would have happened if any of those expressions had truly turned from abstract rhetoric into words that were acted upon and made flesh?   For all the good these slogans have accomplished, it is no wonder that some have chosen the more simplistic path such as Eisenhower’s “I like Ike.”

Looking to individual discipleship, what words would we choose?  Let’s take an easy one, starting with “peace.”  It’s easy to add flesh to the word peace, right?  Well, at first anyway.  Peace is easy to act upon until someone punches you in the nose.  At that moment, peace becomes more difficult to flesh out.  It should be simple enough to preach peace and tolerance until you discover that you are preaching to a child who is bullied at school or woman who is beaten.  For people such as these, the word peace might seem distant and impossible to achieve.

What about the words compassion and generosity?  Those are words that we can agree upon, right?  Again, it depends upon the person that you ask.  For the situation surrounding the homeless in Mobile, compassion and generosity are very volatile words these days.  It might be that downtown businesses and tourism are suffering because some places are, say, generously feeding breakfast to the homeless on week days.  Surely that kind of compassion and generosity must be stopped for the good of our city, right?  There is also the heated debate of health care reform in our nation.  Do the words compassion and generosity have a place within that conversation?

Let’s move on to words that a congregation should act upon, turning words into flesh.  Most congregations like to proclaim, “Come worship with us where it is “warm and welcoming.”  Warm and welcoming.  This concept is true until you ask someone to turn to the person sitting beside them to exchange hugs and handshakes while extending the peace of Christ or until you ask a visitor to stand up so that they can be acknowledged and welcomed.  Some people feel very strongly that this should happen while others would feel more comfortable having a root canal.

In the December edition of The Christian Century, there was mention of a pastor in Minnesota, who says that, “the clearer he is with his congregation about the cost of discipleship, the smaller his congregation gets.”  This pastor feels that churches “need visionary leaders and teachers who will challenge the status quo and make people uncomfortable in their pews… helping them to wake up to the many ways that our lives have been co-opted by the culture.”  Is this indeed what churches need?  Is this what it means to turn God’s truth into flesh?  Do I, as your Associate Pastor of Evangelism and Discipleship Formation, dare make you feel uncomfortable in your pews?  Do I preach at the risk of losing members, which would go against the very reason that I have been called to this church?  There will surely be times when the answer to this question is yes.

Thankfully, however, I do not feel that preaching and teaching God’s Word is always an either/or thing.  We can, at the same time, agree that our lives have been co-opted by the culture while praying together that God will help us to follow God’s truth and light.  We can, at the same time, take words such as “justice” and seek to discover the ways in which God intends us to use them.  The key to this is this: God must be at the center of our efforts.  God speaks, breathes and takes shape in the Words that we must follow.  Turning away from the words of Fox News, The New York Times, CNN, or whatever else we surround ourselves with, we must return to the humility and grace of God’s living Word.  Borrowing a phrase from Waylon Jennings’s Luckenbach, Texas, “maybe it’s time we get back to the basics of love” when discerning how words are to turn into actions.

So… returning to that example of how congregations such as this one can turn words into flesh when proclaiming that we are a “warm and welcome” place to worship… what does that look like?  Getting back to the basics, it begins when we dare to believe that God knew and loved us even before the universe was formed.  It begins when we dare to believe the Christmas story: that the Word was made flesh so that our sins would be redeemed through the gift of the Messiah.  It takes shape when we experience what Jeremiah proclaims today, when we rejoice in the dance, when we allow God to turn our mourning into joy, and when we are truly satisfied with the bounty of God’s grace.  When those expressions turn into action, we will be a people who overflow with God’s love and, therefore, our church will become a place that is indeed warm and welcome to others.   The word might just get out that yes, we truly believe that we are called to serve.

Getting back to those New Year’s resolutions, we will do well to include the same kinds of actions, hopes and beliefs into the midst of them.  If the Biblical story of God’s creation teaches us anything, it is that we are lost if we try to make it on our own.  We have our limits.  When trying to do anything, we must remember that only God can change us.  Only through the law of Moses and the grace and truth of Christ do we have direction.  When it comes to our resolutions of faith, we will do well to remember that “All things came into being through God and without God, not one thing came into being.”  If we truly seek to invite light into the darkness of our lives, and add flesh to the words that we speak, we must begin with the God who is the beginning of all.  Amen.