On the Incarnation

“And while they were there, the time came for her baby to be born. She gave birth to her firstborn son. She wrapped him snugly in strips of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no lodging available for them.” – Luke 2:6-7

Kenda Creasy Dean, a United Methodist minister and professor at Princeton Seminary, once described God simply as “the One who made us, who loves us too much to lose us.”

God loves you too much to lose you.

If you are ever tempted to doubt that central gospel truth, all you have to do is look at the manger. God became a baby. How ridiculous. But love makes you do ridiculous things sometimes.

And God was going to do whatever it took. The Creator of heaven and earth would spend years producing nothing but poopy diapers. The Word of God (John 1:1) would strain his little developing brain to understand the words his Momma and Daddy were saying. The One destined to put an end to pain and wipe the tears from our eyes (Rev 21:4) would cling to his mother, crying over scraped knees and singed fingers. In him was life, and that life was the light of all people (John 1:4)—and yet, far too young, his life would be taken from him, and his body laid in a dark grave. In the words of Hark! the Herald Angels Sing, “Mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die.”

Because he would do whatever it took for us to be together, even live, even die. He just loves us too much to lose us.

That is the glorious message of the Incarnation, God's act of taking on humanity, becoming one of us to save all of us. Jesus, the Son of God, has eye lashes and ears, knuckles and two little toes, and all of it proclaims: “God so loved the world.”

This Sunday is Christmas, and I hope that your day is filled to the brim with joy and celebration. I hope you see loved ones you haven’t in a while. I hope you get some nice presents and eat something delicious. But more than anything, I hope you remember just how loved you are, that the sweet story of the child in the manger is the story of God’s powerful, relentless, bottomless love for you.

And may each of us respond to that love and be shaped by that love this Christmas and all the days of our lives.

The Gospel According to Hark!

The other day, I read (in one of Noah’s Christmas picture books, of all places) a verse from “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” that I don’t think I’ve ever heard before. Like so many of Charles Wesley’s lyrics, it’s dense with scriptural echoes and theological meaning:

Charles Wesley (1707-1788)

Come, Desire of nations, come!
  Fix in us Thy humble home:
Rise, the woman’s conqu’ring seed,
  Bruise in us the serpent’s head;
Adam’s likeness now efface,
  Stamp Thine image in its place:
Final Adam from above,
  Reinstate us in Thy love.

What is Wesley talking about? And what does it have to do with the birth of Christ?

This verse opens with a phrase from Haggai 2:7, which speaks of a day when “the desire of all nations will come.” The rest of the lines all connect to the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis and the way St. Paul applies that story to our lives in his letters.

First, Wesley alludes to Genesis 3:15. Immediately after discovering the deception that led humanity to sin, the Lord tells the serpent:

I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
    and you will strike his heel.

You can take that as a general statement about how much people hate snakes, but this verse has often been read as a reference to Jesus. He is the woman’s seed, her offspring, who will bruise the serpent’s head “in us,” who will conquer the devil’s influence in our lives.

Because of that influence, we need “Adam’s likeness,” the sin-wrecked inclinations and impulses that all humanity shares, to be ousted from our lives and replaced by the likeness of Jesus. He is the perfect image of God (Col 1:15), and he modeled for us what it would look like for human beings to reflect that image in our lives—like we were originally created to do (Gen 1:27). Jesus is the “Final Adam” (or, “last Adam,” 1 Cor 15:45) who established an alternative way to be descendants of Adam, trailblazing a new, holy path for humanity.

So, Mary’s baby boy came to stomp heads, to defeat the power of the devil, creating a chance for us to be the people we were created to be, the image of God. If we—to quote the United Methodist Church’s baptismal vows—accept the freedom and power that God gives us to resist evil, injustice, and oppression, then we can step out of the first Adam’s shadow, and begin new lives reflecting the Final Adam. We can abide in his love (John 15:9-10).

Wesley crammed all of that into a verse of a Christmas carol because he understood that Christmas, the Son of God becoming the Son of Mary, human like us, is the linchpin of all of these incredible, gospel promises of deliverance and new life. Jesus didn’t only come to die. He came to break the mold and reshape humanity. It’s because God became a man that we can hope to overcome sin. It’s because of the baby in the manger that we can “walk in newness of life” (Rom 6:4).

Christmas means you can be free from sin’s power.

Christmas means your life can be different.

“Adam’s likeness now efface, Stamp Thine image in its place."

The Doubting Prophet

Every year it’s a little surprising when gospel readings in Advent (the season leading up to Christmas) focus on John the Baptist, who’s basically the antithesis of holly and jolly. But Advent isn’t Christmas, and who better to read about during this time of preparation than “one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord’”? (Matt 3:3)

Besides, in Luke’s gospel, John’s story overlaps with the story of Christ’s birth. In Luke 1, a pregnant Mary goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth, also pregnant, with John. When Mary arrives, Elizabeth tells her, “as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy.” (1:44) John is already so attuned to the Holy Spirit that he recognizes the presence of Jesus in utero! Years later, John would have those feelings about Jesus confirmed emphatically when he baptized his cousin, and God the Father announced to everyone there: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” (Matt 3:16-17)

To me, this history with Jesus adds some weight to a question John asks in Matthew chapter 11. He’s been arrested by King Herod, and he sends messengers to Jesus from his prison cell with a single question: “Are you the Messiah we’ve been expecting, or should we keep looking for someone else?” (11:3 NLT)

John, who called Jesus “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29) and said he wasn’t worthy to untie Jesus’s sandals (1:27), is now not so sure. Is this really the king we’ve been waiting for, God’s anointed one?

The John the Baptist you meet in the gospels was a radically devoted servant of God, witnessed incredible things, and understood who Jesus was literally from the time he was in his mother’s womb. Yet, he still had questions and doubts in hard times, when reality didn’t match his expectations.

And Jesus doesn’t criticize him for that.

Jesus doesn’t express any exasperation or disappointment. He simply tries to answer John’s question and help him understand. “Go and tell John…” (11:4-6)

When I hear the Advent story of the bouncing baby in Luke 1, I think about the man that child grows into, and his skepticism and misgivings. And Jesus’s response reminds me that it’s okay to have doubts and questions. Almost everyone does at some point! But doubt isn’t the opposite of faith. Unbelief is the opposite of faith. If John no longer believed, he wouldn’t have bothered to ask his question. We want to know more and want to understand better because we want to keep holding on to Jesus, not because we’ve given up.

If you’re wrestling with questions right now, don’t think that Jesus is disappointed or angry. Jesus doesn’t want you to ‘just get over it’ or ‘just have more faith’. What Jesus wants is to try and answer your questions and help you understand who is he and what he’s up to, so that y’all can keep holding on to each other and doing this life together.