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December 25, 2005
The Trajectory of the Incarnation
Philippians 2: 5-11
Christmas Day 2005
Someone very dear to me in this congregation suggested I shouldn’t use the word “trajectory” in the title for a Christmas sermon. It just doesn’t sound very Christmassy.
But I have kept that un-Christmassy word because it really gets at what strikes me this year as I ponder the Christmas story. When Jesus was born He did not remain in that charming crèche—though we know that at the time that manger was not charming at all. It was a feed trough perhaps in a cave outside the inn. Mary did not remain sitting there gazing at him, with Joseph behind her, and shepherds and animals gathered around.
Paul explains the pattern to us in his version of the Christmas story. In Philippians 2 he reminds us that Jesus left a pretty remarkable place because the love of God needed to reach out to us. Behind this reaching out we remember the great tragedy that after God created us in His image and likeness, and put our first parents in Paradise where they had so many choices of good things to do, good places to go, good foods to eat, He said only one thing was off limits. And this one thing would hurt them. And like little children who see the fascination of the hot stove top, they reached out to touch that one thing that would hurt them. And so Adam and Eve polluted their fellowship with God. This was the start of sin and of death, two things repugnant to the holy Author of life.
But the Son of God, equal with God the Father in every way, emptied himself of all the prerogatives of Deity. As Charles Wesley put it in that great hymn we love to sing, “He emptied Himself of all but love.” And He who was the Mater of the universe took the form of a servant. Do you see why I am fascinated with the idea of the trajectory of the Incarnation?
Incarnation means “in flesh.” God moved away from the realm of pure, immaterial Spirit, and lived in a tent of flesh—as John puts it in John 1: 14. He moved out of heaven and into a human body, so that this body was both the very normal body of a baby boy and the dwelling place of God. God came very near in the baby boy born to Mary in Bethlehem’s manger. But it didn’t stop there.
Jesus left that manger scene in Bethlehem. There is a momentum to the story that is essential to the purpose of Jesus coming to be with us. In the details of the Christmas story this movement for a purpose comes out time and again.
How much more comfortable it would have been for Mary to remain in Nazareth to give birth. But they had to leave home and go to Bethlehem where there was no place for them except in a cattle stall. God needed to make clear that His plan embraced this earth at the lowliest level.
The angel told the shepherds, leave your comfortable resting place in the field and go to Bethlehem to see this child—about whom they could have not understood anything profound. But when an angel tells you to go, you go. After they saw the child they went into town and though, as shepherds, they were not credible to very many people, a lot of people wondered at what the shepherds told them. They were unwittingly the first Christian missionaries.
And then we see Joseph taking Mary and little Jesus to Egypt. Why? Because Herod was trying to kill Jesus. But also it was because God’s people had once been in Egypt as slaves. And God needed to give a sign that He would deliver them and all people from other kinds of bondage by having His Son, Jesus Christ come out of Egypt. So again we see the momentum of the Gospel touching Egypt. To this day Egyptian Christians reverently remember the places where according to their tradition Jesus stopped during this time there.
And then there were the Wise Men who had to leave their homes in the Orient and come to Bethlehem. And then they left Bethlehem, bearing their message of Him who was designated by that star they had seen in the East. The trajectory of the Gospel spread to the East by a star and then by the words of the Magi.
When Jesus began His special work He called to be with Him twelve men who had to leave the security and comfort of their homes to be with Him. Jesus made clear that the purpose of His way of life was outward reaching. They followed Him, literally walking with Him on the dusty roads of Palestine down to the unfamiliar city of Jerusalem.
On a hill outside Jerusalem Jesus told them they would be His witnesses not only there, but in the region around Jerusalem, Judea, and then north into Samaria, where the detested Samaritans lived—though it had been a Good Samaritan who showed he understood most what it was to love his neighbor as himself. And then they were to go to the detested Gentiles, those who were not in the least related to Abraham. Because the momentum of God’s grace sought out the hidden corners of the inhabited world. Thus, your forbears and mine, who were then barbarians in the forests of Germany and France, or naked Picts pursuing their blood-stained way of life in the north of the British Isles, all of us, from whatever dark place in the Gentile world it might have been, were able to receive the good news of God’s love, poured out in Jesus Christ.
And you and I can fully appreciate God’s gift only if we see how we fit into this momentum, this trajectory away from ourselves to others. I think of this world with all its self-absorbed people, billions of us. Peace is impossible because at every level of society self-absorbed people collide with other self-absorbed people. It happens in the home, so that home-life is a constant litany of distress. It happens between neighbors in a neighborhood. It happens on the job where self-absorbed people clash with each other. It happens on the city streets. It happens between nations.
The problem is complicated because we don’t recognize how our self-absorption is even wrong. We think it is right to defend our beliefs against the contrary beliefs of others. Pluralism has made us tense and defensive. We imagine that God needs us to defend Him. We lose sight of the fact that there just might be a bit of self-absorption in our defense of God.
We who love our nation forget that other people love their nations too. When I lived in India, I saw that people loved their nation. People in Germany, and Scotland, and Egypt, and Zambia love their nations. And if we are self-absorbed, forgetting this, our love of nation causes us to collide with others who love their nations.
We love our family, and lose sight of the fact that family-love is found in others too.
It is when we catch on to the spirit of the Gospel, that has a trajectory away from ourselves, and towards others that we understand what we believe. “He who was in the form of God did not count equality with God a thing to be clutched, but emptied Himself.” Here is the pattern not only of the ways of God, but of all who have believed in the Gospel. That’s how we can do as Paul told us the followers of Christ are to do, be agents of reconciliation of the world to God. Moving away from ourselves and toward others, toward others of every kind, we bear the Good News, and it shows before it can be heard.
This Christmas I remind you as I remind myself of the trajectory of the Incarnation. God reached out to us in Christ. Christ reaches out to others through us. Thus we can have peace—inside ourselves because we realize that we are living right, with others who find we are not on a collision course with them, and with God, because we have understood and lived the way He intended from the first, but now is possible because of His love poured out in Jesus Christ. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at December 25, 2005 11:00 AM