Tag incarnation

And the Logos Became Flesh

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Christmas Day

John 1:1-18

I have a confession.  I deeply and truly love Christmas, but the sheer enormity of it leaves me flummoxed.   I’m not talking about all the shopping or all the bustle and preparation at home and at church.  I’m not even grumping about the over-the-top commercialism or all the different greeting card interpretations of the “true meaning” which can put you in a psychological sugar coma if you try to swallow them all at once.   

I’m talking about the daunting task of trying to convey a genuine and meaningful understanding of The Incarnation, the idea that the mystery we call God, the Maker of Everything, came to us as one of us—the idea that God “became flesh and lived among us” from gestation to birth to death as a particular person in a particular place and in a particular time so that we could begin to more fully understand that God is with us in all persons, in all creatures, in all creation, and at all times.

That thought, that idea, that reality that we call The Incarnation is so enormous and mind-boggling that it’s really tempting to retreat into the less cosmic halo of ideas that hover around that manger in Bethlehem, ideas like innocence and love personified and new beginnings.  Those are all good, true and valuable things.  They are meaningful parts of the package.  But the goodness, truth, new beginnings and love we see in that holy child become even more potent when we begin to truly understand what God is doing in that manger in Bethlehem.

When the early followers of Jesus began to write down their understanding of who Jesus was and what he was about, when they began to explain what they meant when they called him Christ—Christos—the anointed one, it’s clear that they saw him as something more than just a great spiritual teacher or religious leader.   You don’t have to read very far in these early writings to discover that these followers of Jesus thought there was something of cosmic importance about him.  Early on they called him the Son of God but that description didn’t seem to be enough for some of them.  It didn’t seem to fully capture the cosmic fullness of what they had experienced in Jesus the Christ.  

“He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word,” said the writer of Hebrews.[1]  “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of creation,” wrote St. Paul, “for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible…all things have been created through him and for him…for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven…”[2]

Late in the first century, a writer we’ve come to know as John sat down to write his account of Jesus.  He wasn’t interested in creating just another chronicle of the life of Jesus as others had done; he wanted to explore the meaning of Jesus.  He wanted to make it clear that Jesus the Christ was not someone who could be defined, contained or constrained by geography or time or even philosophy, because the God of all geography and time and philosophy was and is somehow present in him.  

John began his gospel like this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.  What has come into being in him was life, and that life was the light of all humanity.  The light shines on in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it…. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we gazed on his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

The language of this prologue is pure poetry.  But it’s also philosophy.  And in a strange, farsighted way, John was brushing up against physics.  

The Greek word we translate as “Word” is logos.  Logos was a word that ancient philosophers loved to play with and because of that we have numerous ways to translate it.  One of the oldest meanings of logos was story or narrative.  Where does your mind go if you hear In the beginning was the story, and the story became flesh and lived among us?  

Logos could also mean content or reason or statement.  Other philosophical meaningsincluded, order, idea, blueprint, primordial template, primal thought, or intention.  

Logos became flesh and lived among us.  The metaphysical became physical.  If that sounds too esoteric, consider quantum physics.  

 Energy moves through quantum fields as abstract mathematical wave functions.  When wave functions are observed, they tend to collapse into particles.  Particles continually move through patterns in a kind of quantum dance, always moving toward closeness, joining, partnering, combining.  Fermions dance with bosons.  Neutrinos, muons, gluons, leptons and quarks assemble themselves into protons, neutrons and electrons which assemble themselves into atoms which assemble themselves into molecules we call elements.  Hydrogen and carbon molecules dance together to form the four essential organic compounds: nucleic acids, proteins, lipids and carbohydrates.  And out of all of this comes life.  The Word, the Story, the Pattern, the Intention, the Thought becomes flesh and dwells among us.  

The great British astrophysicist James Jeans wrote: “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.  Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the field of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as a creator and governor of the realm of matter… We discover that the universe shows evidence of a designing or controlling power that has something in common with our own minds.”[3]

This is The Incarnation.  The great Thought of God expressed in the whole universe condensed itself into a singular human life and lived among us.  And why would God do that?  

Love.

Teilhard de Chardin saw love as the driving force of the universe.  “For Teilhard, love is a passionate force at the heart of the Big Bang universe, the fire that breathes life into matter and unifies elements center to center; love is deeply embedded in the cosmos, a ‘cosmological force.’”[4]

God is Love, we read in 1 John.  “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

Love became flesh and lived among us.  And still lives among us.  And within us.  And around us.  And beyond us.  

Love…God… was not content to be an abstract idea or a mere sentiment.  God, the Author of Life, the One in whom we live and move and have our being is Love with a capital L.  Love Personified…and Love is all about relationship.  Christmas is when God, the Love that founded the universe, showed up as one of us in order to show us in person just how much we are loved and in order to teach us to love each other more freely and completely. 

Love became flesh and lived among us so that we might learn to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and love our neighbors as ourselves.  

Love didn’t come to us as a king or potentate to lord it over us.  Love came as a poor baby among a poor and oppressed people far from the centers of privilege and power in order to show us that “the fire that breathes life into matter and unifies elements center to center,” is alive in and breathing life into all of us and wants to unify us with each other center to center and heart to heart.  

It’s an enormous idea, this thing called Christmas, this Incarnation.  This idea that the Word became flesh encompasses everything we see and everything we don’t see.  It speaks in poetry then carries us into the depths of philosophy and physics.  It warms the heart and boggles the mind.  It is, quite literally everything.  And the beating heart of it is love.

To even begin to understand the Incarnation, we have to open our minds and our hearts.  As another early follower of Jesus wrote: “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”[5]

Merry Christmas

[1] Hebrews 1:3

[2] Colossians 1:15

[3] James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, as quoted by Ilia Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, p. 40

[4] Ilia Delio, ibid., p.43

[5] Ephesians 3:18-19

Our Down to Earth God

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. –Luke 2:9 (NRSV)

It’s funny how you can look at something a hundred times or more and then one day someone will point out something you hadn’t noticed and the whole thing looks different to you.  That happened to me a couple of years ago when a colleague pointed out one simple word in Luke’s Christmas story that had always just flown right by me.

Stood.

The angel stood before them.  On the ground.

In all the years of reading or hearing this Christmas story I had always imagined this angel and the multitude of the heavenly host hovering in the air.  I think the Christmas carols taught us to picture it that way.  Angels we have heard on high.  It came upon a midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the earth.  

But that’s not what it says in the Gospel of Luke.  The angel stood before them.

If you were a shepherd in a field on a dark night, it would be pretty unsettling to have an angel appear in the air above you making announcements, but at least if the angel is in the air there’s some distance between you—a separation between your environment and the angel’s.  But if the angel suddenly appears in front of you standing on the same ground you’re standing on, shining with the glory of the heavens… well I think my knees would turn to rubber.  And then imagine what it feels like when the whole multitude of the heavenly host is suddenly surrounding you and singing Glory to God.

Angels in the air feels slightly safer than angels on the ground.  Slightly.  If the angels are above, that means that they came from above.  It means that heaven is “up there” somewhere.  It doesn’t mess with the way we understand the spiritual cosmos.  But if the angels appear standing in front of us or behind us or around us, what does that say about heaven?  Could it be that heaven, the dwelling place of the angels, is not just “up there” but also here, with us?  Around us?  Could it mean that the angels of God are standing near us all the time and they simply choose not to show themselves?  Or that we’re just blind to their presence? Could it mean that this ground we walk on and build on and live on is also part of the dwelling place of God—so holy ground?

The angels didn’t bend near the earth.  They stood on it.  

We have this tendency, we humans, to want to separate the material from the spiritual, the divine from the physical.  We are such binary, black and white thinkers in a universe that’s full of colors and shades of gray.  We want here to be here and there to be there.  We want to put borders on oceans and talk about territorial waters!  We want to draw a clear and well defended line between our country and the country next door.  So it’s not surprising that we’ve assumed that there is a border between heaven and earth.

We seem to be most comfortable when there’s a little distance between us and angels, a little distance between us and God.  That seems to be the way most people talk about it, anyway.  “Put in a good word with the man upstairs,” they say.  And then there’s that song: “God is watching from a distance.”

But that’s not what Christianity says.  That’s not what Christmas says.  The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.  In him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.  Not from a distance, but right in front of us.  With us.  As one of us.

We have trouble seeing the presence of God, seeing Christ in creation.  We have trouble seeing Christ in each other.  We even have trouble understanding Christ in Jesus.  How can Jesus be both divine and human?  We struggle to wrap our minds around that idea, so we have a tendency to make him either all human or all divine.  We picture that baby in the manger with a halo, and it doesn’t cross our minds that he might need to breastfeed and burp and need his diapers changed.

Christmas, the mystery of the incarnation, tells us that God is not a bearded old man watching us from the clouds, a deity who is willing to give us what we ask if we are really good or strike us down with a thunderbolt if we’re bad.  That’s not God.  That’s Santa Claus.  Or Zeus.   

God, the Author of Life, the One in whom we live and move and have our being is Love with a capital L.  Love Personified…and Love is all about relationship.  Christmas is when God, the Love that founded the universe, showed up as one of us in order to show us in person just how much we are loved and in order to teach us to love each other more freely and completely. 

“We need to see the mystery of incarnation in one ordinary concrete moment,” wrote Richard Rohr, “and struggle with, fight, resist, and fall in love with it there. What is true in one particular place finally universalizes and ends up being true everywhere.”  In other words, God is present everywhere, in, with, and under everything.  Including you.  And me.  And all those people we’re inclined not to like.  But to really grasp this idea, we need to first see God fully present in one particular person.  We need to see God in this particular baby.  This human baby

That, in the end, is what Christmas, the incarnation, is trying to tell us.  Christmas is God’s way of teaching us that there never really was any distance between heaven and earth, between the divine and the human, between the spiritual and the material.  Christmas is God proving once again that Christ is in, with, and under all the things—all things—including all the things we think we oversee and all the things we overlook.  Christmas is angels standing on the earth singing to shepherds and surrounding them with the glory of the Lord to remind them that they, too, are spiritual beings immersed in a human experience.  

Christmas is God’s love made visible.  Pope Francis said, “What is God’s love? It is not something vague, some generic feeling. God’s love has a name and a face: Jesus Christ, Jesus.”  I would add that, if you open your heart and your mind to it, God’s love can have your face, too.

Love is vulnerable—and what’s more vulnerable than a baby?  God comes to us as a baby because it’s easy to love a baby.  It’s easy to be vulnerable with a vulnerable infant.

Christmas is earthy and concrete and vulnerable.  It enters the world surrounded by the homey smell of a stable.  It needs to be fed at a mother’s breast.  It needs its diapers changed.  It cries when it’s hungry and shivers when it’s cold.  It spits up a little bit on your shoulder.  It looks out at the world with brand new eyes and tries to see and understand.  Most of all, it reaches out to be picked up and held close to your heart.  Christmas wants to be loved and to give love.  

Christmas is our down-to-earth God made manifest.  Yes, gloria in excelsis deo, glory to God in the highest, but glory, too, to God on earth where the angels stand to sing to shepherds, because the Spirit of God is in them, too, and God loves them like crazy.  Just like God loves you.

My prayer for you this night is that you would enter deeply into the concrete, down-to-earth, human and divine mystery of incarnation.  May your eyes and ears be opened to the angels who stand upon the earth and minister to all God’s children.  May you come to see Christ incarnate, permeating all creation.  May you come to see that you are always and everywhere standing on holy ground.  May you dispense with artificial borders in your heart, in your mind, and in this lovely world.  And may you come to see yourself and all the others who share this world with you as spiritual beings immersed in a human experience.  Most of all, though, may you know that you are loved. 

May Christ be born anew in your heart this night and every night.  In Jesus’ name.

Crazy Bread

Steve Beckham 3 Comments

John 6:56-69

When you think about it objectively, religion is kind of strange.  The whole idea of it, if you step back and look at it from a certain perspective, is just king of odd.  The idea that if we meet regularly and perform certain rituals and pray a certain way and sing certain songs in a certain way, somehow God, the almighty, all powerful, omniscient Maker of the Universe, will like us better or come closer to us or overlook our bad behavior or give us things—that whole idea is, on the face of it, kind of bizarre.  And yet, that seems to be the way a great number of people understand God and church and faith and religion in general.  

Years ago, the late George Carlin had a very funny routine about all this.  I’m going to change one or two of his words because I don’t want to say them in church, but here’s what he said:

“When it comes to [bull puckey], big-time, major league [bull puckey], you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest [bull puckey] story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time!

“But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good [bull puckey] story.” 

I have to tell you, if I thought for half a minute that God was anything like that, I’d be an atheist, too.  And the sad fact is, that this is exactly how a lot of religion and the Christian faith is presented and represented.  You think I’m exaggerating?  Go watch religious TV for a day and get back to me.  The picture you get is that God is distant, generally ticked off and inclined to be cranky, and it’s a good thing Jesus is there as our go-between because he keeps talking the Father down when he’s just itching to wipe us out altogether.  Except that in a lot of these “Christian” broadcasts, they think Jesus, himself, is going to come back any minute now  to settle our hash.  

Yikes!  He’s making a list, checking it twice, and you better believe he knows who’s naughty and who’s nice.  That’s not God!  That’s Santa Claus—and not in a fun way.  That’s Zeus throwing thunderbolts from Olympus!    

Richard Rohr said, “Jesus did not come to change God’s mind about us.  Jesus came to change our minds about God.  God did not need Jesus to die on the cross to decide to love humanity. God’s love was infinite from the first moment of creation; the cross was just Love’s dramatic portrayal in space and time.”[1]  

Instead of responding to our violence with more violence, God, in Jesus, endured our violence and responded with grace, love, forgiveness and resurrection.  Jesus came to give us a new understanding of who God is and how God is at work in the world so we could have a fresh start in our relationship with God and with each other.

If God and Jesus are not punishing, vindictive, or violent, then we have no excuse for being that way.  Ever.  

Jesus is the human face of the Cosmic Christ—the nexus where spirit and matter intersect.  The Gospel of John[2] tells us that “all things came into being through him.”  In Colossians we see it spelled out a different way.  “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible…—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”[3]

This is not an invisible, cranky old Sky Man watching from a distance.  This is not Zeus or Santa Claus keeping score to determine rewards and punishments.  This is God who has poured the divine self into all of creation to infuse everything with love and goodness.  This is Christ in, with, and under not only the bread and wine of the table, but all things.  In him all things hold together.

In other words, there’s more than meets the eye in everything you see or touch.  There’s more than meets the eye in everything.  Period.  As it says in Ephesians, Christ is in all and through all.[4]

It’s like Crazy Bread at little Caesar’s.  If you just glance at it, you’ll just see breadsticks.  If you pick one up, though, you’ll find it kind of slippery because it’s slathered in butter and dusted with granules of Parmesan.  And if it happens to be a piece of stuffed Crazy Bread, the minute you bite into it you’ll discover a surprise because it’s filled with melted mozzarella.  There’s more to it than meets the eye.  If you pass it up because you think it’s just a breadstick, you’ll miss the surprise. You’ll miss the experience.

When Jesus was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum, he said, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”[5]  

He wanted us to understand that he is incarnate, God is incarnate, in all things. The world is full of the life and light of Christ.  Yes, Christ is absolutely present in the bread and wine of communion.  But also in the soil where the wheat grew, and in the stalk of the plant and in the grains that were ground into flour.  He wants us to understand that he was incarnate in the vine and the grape and the yeast that ferments it into wine.  He wants us to understand that he is present in our coming together at the table in the same way he is present when water that bonds with flour to make dough, creating a new thing altogether—a thing that is still water and flour but also something different, something greater, something more.  He wants us to understand that he is present in the trials and troubles we share the same way he is present in the fire and heat that bakes the bread.  He wants us to understand that “taste and see the goodness of the Lord”[6] is more than a poetic metaphor—it’s an invitation to open our eyes and broaden our understanding so we can see Christ, so we can begin to see that in him all things hold together.  It’s an invitation to hold all life more dearly—not just ours, all life—because in him was life, and life is the light of humanity[7].  And by that light we understand that the life of Christ is infused into all living things and the planet itself.  By that life we participate in the eternal cycle of life, death, and resurrection—like the grains of wheat that fall to the earth and die but rises again in the fullness of a new existence.

“The words I have spoken,” said Jesus, “are spirit and life.”[8]  He went on to acknowledge that some people had difficulty with what he was saying.  Some took him far too literally when he talked about eating his flesh and blood.  They were offended.  They didn’t understand that it was his words that carried spirit and life.  They didn’t understand that he was the Word—the Word that became incarnate, embodied, living among us full of grace and truth.  The things he said didn’t fit the context of their religion—or at least not as they understood their religion.  So they turned away.

As I said at the beginning, religion is an odd thing.  It can help us understand or it can get in the way of our understanding.  It can open our hearts and minds, or it can close them.  It’s important to remember that Jesus didn’t come to give us a religion.  He came to show us the love of God in person.  He came so that we may have life in all its abundance.[9]

[1] A Nonviolent Atonement (At-One-Ment); Fr. Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation; 10/12/16

[2] John 1:3 ff

[3] Colossians 1:15 ff

[4] Ephesians 1:23; 4:6

[5] John 6:56 ff

[6] Psalm 34:8

[7] John 1:3

[8] John 6:63

[9] John 10:10

Our Down-to-Earth God

Steve Beckham 5 Comments

Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. –Luke 2:9 (NRSV)

It’s funny how you can look at something a hundred times or more and then one day someone will point out something you hadn’t noticed and the whole thing looks different to you.  That happened to me last week when a colleague pointed out one simple word in Luke’s Christmas story that had always just flown right by me.

Stood.

The angel stood before them.  On the ground.

In all the years of reading or hearing this Christmas story I had always imagined this angel and the subsequent multitude of the heavenly host hovering in the air.  I think the Christmas Carols taught us to picture it that way.  Angels we have heard on high.  It came upon a midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the earth.  

But that’s not what it says in the Gospel of Luke.  The angel stood before them.

If you were a shepherd in a field on a dark night, it would be pretty unsettling to have an angel appear in the air above you making announcements, but at least if the angel is in the air there’s some distance between you—a separation between your environment and the angel’s.  But if the angel suddenly appears in front of you standing on the same ground you’re standing on, shining with the glory of the Lord… well I think my knees would turn to rubber.  And then imagine what it feels like when the whole multitude of the heavenly host is suddenly surrounding you and singing Glory to God.

Angels in the air feel slightly safer than angels on the ground.  If the angels are above, that means that they came from above.  It means that heaven is “up there” somewhere.  But if the angels appear standing in front of us or behind us or around us, what does that say about heaven?  Could it be that heaven, the dwelling place of the angels, is not just “up there” but also here, with us?  Around us?  Could it mean that the angels of God are standing near us all the time and they simply choose not to show themselves?  Or that we’re just blind to their presence? Could it mean that this ground we walk on and build on and live on is also part of the dwelling place of God—so holy ground?

The angels didn’t bend near the earth.  They stood on it.  

We have this tendency, we humans, to want to separate the material from the spiritual, the divine from the physical.  We are such binary, black and white thinkers in a universe that’s full of colors.  We want to put borders on oceans.  And we certainly seem to want a border between heaven and earth.

We seem to be most comfortable when there’s a little distance between us and angels, a little distance between us and God.  That seems to be the way most people talk about it, anyway.  “Put in a good word with the man upstairs,” they say.  And then there’s that song: “God is watching from a distance.”

But that’s not what Christianity says.  That’s not what Christmas says.  The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.  In him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.  Not from a distance, but right in front of us.  As one of us.

We have trouble seeing the presence of God, seeing Christ in creation.  We have trouble seeing Christ in each other.  We even have trouble understanding Christ in Jesus.  How can Jesus be both divine and human?  We struggle to wrap our minds around that idea, so we have a tendency to make him either all human or all divine.  We picture that baby in the manger with a halo, and it doesn’t cross our minds that he might need to breastfeed and need his diapers changed.

“We need to see the mystery of incarnation in one ordinary concrete moment,” wrote Richard Rohr, “and struggle with, fight, resist, and fall in love with it there. What is true in one particular place finally universalizes and ends up being true everywhere.”  In other words, Christ is present everywhere, in, with, and under everything.  Including you.  And me.  And all those people we’re inclined not to like.

That, in the end, is what Christmas, the incarnation, is all about.  Christmas is God’s way of teaching us that there never really was any distance between heaven and earth, between the divine and the human, between the spiritual and the material.  Christmas is God proving once again that Christ is in, with, and under all the things we think we oversee and all the things we overlook.  Christmas is angels standing on the earth to sing to shepherds and surrounding them with the glory of the Lord to remind them that they, too, are spiritual beings immersed in a human experience, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said.  

Christmas is God’s love made visible.  Pope Francis said, “What is God’s love? It is not something vague, some generic feeling. God’s love has a name and a face: Jesus Christ, Jesus.”  I would add that, if you open your heart and your mind to it, God’s love can have your face, too.

Christmas is earthy and concrete.  It needs to be fed at a mother’s breast.  It needs its diapers changed.  It cries when it’s hungry and shivers when it’s cold.  It looks out at the world with new eyes and tries to see and understand.  Christmas wants to be loved and to give love.  

Christmas is our down-to-earth God made manifest.  Yes, gloria in excelsis deo, glory to God in the highest, but glory, too, to God on earth where the angels stand to sing to shepherds, because the Spirit of God is in them, too, and God loves them like crazy.  Just like God loves you.

My prayer for you this night is that you would enter deeply into the concrete, down-to-earth, human and divine mystery of incarnation.  May your eyes and ears be opened to the angels who stand upon the earth and minister to all God’s children.  May you come to see Christ incarnate in all creation so that you are always standing on holy ground.  May you dispense with artificial borders in your heart, in your mind, and in this lovely world.  And may you come to see yourself and all the others who share this world with you as spiritual beings immersed in a human experience.  May Christ be born anew in your heart.  In Jesus’ name.