Emmanuel, God With Us

12/18/11 1 John 1:1-10 Grace UMC

Several years ago, at a different church, when I preached my very first Christmas Eve sermon, I made a statement that the birth of Christ was a relatively unimportant event. I did not say, nor did I mean, that it was unimportant, but that it was relatively unimportant. In the message, I spelled out some of the things that Jesus did not come to do: he did not come to give us an extravagant, human-centered holiday, he did not come to brainwash us and make everyone conform to some narrow definition of "the Christian life," he did not come to make everyone happy and, perhaps most importantly, he did not come to leave us how we are. Then I raised the question, "If those are some of the things that Jesus did not come to do, what did he come to do?" I took the response from John's first letter, where he says, "The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil," which happened most fully and finally in the death and resurrection of Christ. That is to say, Jesus was born so that he could die.

While I still stand by the fact that the death of Christ is of supreme importance for us as Christians and that we cannot correctly understand the New Testament witness to what Jesus has done on our behalf and in our place if we forget about Good Friday and Easter, I will never again make the point that the birth of Christ is unimportant, relatively or otherwise. You see, it is not just important that we have a God who dies for us, as amazing as that might be, but we also have a God who lives for us, a God for whom no sacrifice is too great, even becoming a creature and entering into his creation.

The reason I said what I said my first Christmas as a pastor is because I had been misled by a well-meaning but inadequate understanding of just who Jesus is and why he came, which is quite common in our world today. If you were to ask many Christians, "Why did Jesus come?" the answer would often be something like this, "Jesus came because God needed a perfect human to die for us so we could be forgiven." If pushed, they may continue and emphasize that Jesus' teaching ministry was important as well, that we needed to learn from Jesus as well as have him die for us. The radical humanity of Christ tends to play nothing more than an instrumental role in God's plan; that is, it serves as a vehicle to get a perfect human being from the cradle to the cross, but not much more.

I don't mean to imply that the things this view emphasizes are fundamentally wrong. It is absolutely true that Jesus lived his life in utter human perfection, that if he had not lived in such perfection, it would call into question God's saving act through his death. It is true that we benefit from Jesus' teaching, which often surprises us and catapults us out of our comfort zone. My point is that the reality of what God has done in, through, and as Jesus is far more dynamic and staggering than this view leads us to believe. As true as it might be, we cannot collapse all of what God has done in Christ to simply the formula, "We had a debt, God paid it, now we are free."

When we look closely at what John tells us in our passage for this morning, we see that he, at least, understood the coming of God in our midst to be of supreme importance. "We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life." According to John, the word of life is not just a concept, not just an idea that we can learn once and then never worry about again. The word of life is something that does not stay "out there" but something that comes and meets with us, that is something that entered into our world of space and time, that was actually encountered by real human beings. Jesus of Nazareth was not just a man, but the very word and truth of God, taking up residence in the same world we live in, walking around real places that we can visit today, using real human words, eating real human food, interacting with and building relationships with real human beings not unlike you and me.

I don't know how often you think about the fact that the God who created the universe with nothing more than a word, who never needed to create the universe or people to live in it, actually stepped into it, God becoming a man, the Creator becoming a creature, but it is truly astonishing. In Jesus we have a word that we don't just hear, but that we can see and touch and enter into relationship with. In the baby in the manger we have nothing less than all the fullness of God in our midst, the God of all as a human infant, the Creator of all the vastness of the cosmos so small you could hold him in your hand, the very Word of God unable to speak but reduced to cries to communicate with his parents, those he had created. When I think about the earth-shattering idea that God himself has met with us, I am so overwhelmed, I can't hardly get over it.

Though the coming of God into our world in Christ has become a fairly common notion, something that we affirm, often without thinking about it, it was not always so. There have been many people who have found it impossible to believe that God either could or would become a human in our midst. The ancient Greek philosophers argued that God was so utterly detached from the world that we live in that God could not come among us, even if he wanted to. The Jewish thinkers of the first and second centuries who engaged in dialogue with Christians affirmed that God could become a human being, but that he never would do so, that they simply could not entertain the idea that the holy and glorious Lord and God of the universe would stoop to such a lowly position as to become a human being.

The offensiveness of this central claim of the Gospel, that in the man Jesus of Nazareth, we have to do with God himself, did not go away. Arius, a church leader in the early fourth century, said that God would not have come among us, so we must think of Jesus as a creature, a lofty messenger, but not God. A group called the docetists taught that, if Jesus really is God, then he cannot really be a a human, but only seems to be like us. Apollinaris of Laodicea argued that, in becoming a human, God refused to take on a real human mind, since it is so diseased by sin, and so Jesus is not really a human in the same sense that we are.

Even when Christianity became the dominant religion in the West, resistance to this idea that God would really meet us and make himself accessible to ordinary humans like you and me continued. Isaac Newton, the great physicist, thought of God as the great container of the whole of space and time. If that is the case, to say that God entered into his creation is like saying a box contains that contains many things, also contains itself, which would be ridiculous. Even today, we are surrounded by people, theologians, biblical scholars, and many others, who simply cannot bring themselves to really believe that when we look into the face of Jesus, we see the face of God, a face that we have never seen anywhere else and that we could never see in any other way. The reality of the incarnation, that the God of the universe has come among us, is repeatedly domesticated into the idea that Jesus was just really good at being good, that we follow him like we would follow any other human leader, that the real work of Christ is to provide us a model to follow in our lives (though even when we look at it this way, we usually stop short of suffering and dying, like he did), and in other ways as well.

Why do we do this? Why is it so hard for human beings to admit the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Jesus is who he claims to be, truly united to the Father, the Son of God in whose hands the Father has placed all things, the one who is in the Father and in whom the Father dwells, the one through whom all things were made and without whom the Father does nothing? I think it is because we are terrified to see the coming of God into our world for what it really is: an invasion. It doesn't take much to see that we live in a world that is dreadfully infected with sin. It isn't just that we commit sins, but that sin goes down to the core of who we are. We don't just make mistakes, we don't just make wrong choices because we don't know which choice is right and which is wrong. All too often, we know all too well what is the right thing to do and choose the wrong thing anyway. And it isn't just that we sin, but our neighbors sin too, and it is isn't just we as individuals who do what is wrong, we as a society sin, too.

In the midst of all this sin, it really is no surprise why we would rather find some way, any way, to keep God from meeting us here in this world of ours. So long as God remains "out there," we are like kids who have made a huge mess while our parents are out of the house. We keep telling ourselves, "We'll fix it in time, we'll get it all cleaned up before they come home." But every time we try to clean up our mess, in spite of our best efforts, we make it worse. So long as God has not actually come among us, we can still convince ourselves that there is still time to make things right on our own; we can still get our act together, we can still pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Maybe, just maybe, God won't even notice that we haven't been as good as we would like to think and we'll be let off the hook. Maybe we'll get it all cleaned up in time, maybe we'll never have to face the consequences for what we have done. As soon as we admit that, in Jesus we have to do with nothing less than the very God of the universe, we realize that we are out of time, that we were out of time even before we were born. We have made a mess and we didn't get it cleaned up. Indeed, we realize, when we are face to face with God, that we never could have cleaned it up on our own.

But when we realize that the jig is up, that we didn't, and even couldn't save ourselves, when we realize that the high and holy God has actually come near, has met with us, who has, by his Spirit, probed into the depths of our hearts, we find that all the consequences we feared do not come to pass. When we come face to face with God in Christ, we are asked to open our hands and give up everything we have. We are asked, not only to give over the mess we have made, but we are asked to give up even all our best attempts at cleaning it up, and God takes them from us and takes them to the cross. The only way we face punishment is if we stand before God and say, "I never made that mess; it was someone else; I was set up," or perhaps, "Yes, I made a mess, but I did my best to clean it up, so that should count for something."

We read in the New Testament that there will be a judgment, that we will all be judged. This can be, and has been a frightening thing for many people, but we need to ask, "When we are judged, who will be our judge?" We are told in the book of Revelation that the one who oversees the judgment is Jesus, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, the one who conquers, but when this Lion is revealed, what is it that we see? "A Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered." Our judge is not a vindictive human being like we can so often be, but one who has been sacrificed in atoning reconciliation on our behalf and in our place. The one who will judge us is not some angry pagan god who weighs up our good deeds and our evil deeds and we had better hope and pray that we've done more good than bad. Rather, the God who judges us is the God who has made our cause his own who, when he set out to redeem us from our sin and death, did not count it too great a sacrifice to become one of us, God of the universe though he was, live in our broken world and finally take our disease, sin and death on his own shoulders and take them to the cross.

As Charles Wesley wrote, "'Tis mystery all, the immortal dies, who can explore his strange design. In vain the firstborn seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine. 'Tis mercy all, let earth adore, let angel minds inquire no more."

If we were in a situation where we had simply built up a debt that needed to be paid, then all we would need is a savior who would be willing to die for us. If all we needed was a savior who would die our death on our behalf and in our place, then we could say that Christmas only matters because there has to be Christmas before there can be Easter. But we are not just people who commit sins, we are sinners. The fact that, in Christ, we see God walking as one of us and one with us, we see him enduring our temptations and overcoming them, we see him confessing our sins when he is baptized in the Jordan, we see him being faithful where we are all too often faithless, shows us that we do not only need a God who dies for us, but a God who lives for us. We not only have a God who offers up his own death so that we do not need to suffer the eternal death that would separate us from God, our God also comes and lives the life that we could not live and offers that in on our behalf and in our place. To believe in Jesus is not just something we say, not just something to check off our list of things to do in this life, but a profound trust that, when God judges us, it will be the God who sacrificed himself for us and that this God will accept, not only the death of Christ in the place of our death, but the life of Christ in the place of our lives.

Because of what God has done, we are bound to Christ in every way. Listen to these words of Gregory Nazianzen, one of the most important leaders in the early church. "We needed an Incarnate God, a God put to death, that we might live. We were put to death together with him, that we might be cleansed; we rose again with him because we were put to death with Him; we were glorified with him, because we rose again with him." In everything we do, whether in life or in death, we find that it is in Christ that we live and move and have our being. Our God is a God who does not abandon us, but meets us where we are, long before we ever dreamed of turning to him. Though the coming of Christ is an invasion into this world of sin and that means even our sin is under attack, it is not an attack that destroys us, but liberates us and makes us free to love like we have never loved before. O come, O come, Emmanuel. Let us pray.

AMEN