Second Sunday of Christmas
January 4, 2015
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
6There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
10He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
14And 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. 15(John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.'”) 16From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. – John 1:1-18
What does it mean to go camping?
That depends a great deal on who you ask. For instance, if you ask my father it means finding a clean, designated campground with lots of concrete pads you can drive your car up to and plenty of facilities with indoor plumbing. It means putting up a tent, going to the campground swimming pool, and then getting in the car to drive to McDonalds for dinner. It’s an experience for sure, and more roughing it than actually being indoors, but it isn’t exactly communing with nature.
But then there’s another kind of camping. The kind where someone with skill and experience packs a bag with essential survival items and treks off into uncharted wilderness for days or weeks or months at a time. The person camping does so in such a way as to become one with the natural world around. The shelter is just enough for survival against the harsher elements and not a barrier to being a part of the surroundings. Perhaps someone who really knows what she’s doing can eat from the land itself, taking in the natural world to her body. After days in the wilderness dirt and grime accumulate and this camper takes on the smell of nature. This is about as close as humans can come to being one with nature.
My question is what kind of camping God prefers to do. Because in the Christmas text from John’s gospel that we read every second Sunday of Christmas is the line: “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” The Greek word is most directly translated the Word put up his tent among us. The Word made flesh is God’s camping excursion in the world.
But I wonder if we are sometimes too quick to assume that God’s camping is more like my father’s, staying a separate as possible from the world as it really is. There are, of course, any number of ancient church heresies that lean this direction, those that claimed that God only appeared in human form rather than actually being an embodied human being. Though that’s still a thought I hear from time to time, we have more subtle ways of living out that heresy.
When we assume that God is most clearly revealed in perfectly orchestrated words and music and liturgy, we’ve cleaned up God’s camping in our midst. I’m certainly guilty of it myself – it’s tempting to find words and phrases for worship that sound beautiful and transport us away from our troubles. It feels odd to me sometimes to use language that’s too grounded in our experience, too ordinary. We tried out that kind of language a bit in our midweek Advent services this year and it took me a while to get used to it. We also clean up God’s camping when we expect church to easily fit into our mold of what it should be, or expect it to be there primarily to serve what we need. Church should enrich our spiritual lives, it should provide community, and it should support one another in joy and hardship. But sometimes we forget that it also serves us by challenging us and inviting us to engage in hard work, even sometimes work we don’t always want to do. We sometimes consciously or unconsciously expect the church to shield us from our reality or allow us to remain unchanged. Camping in sterile environment.
We also clean up God’s camping when we look out at the world and refuse to see God in other people. I know that you know as well as I do that we are expected to see God in the poor, the outcast, and the stranger. And it’s hard enough to engage those people in really genuine, unselfish ways. But if you’re anything like me, it’s even harder to see God in enemies, however you want to define that. It’s easier sometimes to see God in the poor, starving people far away than it is to see God in your next-door neighbor, in the person with whom we have to share an actual lived reality – hard to admit that the person you don’t really like has God in them and something to say to us about God. It’s our own way of keeping God clean and comfortably in a box.
But despite John’s beautifully poetic language and his tendency to highlight Jesus’ divine nature, in all the stories about Jesus it becomes clear that God’s putting up a tent in our midst is the kind of camping where God expects to get dirty. You know the stories, the ones where Jesus is born among the animals, washes in the muddy Jordan, eats with sinners, touches the unclean, calls the lowly and despised as disciples, and ultimately submits to torture and death. From dirty 1st century diapers to a bloody and gory death, Jesus comes to dwell among us fully. Emerging from the time tenting among us covered in the dirt and grime of our earthly lives. Emerging from camping having taken in the reality of our world. Emerging from the wilderness journey transformed forever by communion with this world, our world, in all its disgusting mess.
Frederick Buechner, whom I quote often, says of this passage, “One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.” God didn’t come down with plans for giant cathedrals and nice groups of people, but rather to dwell in our daily existence in such a way as to experience fully what this world is about, to get inside creation, inside us in such a way that not only are we transformed, but also God is forever changed by the encounter.
As we reluctantly leave behind this Christmas season, turning our minds to the season after Epiphany and the quick leap to the start of Jesus’ adult ministry, we take an opportunity to wonder at the mystery of Christmas, that God would come so fully into our midst as to be transformed by the experience. And that God, experiencing the worst creation has to offer, would be so moved with love for us that we are transformed, that we are invited to be heirs of all that God has to offer. And even more than that, we are invited to participate in the work. That we are invited to live into our messy, embodied lives. That we might find God waiting for us in our mess and the times we cannot get ourselves together. That we might find God in the things that are hard and challenging for us. That we might find God is deep service to one another. That we might find God in one another not when we become the same or when we meet each others’ expectations, but in the reality of who we are now in the present moment, failures and all.
Because the Word became flesh, and put up a tent among us. By dwelling in us and among us, God lifts us up if not out of our mess, lifts us up with all our mess together. Because if God can be covered with the grime of our world, then maybe we can come to terms with who we are as people of God now covered in our dirt, in this moment now, no matter who we are or where we’ve come from or where we think we’re going. Because God is always dwelling among us, setting up camp in the middle of wherever we are and ready to pick up and move along with us wherever we are going next.
-Pastor Steven Wilco
Stewarding the Word 