Scripture: John 1:1-5, 14
I said something in the sermon last week about how here at Sojourners we are pretty good at avoiding theological rigidity, and then jokingly commented that some people would probably say that we avoid theology altogether. I realized as I was saying that, that I was probably issuing a challenge to myself to be theological in my next sermon, just to show that we don’t, or I don’t, avoid theology altogether. And sure enough I did decide this week to accept the challenge. I thought I would take a theological concept—incarnation seemed like a good one since we are still in what the church refers to as Christmastide—and just play with it a little bit, which I think is the best way to do theology…playfully …not too seriously.
I’m being serious when I say that I think we should be playful about theology. (This is sort of an aside, but I wanted to say it anyway.) A lot of the trouble religion gets into, a lot of the trouble religion causes, a lot of the evil religion causes could be said to be a result of people taking theology too seriously. Crusades have been carried out, wars have been fought, heretics burned at the stake, not to mention all manner of lesser offenses committed because, it could be argued, people have taken theology, the importance of having a right theology, way too seriously. Of course it could also be argued that crusades and wars and persecution have other causes too, like the greed for power or land or wealth, and that theology is just a cover for more material urges.
I don’t want to go into that discussion this morning, but I do want to hold, and it seems to me this can hardly be disputed, that theology can be taken to great excess. It can be taken with deadly seriousness, literally deadly seriousness, or at least with harmful seriousness, the general assumption being that holding wrong ideas about God somehow poses a clear and present danger not just to a person’s own well-being or salvation, but to other people’s well being or salvation, the good of the community, the state of the world, or the good name of God. Being excessively serious about theology, having no sense of humor about theology, being deeply concerned about what is good theology or right theology and deeply offended or threatened by something designated as bad theology, all of this is a health hazard to all of us, including the people who are so very serious about it. But then losing your sense of humor is always hazardous to your health.
I guess I should also say that I do think theology is important. If theology at its most basic level is thinking about God, then I do a lot of that, and I take it seriously. If I didn’t, I guess I should find myself another line of work. But profession or no profession, I think a lot about God because I can’t help it, and I think it’s a good thing for human beings to do. It’s not trivial, and it’s not just a game, a diversion, a pastime. And so when I say that we need to do theology playfully, I don’t mean that we should do it lightly, as though it were of no great moment. Theology—thinking about God—is an important human activity. It is more than important to me. Both professionally and otherwise, my life is all wrapped up in it. Maybe it’s not so much that I shouldn’t take theology seriously, but that I shouldn’t take my own theological thoughts too seriously, shouldn’t take myself too seriously.
I also don’t think that there’s no such thing as good theology or bad theology. I absolutely do think that some theological ideas are better than others and that some theology is just plain bad. There are wrong thoughts about God, for instance the thought that God and the United States of America are practically synonyms for one another. That is a wrong thought about God. And I do think that wrong thoughts about God ought to be opposed. So again when I say that we need to be playful when we do theology, I don’t mean that I think there is nothing much at stake or we should be completely unthinking or have a kind of “anything goes” attitude. What I do think is that when the need to be right becomes more important than the need to be loving, which seems to happen quite a bit in life, it is almost always a bad thing, and this is true whether we’re talking about intimate personal relationships or big public issues.
So I come back to the idea of doing theology playfully. Yes, there are serious thoughts to be thought and yes some thoughts are more on the right track than others, and yes it makes a difference whether we’re on the right track or not, but isn’t it also likely to be the case that all our thoughts about God, that any thought having anything to do with God, to God must seem just downright funny. Isn’t it likely that even the profound ideas of people assumed to be the great theological minds of the western religious tradition, people who think very deep and complicated thoughts and write very large books, maybe especially the ideas of the so-called great theologians are much less likely to be impressive to God than they are to be hilarious to God. I can’t help but picture God, in need of a little entertainment on a Friday night, picking up a book, oh let’s say by Luther, opening it at random and sharing a good belly laugh with the angels. I picture God getting a huge kick out of the different things people say about her, until human beings start to use their ideas about God to hurt each other. Then God stops laughing.
Anyway, with all that said, let me say a few playfully serious words about incarnation. A good theological word: incarnation. It usually refers to Jesus. In theological terms, it’s what the birth of Jesus is all about, God becoming human, becoming incarnate in the person of Jesus, the holy, mysterious, eternal, very spiritual God becoming a real live human being, as earthly and as vulnerable as you and me, yet at the same time never ceasing to be God. That, or something like that, is what incarnation is generally thought to be about. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God…the word was God…and the word became flesh…and God become flesh… and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” Jesus is the very incarnation of God, not just someone who has divine qualities, not someone who is very godly, or god-like, but fully, completely, thoroughly God, and at the same time fully, completely, thoroughly human. When I was young and being drawn in various ways toward Christianity, I understood that this was one of the things, probably the most important thing, that Christians believed, and since I wasn’t sure I could believe that, I wasn’t sure I could be Christian. So I struggled long and hard with the idea of the incarnation.
I would be lying to you if I said that I eventually resolved all my difficulties with the incarnation and came to the point where I understood and believed the true, deep meaning of the incarnation. I became a Christian not because I resolved my difficulties with the incarnation, but because I came to believe I didn’t need to resolve them. I did promise myself that I would not resolve my difficulties either by accepting the doctrine submissively or by dismissing it as something that no rational person could believe in. I promised myself to continue to wrestle with the idea of the incarnation, not resolve it in one direction or the other.
I would also be lying to you, in the sense of not telling you the whole truth, if I did not tell you that I do, in my own mind, in my own way, believe in the incarnation. I need to make a testimony. I don’t do it in the spirit of suggesting that this would be a good way for other people to think or feel or believe. It’s just where I am, not some grand statement about where Christians ought to be, or what the right way to understand the incarnation is. You understand…
What happened to me gradually during that long period of time when I was struggling with Christian beliefs, and especially with the notion of the incarnation, is that I came to realize that Jesus had become, without my ever making a conscious, explicit decision, Jesus had become the center of my spiritual life, and he has been ever since. I can say that to you somewhat comfortably because I am pretty sure you will not mistake me for a fundamentalist Jesus freak kind of person. I wish I could say that it just dawned on me one morning but I was too hard-headed for that, so I had to come to realize over time that Jesus was important to me, that it had come to be the case that he was something more to me than a person who had wise things to say. It had come to be the case that in my own thinking and searching and journeying toward God I kept coming back to Jesus. It had come to be the case that I found in Jesus a window into the heart of God, that I found in Jesus an inexhaustible source to help me think about, search for, know, and love God.
I had come, in other words, without realizing it until it was mostly all over, had come in spite of myself, to believe in the incarnation. Maybe not in a way that some other Christians would consider completely orthodox or the way they would like me to believe in the incarnation, but in a way that I recognized, somewhat to my own surprise, as being real. I still have trouble with the belief that Jesus was both fully God and fully human. I’m still keeping my promise not to dismiss it, but I still have trouble with it, not just trouble believing it, but now the additional trouble of not even thinking it’s very important. But I have also learned over many years now, so I know it’s not just a passing phenomenon, that I can’t think about, reach out for, relate in any way to God for very long without Jesus being involved, and I can’t think about, try to follow, or relate in any way to Jesus for very long without God being involved. My faith is centered on God, but I keep coming back to Jesus for many reasons, some of which I could explain and others of which I couldn’t.
I believe in the incarnation. I don’t believe in it, even my idiosyncratic version of it, as the one and only badge of being a Christian. And I don’t believe that the theological notion of incarnation necessarily has to do only with Jesus. And this will be my only other thought for the day, which I will just sort of introduce this morning and then continue on with next week.
On this matter of knowing God and loving God…these are not things we do easily or casually. We talk about them easily and casually enough, but actually doing them is something else again. Even having a basic understanding of what loving God means, what it involves, is not a casual thing. We pretty much know what loving human beings is about. We may not be always very good at it, but we pretty much know what that’s about. But how do we love this mystical, otherworldly, spiritual, beyond-all-imagining, reality we refer to as God.
One way, as I have been suggesting, is through Jesus who offers us a flesh and blood way, through his words and actions and his perhaps his very being, a way to understand, to begin to understand, what God’s love for us and our love for God is all about. But it’s not the only way, not even for Christians, much less for anyone else.
Isn’t it possible that the incarnation is not just about having some specific thought about Jesus or some specific relationship to Jesus but in a broader way is about the indwelling of God in the things of this world, so that we don’t have to escape from this world or transcend this world in order to find God. Isn’t it possible that incarnation also means that that is precisely not the way, or at least not the only way, to approach God? Isn’t it possible that finding our way to God is not a matter so much of getting spiritual as it is of getting material, that we find our way to loving God by loving things, like this holy planet in all its earthliness, and people in all their imperfect earthliness. Some people I suspect have a very clear sense that their efforts to love the earth and its people bring them closer to God. Others, I suspect, don’t have such a clear direct connection between their concrete earthly loving and loving God. For them the concrete earthly loving will have to see them through. I suspect that while we are thinking about what it means to love God, and we may never stop thinking about what it means to love God, that in the meantime it is enough to do our best at loving people, in whom God truly dwells, and loving and caring for this earth, wherein God truly dwells. Maybe that too would be believing in the incarnation. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 11, 2004