Scripture: John 1:1-5, 14
I usually start to write my sermons on Friday mornings. That means that sometimes, when I can, I spend a portion of Thursday evening in a kind of meditative mode, just being quiet and gathering my thoughts so that I can get off to a good start the next morning.
This last Thursday night, though, I decided to attend the meeting of the Albemarle County School Board, which is not a place of quiet or meditation or any kind of reflective creativity. I went because the Albemarle County School Board is considering a number of proposals that would add sexual orientation to their existing policies of non-discrimination, in other words that would make clear that people will not be discriminated against because of their sexual orientation. I had been at the previous board meeting where the subject had been on the agenda. I didn’t say anything at that meeting, but I felt I had to go to this one because I could not not say something in support of these proposals. I was expecting, perhaps naively, that at the end of this meeting at least some of those proposals would be voted on—positively. It turned out that the meeting lasted until almost midnight and ended with nothing being done. So I went home…and ate… and then ate some more…and then looked for something else to eat.
When I woke up Friday morning I realized that I would have to say something in this sermon too. All I really have to say is to offer what I would call a “pastoral encouragement”. I did not intend to begin the sermon this way, and I usually don’t use the sermon to promote things, but if you are so inclined—and I know that this is not something that everyone can or will want to do—but if you are so inclined, I encourage you to go to the next board meeting to speak on behalf of these proposals. Most of the people who spoke the other night were students. All of them spoke effectively. Many spoke eloquently. They deserve to know that there are people in the community, and in the Christian church, who support them and who also care about this issue. The school board needs to know that it is not just some students and a few parents and teachers who care about this issue.
You can tell that this is just something I had to get off my chest this morning, but it does happen to have something to do with what I had intended to talk about, which is the relationship between word and flesh, the relationship between what we say and what we do or who we are.
The fancy word, the theological word, for what the scripture is talking about, and in a way for what I want to talk about, is incarnation. “The word,” John says, “became flesh and dwelt among us.” Now to be honest, I’m not always real sure I understand what is being said here. I’m not sure I understand what this Word is that became flesh, and I have never related really well to the metaphysics of this idea of incarnation, how it is that some indescribable something, some holy mystery, became flesh and blood real in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. There is a hymn by Dave Brubeck in our hymnal called “God’s Love Made Visible”. If that’s what we mean by incarnation, then I can relate. Here, in the person of Jesus, God’s love is not just words but is concrete and tangible. “The word made flesh” I have to confess is sometimes just a bit abstract for me.
But there are some things that this scripture makes me think about. I am concerned about the authenticity of our words, particularly words of faith, and I realize I’m going to have to explain what I mean by that. Words are always problematic. Do we say what we mean? Do we mean what we say? Do words serve to speak the truth or to hide the truth? Do we use words to hurt or to heal? Are the words we use honest or phony? There are always a lot of things to consider about our use of words.
For me anyway, there is a particular kind of pointedness about this concern when we come to the season of Advent, the season of Christmas. We say or sing so many nice sounding words so often that there is just no way we can avoid overusing them. We can’t help ourselves. And so there are all these perfectly good words that we use so loosely that they tend to lose, for me anyway, that ring of authenticity. Instead of these words grabbing hold of us and entering into and latching on to something inside us and saying, “What about me?”…instead of that we just let these words loose in the air and use them as decorations, things that will make the season nicer or prettier. That’s when good, important words do not become flesh. They’re just “in the air”. They don’t land anywhere. They’re not rooted in us.
I have been particularly thinking this year (not surprisingly) about peace, the word peace. This fall as I began to think about the Christmas season, I was aware of course that peace is a word that we would soon be saying a lot. The scriptures of Advent and Christmas are about peace. Somewhere along the line we will be hearing scriptures such as the one from Isaiah that speaks of the coming messiah and says “his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Or, “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks”. Or “you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace…” Or the words of angels “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace.”
Meanwhile as I was contemplating the beautiful words, and in some cases the beautiful music that goes along with all this, images of flames bursting from tall buildings continue to haunt us and in some cases invade even our dreams. Meanwhile as I contemplated a season where we would almost surely talk a lot about peace, bombs were dropping in an almost continuous rain of destruction in Afghanistan and would almost certainly continue to drop as we eventually came to reading our scriptures and singing our songs. In this context, what will make our talk of peace authentic? How do we keep peace from being a word that merely decorates the Christmas season? How does it take on some kind of substance? How does this word become flesh?
I was thinking about these things and I remembered the words of Jesus at the end of his life, as he was preparing to enter Jerusalem. He looked out over the city and wept over it and said, “Would that you knew the things that make for peace.” Would Jesus say that any less plaintively, with any less sorrow in his voice, if he were saying it today? In fact I think I hear him saying it today. In fact I think I might hear him saying, would that you were even willing to ask the question of what it is that will make for peace.
Strangely, there’s at least a hint of an answer to that question just in the asking of the question. Some of the things that make for peace are present in the sincere asking of what it is that will make for peace. For one thing, an unwillingness to just pay lip service to something that is a self-evident good and that pretty much everyone wishes for as long as we don’t have to get too specific—a refusal to let the word be just a word with no real flesh to it: that is one of the things surely that makes for peace: a deepening awareness of the need for incarnation.
For another thing, asking the question, just asking the question implies that there are some costs here. Some of the things that make for peace probably have to do with us. If I can ask the question of what makes for peace and I come up with answers that don’t involve me, then I know that I haven’t asked it with any real seriousness. This is just as true, by the way, in thinking about “inner peace” as when we are talking about “world peace”. If I want some sense of serenity within, that’s going to cost me something too. Personal peace doesn’t just happen any more than world peace does. Asking questions about the things that make for peace, at least recognizes that there is a distance to travel to get from here to there and that the getting there will not be just nothing.
Still another thing implied in the asking of the question is that we need to begin from a place of confession. We do not know the things that make for peace. It’s not just that they out there don’t know, those people with the bombs and the guns and the evil intentions. We don’t know the things that make for peace. We do need to ask, and we need not to settle for whatever answers we can come up with in a few minutes, or a few hours, or a few days. I need not to give a sermon which gives all the best answers I can come up with on some given Sunday—Bundy’s top 10 list of things that make for peace—because that would mean that I could say to myself that I am finished for a while anyway with that topic and I can go on to something else next week, which is precisely what I need not to do: put this aside and go on to something else.
What I do need to do is to sit uncomfortably in that place where it is apparent that the words that are important to me, words that speak to me and that I want to be able to speak with conviction, those words have not yet fully become flesh even in my life, much less in the life of the world.
There is such a long way to go. And to go back to where I began this sermon, I was reminded of that again as I stood in my kitchen last Thursday at midnight after the school board meeting eating ice cream out of a container. There’s such a long way to go before what I say I believe becomes flesh in the life of the world, and I am part of what has to change. The word, I have to admit, has not become fully enfleshed in my life, not even close.
But then how could it? It’s appropriate and good to begin Advent in a spirit of confession not just because it’s healthy to be realistic about ourselves, not just because it’s good not to claim to be more than we really are, but also because it reminds us that if our dreams are worth dreaming, if our beliefs are worth believing, if our hopes are worth hoping, I cannot live up to what I profess. Neither can you. Not if what you and I profess is a Word, with a capital W, that comes from the heart of God, not if what we believe in and live toward is nothing less than the reign of God. On the one hand believing in the reign of God will inevitably and continuously and uncomfortably remind us of how far we have fallen short. On the other hand it reminds us that we have been summoned to a sacred journey. May we receive at the communion table today strength for that journey. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 2, 2001