Incarnate Love

Kendall Smith, No-Div

Kendall is an elementary science teacher and an avid lover of books, nature, and long walks. She is easily distracted by thunderstorms and loves a good conversation over coffee.

When we walk through dark seasons--Christmas being one of them!--we often ask hard and lonely questions.  Where is God?  Why do I still feel so alone?  Will this darkness ever leave?  I have had the privilege of hearing from some dear friends and acquaintances this season who have confided in me about their deep sadness and loss this Christmas.  This year feels more profoundly heavy, doesn’t it?  

Here’s a reminder, just in case you need it: you have permission to not decorate, to leave the Christmas tree in storage, to skip baking those special cookies this year.  Christmas time heightens loss and grief, and it is okay to tend to your grief, rather than push on to celebration.  Christmas happened, whether we acknowledge it with lights and celebrations this year or not.

What often lurks behind those questions that I mentioned above, though, is this deep wondering:  Does God even love me?  Why did God allow this to happen?  And that, my friends, is a hard and scary question to wrestle with.  If you are walking through this particular deep valley right now, I send you a virtual hug to let you know that this struggle is at the heart of humanity’s deepest longing.  People have been asking this for as long as people have been around--how do I know?  It seems to be behind (Adam and) Eve’s temptation in the garden.  

One of the reasons that we celebrate Advent, and then Christmas, each year is to remind ourselves of our Father’s deep love for us. God came to us. But what I love about the entire biblical story is that it is a narrative of a God who has continued to pursue, love and give of Himself for the beautiful Creation (including us!) that God created.

God’s Love said, “I’ll cover you with clothes, I’ll send someone to take care of the serpent!” when Adam and Eve fell prey to it’s schemes.

God’s Love said, “I’ll never again flood the earth…” and instead, committed to blessing the entire world through one family—Abraham and Sarah.

God’s Love heard the cries of the slaves in Egypt and said, “I’ll rescue you from Pharaoh—and show you what it’s like to be my people.”

God’s Love moved into the wilderness and lived among the Israelites, as they struggled to become God’s People.

God’s Love sent prophets to warn wayward Israel of the impending doom—”STOP! Come back to Me!”

God’s Love sent prophets to comfort Israel in their time of exile. “A time is coming…”

And when that time fully came, God’s Love brought forth Jesus, God with Skin On.

As we prepare to celebrate Christmas this week, may we have eyes to see the ways God has drawn near to us. The long story of God working in the world reminds us that God will move Heaven and Earth to be near to us. God did it two thousand years ago and continues to draw near to us today.

The Meaning of Christmas

Tyler Johnson, MDiv

Tyler is a pastor, a teacher, and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Kansas with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has pondering the mysteries of light.

This is the first week of Advent in the church. It begins the time of anticipation of, not simply opening a bunch of presents at Christmas, but the celebration of the birth of Jesus. And of course, that too is easily misconstrued. Advent is a time of waiting and anticipation and remembering of the greatest event in human history: the Incarnation of God.

My favorite Advent hymns are those that are played in a minor key. This is how I experience Advent and Christmas. There is joy and love and hope and peace, but it is always marred and distorted by the profusion of consumeristic advertisements and efforts at secular meaning making. There is the celebration of what God has done, and the desire for God to complete the work. Advent is a reminder that we live in between these events.

The rituals of Advent and Christmas are great. We seek to mark the season off as special as different than ordinary time. My family cuts down a Christmas tree and decorates it. We decorate the house both inside and out. We bake special treats, watch certain movies. I love the rituals. But still the season seems to lack something.

Upon reflection, I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason for my dissonance during Advent is that none of these things seem to adequately capture the true meaning of Christmas, by which I am referring to the depth of the Incarnation. And I’m fairly certain that this is inevitable.

C.S. Lewis calls the Incarnation, “the central event in the history of the Earth - the very thing that the whole story has been about.” That’s a big deal. Far bigger than any nativity scene, or lights display, or Christmas Eve service can capture. The Incarnation is indeed a paradox. God becoming man, the Creator becoming a part of the creation, omnipotence depending on a young woman for life, omniscience being taught: none of it makes sense. And yet either it happened, or the whole Christian faith is a farce.

The meaning of the Incarnation cannot be captured easily. It’s paradoxical nature rejects any satisfying scientific or philosophical explanation, helpful though these can be. In many ways it is unreasonable or irrational. This doesn’t mean that the Incarnation isn’t true. It is just a recognition that truth and meaning are not the same thing and they derive from different places.

“Reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.” So argued C.S. Lewis. And I think he is absolutely right. Truth is found through the proper use of our rational functions. But meaning is found through the proper use of our imaginative functions. All the facts and data in the world cannot produce one ounce of meaning. That comes from a different place, from story, from myth, from the functions of the imagination.

I’m beginning to think that the goal of Advent is not just reasserting the facts of the story, not just making sure that Christ is in Christmas, but actually allowing the Incarnation to work on our imagination, allowing it to extend beyond Christmas. The paradoxical reality of God becoming man should invigorate our imaginations to consider just what kind of universe we live in, what it means to be human, what is the purpose of life, and all kinds of other big (and little) questions. It should color our perception of what is and what is possible.

The General Theory of Hope

Tyler Johnson, MDiv

Tyler is a pastor and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Iowa with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has pondering the mysteries of light

One of the big themes of the Advent (Christmas) season is hope. Hope is a tricky thing though, because hope is not something that grows strong when we are living lives of comfort, convenience and control. When everything is going well, or even just okay, we have little motivation to hope for something greater. Instead hope grows strong in the petri dish of frustration and futility, disappointment and despair. Hope makes the most sense when the current reality doesn’t make any.

Some of you out there may be living in that petri dish right now. Maybe you’ve lost your job, or lost a loved one. Maybe your world has been turned upside down by this COVID pandemic and you see no way forward. Maybe your eyes have been opened to a slew of systemic problems in the world and it seems that the people who have the power to make meaningful changes are more concerned with greasing the wheels that keep them in control than actually doing right by the people they serve. We have good reason to be disappointed with the world we live in.

These are all what we could call examples of ‘special despair,’ meaning that they are only true for certain people under certain circumstances. Scientifically special cases are interesting to study, but much more helpful is the ‘general’ case. The general case is the most broadly construed case that affects as many people as possible in the same way. So allow me, if you will, a moment to generalize the petri dish we live in.

The planet we inhabit won’t sustain life forever. This is true regardless of the effects of climate change, because eventually our sun will die. Sure that will likely be billions of years from now, but it is inevitable nonetheless. When it dies it will probably become a red giant that will swell to such an enormous size that it will encompass Earth’s orbit. So Earth will become subsumed by its dying sun.

That’s a long time away, though, and it is possible that humanity will be able to escape Earth and our solar system and find a new home elsewhere. Even if this happens it too will be temporary. Sure all stars eventually burn out, but it’s even more futile than that. The universe is not eternal. The best cosmological models all show that the universe will one day end. There are two ways this could happen. The first happens if gravity wins and eventually reverses the expansion of the universe so that all things start moving back towards one another. In this model the universe ends in a Big Crunch which seems to be something like an infinitely dense massive black hole. The second option is that gravity ultimately loses to the universe’s expansion and it just keeps spreading out. In this model all the stars die, all the planets fall apart, and the whole universe becomes a uniform blob of low temperature nothingness. Either way the future of the universe is nothing but death and futility.

There it is. That’s the general case for despair. That is the universal petri dish that we exist in. Everything ends. All life dies. All purpose becomes pointless. Merry Christmas!

And I don’t mean that facetiously. Seriously, Merry Christmas!

See, the only thing that could offer any kind of hope in a universe such as ours would have to be something from outside the universe. It would require that something outside our universe take an interest in our universe and intercede somehow. It would require something that wasn’t bound by the trajectory of death and futility that marks our universe. And that is precisely what we celebrate at Christmas.

The Incarnation is God, the Creator, breaking into the world He created and becoming a part of it. It is the greatest paradox of them all. It would be like me imagining a whole world of people and places and things full of color and details and stories and emotions. And then while still holding that world in my imagination, also entering that world and becoming a part of it. It makes no sense. Neither does the Incarnation.

But it happened. Christmas can’t be cancelled because the past can’t be changed. God, the Creator, entered our world and became a part of it. And if that can happen, then anything is possible. And that is the root of the hope that we find at Christmas. A hope so strong that not even a futile universe of death can quell its power.

So whatever you’re going through right now, remember the Incarnation. Remember that the Creator of this universe loved it (and you) so much that he humbled Himself and entered our world of frustration, futility, desperation and disappointment. He became a part of our world, so that he could raise it up and create a path for it to become part of His. That is the root of all our hope.