Luke 2:22-40
December 28, 2009
By Patty Friesen
The Danger of Incarnation
My girlfriend just sent me an e-mail birth announcement of her daughter
Phoebe, born 10 days overdue and weighing over 9 lbs. Phoebe has the fattest
cheeks I have ever seen on a baby – a total butterball of joy. The photographs
of her first smiles and exhausted parents have made me smile this Christmas
season. Indeed, I told her parents that she would be the happiness and
occasional heartbreak of their lives.
Patrick and I have been smugly content to enjoy our friends and siblings’
children without having to actually change dirty diapers or pay for anyone’s
college education. We stand on the periphery of parenting in awe of the joy and
pain of family life. But thank goodness God chose to step out from the periphery
of parenting and enter the blood soaked, tear-stained experience of birth. This
is the amazing event that we have been celebrating for the last four weeks:
God’s own birth announcement of his baby boy. The physicality of Christ’s birth
has been made real to me in the recent birth of Phoebe. In the same way, God was
made flesh and dwelt among us in the overwhelming pain of labour, the struggle
of birth, the mess of placenta and merconia. God in Jesus experienced everything
that we experience from diaper rash to lost teeth from friendship to betrayal.
Madeline L’Engle says, “Because God became human, nothing is so secular that it
cannot be sacred. That is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.”
The poetry of mother and Vanderbilt professor Kate Daniels captures this miracle of incarnation, describing the presence of God not only in birth but in every aspect of childhood, including dirty diapers.
Opening the diaper, each morning
becomes the third day, when God
created the earth, late
in the afternoon, mountains
and continents firmly in place,
the waterways swinging between,
He turned his attention to the lowlands, malodorous
and steamy, the swampy
muck of undersides mutating
already into something new,
future home of the uncivilized
creatures who will sleep in their own
dung and arise unfazed, a dazzling
smile ripping through the bars of
of the crib, sunlight breaking
like tears on their slithering bodies and their unhaired heads.
The child Jesus is God’s radical act of solidarity with the height and breadth
of the human condition. Jesus had poopy diapers too! How wonderful! And he had
to learn how to walk and eat without smearing hummus in his hair! In the birth
of Christ, we can no longer associate God with private, spiritual, otherworldly
and perfect things. The stunning insight of our faith is that God walks with us,
not as creator of the universe but as a fat toddler having a temper tantrum. God
entered into all that is most creaturely, most bodily, most intimately us. God
is in the ordinariness and overwhelming fleshliness of our lives.
Because God became human, God knows the danger of incarnation, the restlessness
and difficulties that come in our souls and in our family life – even in the
midst of this celebrative time. There is only one Holy Family and the rest of us
are not it! There certainly is nothing holy about the household at 1515 Coy
Avenue. There are no angels singing or halos shining around our heads as we
fight over setting the house thermostat on this cold days and as we try to make
Fleish-Kuechle, those stupid meat pockets that never stay together and never
turn out how someone’s mother used to make them!
In reality – Mary, Joseph and Jesus probably weren’t always happy either. My
favourite painting of Madonna and Child is a medieval painting of Mary flinging
Baby Jesus over her lap and spanking him. My guess is that spankings and
backtalk are closer to the truth of Jesus’ home life than chests of gold,
frankincense and myrrh. We don’t have much record of Jesus’ terrible twos or
adolescent years but one glimpse comes in the passage following today’s
scripture in Luke 2:41 when Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the temple as a
teenager and then mysteriously can’t find him when they return home. Did he run
away from his parents in the temple or did they just leave him there? It makes
one think the holy family may not have been so holy after all!
Christian faith teaches us that through the Incarnation God chose to be with us
right in the midst of our personal and family struggles. This is the human
reality into which the infinitely overflowing love of God is poured. God knew
what lie ahead with the risk of birthing Jesus. The danger of giving life and
the heart wrenching love of children is the fear of losing them. There is no
greater fear and no greater sorrow.
Kate Daniel’s expresses this fear in her poem Necks.
Because he looked undamaged
when they raised him
from the water,
because his mother failed to see him fall,
I still rise each night to ascertain
my sleeping children live, to touch
their stilled and silent
bodies, to press my face
against their throats, inhaling
odors that are theirs alone.
The pulse lives in the neck, as does
the breath, and that is why, I guess,
I go there to dialogue with God, and avail myself
of the bony cup the collarbone provides
for my teary alms of gratitude and fear.
The incarnation of God in the one child Jesus leads us to reflect on the incarnation of God in all children, particularly those born in difficult family situations in Saskatoon and in tough places around the world. Today, December 28 is celebrated as the Feast of the Holy Innocents, commemorating the children murdered by King Herod. It is the day we remember children who have tragically lost their lives around the world. We remember children in our province, who lost their lives through accidents and house-fires.
Christians in Omaha, Nebraska gather to focus attention on a prayerful reflection on the story from Matthew 2, and some participants go the US Strategic Air Command south of the city to protest the nuclear warheads pointed at trouble spots around the world where many children have to live. Other believers choose to wait in vigil at a local shelter for the homeless in solidarity with the growing numbers of children who now find themselves on the streets of America’s cities at night. Others pray in front of an abortion clinic in witness to their belief that present day practices and the tragedy in Bethlehem two thousand years ago are analogous events. In Minneapolis, we always had an ecumenical service on December 28 to commemorate the children who lost their lives in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
God deliberately chose to come to one of the poorest and most violent places on earth. There is nothing pretty about having your first baby in a barn or fleeing terrified into the night to start your life as a refugee in Egypt. So where would God choose to birth Jesus these days? Laurel Borisenko working for Mennonite Central Committee in Burkina Faso describes a holy incarnation among African refugees.
In West Africa, I find Jesus incarnate in the eyes of urban refugee children.
Their families can be found in obscure corners all over Burkina’s capital,
having fled the terrors in Congo, Sierra Leone and Sudan. As I visit one home I
see three children lying on a plastic mat on the cold concrete floor – not so
different from a feed bin in a barn in Bethlehem. Even in the face of this daily
suffering, I see such strength of spirit, I see warmth and generosity; I see
smiles that shine like the rays of a star. I see Jesus. (The Mennonite, Dec.
7/04)
Recognizing Jesus in our own families leads us to recognize Jesus around the
world in all children and in all situations. Our personal, familial and societal
sorrow associated with this season connects us with the sorrow that resides
around the world. It is not simply an act of political awareness to be in
solidarity with the darkness that pervades human communities. It is an act of
spiritual awareness as well. God is in the midst of all this mess. In the
darkest corners of the world and in our own families, God has chosen to be
present. Thanks be to God! Kate
Daniel’s Prayer for My Children.
I regret nothing.
My cruelties, my betrayals
of others I once thought
I loved. All the unlived
years, the unwritten
poems, the wasted nights
spent weeping and drinking.
No, I regret nothing
because what I’ve lived
has led me here, to this room
with its marvelous riches,
its simple wealth—
these three heads shining
beneath the Japanese lamp, laboring
over crayons and paper.
These three who love me exactly as I am, precisely
At the center of my ill-built being.
Who rear up eagerly when I enter,
and fall down weeping when I leave.
Whose eyes are my eyes.
Hair, my hair.
Whose bodies I cover
with kisses and blankets.
Whose first meal was my own body.
whose last, please God, I will not live
to serve, or share.
Amen. May God be with us.