"A Tough Year for Flesh" - A Sermon on John 1 by John Schwehn
Preached on January 7, 2015 at Boe Memorial Chapel, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN
A video of the service and sermon is available here: http://www.stolaf.edu/multimedia/play/?c=2344
"A Tough Year for Flesh" - A sermon on John 1
Last August, a single comic book was auctioned on ebay for 3.2 million dollars. When it debuted 76 years ago, in 1938, this issue was sold widely across the country for only ten cents apiece. Comic book collectors know this particular issue simply as, “Action Comics #1.” It is 65 pages long, with brilliantly colored pages from cover to cover.
What makes Action Comics #1 so special, however, is what appears on the first 13 pages alone. You see, Action Comics #1 is the first time that a beloved American hero was ever introduced to the public. Listen as I read the opening panels from the first page, and, as you listen, recall the prologue to John’s gospel that we just heard read. Like the Gospel of John, Action Comics #1 is telling the origin story of a truly remarkable child. It begins:
“As a distant planet was destroyed by old age, a scientist placed his infant son within a hastily devised space-ship, launching it toward earth! When the vehicle landed on earth, a passing motorist, discovering the sleeping babe within, turned the child over to an orphanage. Attendants, unaware the child’s physical structure was millions of years advanced of their own, were astounded at his feats of strength…
…Early, Clark decided he must turn his titanic strength into channels that would benefit mankind. And so was created SUPERMAN, champion of the oppressed, the physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need!”
And just like that, the entire superhero genre was born in this country, and Superman, our very first superhero, remains an enduring cultural icon. And there is something so comforting and awesome – is there not? – about a guy who walks among us in plainclothes, but who is really faster than a speeding bullet and able to leap over buildings in a single bound anytime he chooses.
So now, by contrast, let’s think about the origin story of Jesus that we’re given in the Gospel of John. “In the beginning was the Word,” it begins. So far, so good. That’s a big opening: almost identical to the opening of Genesis, the story of the beginning of the whole creation. So, right off the bat, we know this, like Superman, is going to be a really big deal.
John’s prologue goes on to tell us how the Word comes to us, comes as a light in the darkness, comes into a world that does not accept it. These words are poetic and metaphysical and grand – countless pages have been written about these opening few verses – and then, finally, John arrives at God’s big idea: “The Word became flesh and lived among us.”
And that’s it. That’s the whole thing. God does not load a supernatural babe into a spaceship and launch it towards earth. Instead, God, the Word that was present at the birth of creation itself, becomes flesh. Really becomes it. Think about that. According to John, it’s not as though God slips on flesh like a disguise that she can freely slip out of later. God does not wear this flesh like a cheap coat of skin, like a uniform. The Word doesn’t even choose to be incarnated in a hyper-advanced, alien body.
No. God, the Word, became flesh. You know the stuff! Go ahead and give your own skin a pinch right now…it hurts. Cut it and you will bleed. If you go running or get nervous, you will sweat. You will probably even start stinking a little! Flesh is painful and it is unpredictable and, yes, it dies. Why would God want to become this stuff? How is that a good plan at all?
It is upon this preposterous assertion that this mysterious and beautiful and messy Christian faith of ours rises and falls; that the grandeur of God becomes flesh among us in order to make it all whole again.
God becomes flesh and blood with us because God has declared that this life – your life and mine – matters. God has spoken, and continues to speak, in and through all flesh, announcing over and over again that all of it is beloved and good.
Especially after the year we’ve just had, we know how risky and how strange it is that God comes to us in this way. 2014 felt like an especially hard year for flesh, didn’t it? We heard stories of Ebola virus and the devastation it has left behind in West Africa. Stories of unspeakable violence in parts of the Middle East. Stories of this bluegreen planet threatened, of all plant and animal species under siege by our greedy and careless practices.
We have witnessed heartbreaking stories of the division and fear that persists between us because of the very color of our skin, our flesh; stories that reveal how we have knit vast and oppressive systems of power and privilege into the very fabric of our life together. Then there are the personal losses we have suffered; lives that have ended too fast or too soon, the darkness and grief of it all sticking to our own flesh as we question and remember.
But then, consider those other properties of flesh. Hold the hand of someone you love. Remember the tastes of your favorite foods, recall the faces of those you have known and loved through the years.
A couple of months ago, I heard an NPR story by a reporter who had just returned home from Liberia. She went there in order to report on the medical efforts to halt the spread of the Ebola virus.
This reporter spoke at length about how hard it was for doctors to enforce a culture in Liberia where people were no longer allowed to touch each other, which is the surest way to keep the disease from spreading.
She told the story of an Ebola virus survivor, named Patience, who contracted the disease from her 2-year-old daughter. She asked Patience, “Why did you touch [your daughter]? It’s not like you didn’t know that this was Ebola, that…you were putting yourself in danger. So why did you do it?”
Patience told her what, I suspect, many of us here probably already know, have experienced on some level. “When you're seeing a familiar face that you love so much, who is suffering,” she reported, “it's really, really hard to…physically restrain yourself from touching them. It is not as easy as we might think.” In her case, Patience was unable to restrain herself from comforting her child, and so she got sick, too.
In fact, it is not Superman, but Patience, who might give us a glimpse into understanding God’s incarnation among us in this child. God becomes flesh because God cannot be restrained, cannot act in any other way. And, as we will remember in a few weeks, this incarnate Word-baby Jesus who we adored on Christmas, like Patience, takes onto himself the pain and disease and brokenness of all of God’s people.
So what does this strange news of God’s incarnation mean for us? How does God becoming flesh call us to live?
Well, for starters, it calls us as people of faith into deeper and deeper engagement with this whole wild and fleshy world. We are called not to stand apart from the world as enlightened religious observers, but instead to love the world fiercely, with abandon, every day.
Such love means opening ourselves to pain; but it also means encountering the fullness of the vast, diverse, and beautiful creation of which we are blessed to be a part. Theologian Douglas John Hall says calls faith, “a dialogue with life,” meaning it necessarily engages and is engaged by context.
Ironically, that 3.2 million dollar Superman comic book was priced so high precisely because it had never actually been read. Never actually been touched, really. It was in pristine condition. According to those in the comic book appraisal business, in order to keep a comic at quality grade like this one, it must remain locked away in a place that is cool, dry, dark, and containing as little air as possible.
This description could not be further from that of the Christian vocation. Not “cool, dry, dark, and airless,” but instead we are called “light, salt, yeast, and seed” – good, earthy, messy little things that become deeply enmeshed within the places they are cast.
At the very end of John’s Gospel, he tells a story about the disciple Thomas, who demands that he be able to touch the flesh wounds of Christ before he will call him his Savior and Lord. We see Thomas stick his finger, knuckle-deep, into Jesus’ own flesh, and it is only once Thomas knows and sees the wounds that he knows that God has truly come for him, that God knows intimately the hopes and longings and fears and loves of his own blessed human heart.
My friends, God’s promise to become flesh is also for you, today. May we, by faith, come to bear in our own flesh, our own hearts, the good news that God comes to us in precisely this way, in a wounded, yet beautiful, body. Amen.
A video of the service and sermon is available here: http://www.stolaf.edu/multimedia/play/?c=2344
"A Tough Year for Flesh" - A sermon on John 1
Last August, a single comic book was auctioned on ebay for 3.2 million dollars. When it debuted 76 years ago, in 1938, this issue was sold widely across the country for only ten cents apiece. Comic book collectors know this particular issue simply as, “Action Comics #1.” It is 65 pages long, with brilliantly colored pages from cover to cover.
What makes Action Comics #1 so special, however, is what appears on the first 13 pages alone. You see, Action Comics #1 is the first time that a beloved American hero was ever introduced to the public. Listen as I read the opening panels from the first page, and, as you listen, recall the prologue to John’s gospel that we just heard read. Like the Gospel of John, Action Comics #1 is telling the origin story of a truly remarkable child. It begins:
“As a distant planet was destroyed by old age, a scientist placed his infant son within a hastily devised space-ship, launching it toward earth! When the vehicle landed on earth, a passing motorist, discovering the sleeping babe within, turned the child over to an orphanage. Attendants, unaware the child’s physical structure was millions of years advanced of their own, were astounded at his feats of strength…
…Early, Clark decided he must turn his titanic strength into channels that would benefit mankind. And so was created SUPERMAN, champion of the oppressed, the physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need!”
And just like that, the entire superhero genre was born in this country, and Superman, our very first superhero, remains an enduring cultural icon. And there is something so comforting and awesome – is there not? – about a guy who walks among us in plainclothes, but who is really faster than a speeding bullet and able to leap over buildings in a single bound anytime he chooses.
So now, by contrast, let’s think about the origin story of Jesus that we’re given in the Gospel of John. “In the beginning was the Word,” it begins. So far, so good. That’s a big opening: almost identical to the opening of Genesis, the story of the beginning of the whole creation. So, right off the bat, we know this, like Superman, is going to be a really big deal.
John’s prologue goes on to tell us how the Word comes to us, comes as a light in the darkness, comes into a world that does not accept it. These words are poetic and metaphysical and grand – countless pages have been written about these opening few verses – and then, finally, John arrives at God’s big idea: “The Word became flesh and lived among us.”
And that’s it. That’s the whole thing. God does not load a supernatural babe into a spaceship and launch it towards earth. Instead, God, the Word that was present at the birth of creation itself, becomes flesh. Really becomes it. Think about that. According to John, it’s not as though God slips on flesh like a disguise that she can freely slip out of later. God does not wear this flesh like a cheap coat of skin, like a uniform. The Word doesn’t even choose to be incarnated in a hyper-advanced, alien body.
No. God, the Word, became flesh. You know the stuff! Go ahead and give your own skin a pinch right now…it hurts. Cut it and you will bleed. If you go running or get nervous, you will sweat. You will probably even start stinking a little! Flesh is painful and it is unpredictable and, yes, it dies. Why would God want to become this stuff? How is that a good plan at all?
It is upon this preposterous assertion that this mysterious and beautiful and messy Christian faith of ours rises and falls; that the grandeur of God becomes flesh among us in order to make it all whole again.
God becomes flesh and blood with us because God has declared that this life – your life and mine – matters. God has spoken, and continues to speak, in and through all flesh, announcing over and over again that all of it is beloved and good.
Especially after the year we’ve just had, we know how risky and how strange it is that God comes to us in this way. 2014 felt like an especially hard year for flesh, didn’t it? We heard stories of Ebola virus and the devastation it has left behind in West Africa. Stories of unspeakable violence in parts of the Middle East. Stories of this bluegreen planet threatened, of all plant and animal species under siege by our greedy and careless practices.
We have witnessed heartbreaking stories of the division and fear that persists between us because of the very color of our skin, our flesh; stories that reveal how we have knit vast and oppressive systems of power and privilege into the very fabric of our life together. Then there are the personal losses we have suffered; lives that have ended too fast or too soon, the darkness and grief of it all sticking to our own flesh as we question and remember.
But then, consider those other properties of flesh. Hold the hand of someone you love. Remember the tastes of your favorite foods, recall the faces of those you have known and loved through the years.
A couple of months ago, I heard an NPR story by a reporter who had just returned home from Liberia. She went there in order to report on the medical efforts to halt the spread of the Ebola virus.
This reporter spoke at length about how hard it was for doctors to enforce a culture in Liberia where people were no longer allowed to touch each other, which is the surest way to keep the disease from spreading.
She told the story of an Ebola virus survivor, named Patience, who contracted the disease from her 2-year-old daughter. She asked Patience, “Why did you touch [your daughter]? It’s not like you didn’t know that this was Ebola, that…you were putting yourself in danger. So why did you do it?”
Patience told her what, I suspect, many of us here probably already know, have experienced on some level. “When you're seeing a familiar face that you love so much, who is suffering,” she reported, “it's really, really hard to…physically restrain yourself from touching them. It is not as easy as we might think.” In her case, Patience was unable to restrain herself from comforting her child, and so she got sick, too.
In fact, it is not Superman, but Patience, who might give us a glimpse into understanding God’s incarnation among us in this child. God becomes flesh because God cannot be restrained, cannot act in any other way. And, as we will remember in a few weeks, this incarnate Word-baby Jesus who we adored on Christmas, like Patience, takes onto himself the pain and disease and brokenness of all of God’s people.
So what does this strange news of God’s incarnation mean for us? How does God becoming flesh call us to live?
Well, for starters, it calls us as people of faith into deeper and deeper engagement with this whole wild and fleshy world. We are called not to stand apart from the world as enlightened religious observers, but instead to love the world fiercely, with abandon, every day.
Such love means opening ourselves to pain; but it also means encountering the fullness of the vast, diverse, and beautiful creation of which we are blessed to be a part. Theologian Douglas John Hall says calls faith, “a dialogue with life,” meaning it necessarily engages and is engaged by context.
Ironically, that 3.2 million dollar Superman comic book was priced so high precisely because it had never actually been read. Never actually been touched, really. It was in pristine condition. According to those in the comic book appraisal business, in order to keep a comic at quality grade like this one, it must remain locked away in a place that is cool, dry, dark, and containing as little air as possible.
This description could not be further from that of the Christian vocation. Not “cool, dry, dark, and airless,” but instead we are called “light, salt, yeast, and seed” – good, earthy, messy little things that become deeply enmeshed within the places they are cast.
At the very end of John’s Gospel, he tells a story about the disciple Thomas, who demands that he be able to touch the flesh wounds of Christ before he will call him his Savior and Lord. We see Thomas stick his finger, knuckle-deep, into Jesus’ own flesh, and it is only once Thomas knows and sees the wounds that he knows that God has truly come for him, that God knows intimately the hopes and longings and fears and loves of his own blessed human heart.
My friends, God’s promise to become flesh is also for you, today. May we, by faith, come to bear in our own flesh, our own hearts, the good news that God comes to us in precisely this way, in a wounded, yet beautiful, body. Amen.
