Almost every day as a hospital chaplain, I would sit by the bedside of someone who was going through a significant illness. Some were in rehab for a broken hip or leg. Some had ALS (known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). Some had Multiple Sclerosis. Some had kidney failure and were undergoing constant dialysis of their toxic blood. Some were stricken with cancer. And some were in palliative care. Some people were clearly in mental and emotional and spiritual distress. Others were in various places of depression. Some welcomed me to be with them and others waved me off when they discovered I was a chaplain. Some had difficulty accepting the presence of any kind of help let alone a person of faith like myself. A hospital patient once told me that I couldn’t possibly understand what he was going through. “How could you?” he said. “You have your health and I don’t. You go home to your family and here I am, imprisoned in my pain and suffering.” At the end of some days, my head almost touched the pavement as I dragged myself to my car. At some level in my spirit, I sensed the hospital patient was speaking truth. I was reasonably healthy and could go home to my family while he could not.
Then one day, I was struck with the pain of cellulitis in my lower left leg. Cellulitis is an infection and inflammation of the tissues beneath the skin. It is normally not dangerous unless it penetrates the deeper skin structures. But if it is not treated promptly and properly, it could enter the bloodstream and cause blood poisoning as well as infecting the bone. Then, not only severe suffering may occur but even death is possible. What started out for me as a local skin irritation, high fever, some pain, redness and swelling developed into severe pain and spreading infection, enough to put me into the hospital for six days and for me to experience acute pain for several weeks. I was even in a wheelchair and on crutches because of the difficulty and pain of walking. Thankfully, I regained my health. But I relearned something in those couple months of illness. What I knew in my head through my chaplaincy training, my heart learned again through personal suffering. I experienced once more the reality that, essentially, I live in the same room as my suffering hospital friends.
And, in Jesus, God has also lived in the same suffering world that we live in.
We heard this morning in John’s Gospel that “The Word became a human being and ... lived among us.” The older translation in the King James Version of the Bible puts it: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” I also appreciate the image in The Message Bible: “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.”
God loves our flesh. And God expressed himself, God even revealed himself, in our flesh -- in our skin-covered skeletal frame of bone and cartilage and muscle, with a pumping heart muscle and veins coursing with life-producing blood cells. God loves our humanness: our minds, our wills, our emotions and our spirits. Because God made us!
John 1:1-18 is John the Apostle’s defining statement about the astounding good news and hope of Christmas! John has embodied Christmas in one word: Incarnation. That is, the Word – the very Life and Light of God – became flesh, became a human being. The One who was known as the Word -- who existed in the beginning before the world was created – became flesh and came to live among us who are also flesh and blood human beings. John wanted his readers to understand that, at whatever point creation began, the One known as the Word already existed. And it was this Word -- who is the Life and the Light of God -- who became a human being just like us. And he was born in Bethlehem just over 2,000 years ago.
Why would the Word become human and live among us?
John says, because the Word, Jesus, is so full of grace, he keeps giving humanity the blessings of God -- the gifts of God -- gift after gift after gift, blessing after blessing after blessing. Not only then but now in our day as well. In John’s Gospel, grace focuses on Jesus’ character and personality. In Jesus we see grace expressing love and kindness – a loving kindness that actively cares for and seeks to help all those who need help and come to him. And all throughout his Gospel, John wants us to understand that this grace depends upon the character of Jesus, not on any merit in the people themselves.
Can you see “grace” in the following story? In his book Tattoos on the Heart [Free Press, 2010, pp. 26-27], Father Greg Boyle, pastor of an inner-city church in Los Angeles, California, for 20-plus years, tells the story of Rigo, a 15-year-old member of a local gang. Rigo was in jail getting ready for a special worship service when Boyle casually asked if his father would be coming. The following is a summary of their conversation:
“No,” he said, “He's a heroin addict and never been in my life. Used to always beat me.”
Then something snapped inside Rigo as he recalled an image from his childhood.
“I think I was in fourth grade,” he began. “I came home. Sent home in the middle of the day…. My dad says, ‘Why did they send you home?’ And cuz my dad always beat me, I said, ‘If I tell you, promise you won't hit me?’ He just said, ‘I'm your father. Course I'm not gonna hit you.’ So I told him.”
Rigo began to cry and wail and rock back and forth. Boyle put his arm around him until he slowly calmed down. When Rigo could finally speak again, he spoke quietly, still in a state of shock: “He beat me with a pipe … with … a pipe.”
After Rigo composed himself, Boyle asked about his mom. Rigo pointed to a small woman and said: “That's her over there…. There's no one like her.” Then Rigo paused and said: “I've been locked up for a year and half. She comes to see me every Sunday. You know how many buses she takes every Sunday?”
Rigo started sobbing…. After catching his breath, he gasped through the sobs: “Seven buses. She takes … seven … buses. Imagine.”Boyle concluded his story with an analogy. God, as revealed in the person of Jesus, loves us something like Rigo's mother loves her son -- with commitment, steadfastness and sacrifice. We have a God “who takes seven buses, just to get to us.” All throughout Jesus' ministry -- his birth on that first Christmas Day, his meals with sinners, his healing of those who were sick, his death on the cross for our sins – Jesus showed us the heart of God, the God who will take a long journey of love to find us. And we really cannot fully comprehend the length of that journey God made for us. Another word for that kind of journey is grace!
Why would the Word become human and live among us?
John says because the Word is also full of truth – not only the truth that Jesus revealed about God but, more so, that Jesus himself was the true revelation of God. When John, in his Gospel, connects truth with Jesus, he wants us to understand that “what Jesus was shows completely what God is” [Newman, B. M., & Nida, E. A. (1993). A Handbook on the Gospel of John: Helps for Translators, UBS Handbook series (22). New York: United Bible Societies]. John said clearly in verse 18 of Chapter 1: “No one has ever seen God. The only Son, who is the same as God and is at the Father’s side, he has made [God] known.” Again like grace, truth may be better illustrated than directly stated.
A father was anxiously anticipating the premature delivery of triplets. For at least one of the babies, there was a definite possibility of being born dead. He said he will never forget the moment the doctor announced, “They are all alive!” Until they heard those words, he and his wife lived in total uncertainty. All of the wishful thinking -- even from certified medical professionals -- could not alleviate that uncertainty and turn possibility into actuality. The father said:
“I could believe all I wanted in a successful delivery, but I had no promise to rely on, either from God or the doctors, and the intensity of my believing had nothing to do with the state of affairs. My confidence developed entirely on the words that the doctor uttered”: [“They are all alive!]” [Michael Horton, The Gospel-Driven Life: Being Good News People in a Bad News World, Baker Books, 2009, pp. 123-124.]You see, the gospel is good news – hopeful news -- because it speaks about events that actually happened, whether we are talking about the Incarnation (the birth of Jesus), the Crucifixion of Jesus or the Resurrection of Jesus. Our faith does not make the event true; rather, our faith embraces the truth. We see and embrace God when we place our trust in and embrace the Word made flesh – Jesus Christ.
Why would the Word become human and live among us?
Because God wanted us to know that he thoroughly understands human pain and suffering. God wanted us to know he is not distant or aloof from the human condition. That’s part of the good news and amazing hope of the Incarnation – of Christmas – that the Word became flesh and blood and spent about 33 years of human life on this Earth with us. And especially in his last three or so years of earthly existence, Jesus experienced in his own body what human pain, suffering and struggle against all kinds of adversity and difficulty feels like and means to us as human beings. One biblical writer, the author of the Letter of Hebrews, spoke about this identification of the human Jesus with us when he wrote: “We don’t have a priest who is out of touch with our reality. [No.] He’s been through weakness and testing, experienced it all -- all but the sin” [Hebrews 4:15, The Message].
The late Jesuit priest and writer Henri Nouwen possessed keen spiritual insight into the human condition. Because of his time in the L’Arche community [http://www.larche.ca/en/larche], he was also known as a compassionate caregiver for people with developmental disabilities. In his book Out of the Solitude, Nouwen made the following observation:
“What we see, and like to see, is cure and change. But what we do not see and do not want to see is care: the participation in the pain, the solidarity in the suffering, the sharing in the experience of brokenness. And still, cure without care is as dehumanizing as a gift given with a cold heart.” [Henri J. M. Nouwen, Out of Solitude (Ave Maria Press, 2008), pp. 35-36.]But the reality of God becoming human in Jesus Christ – what the worldwide Church calls the Incarnation -- means God’s care is there for us and we can have hope even in our pain, suffering and brokenness. The reality of God becoming human in Jesus Christ means God shares in our experiences of suffering and brokenness. The reality of God becoming human in Jesus Christ means God will do whatever it takes to bring about, in time, justice and hope in a world we cannot control. The reality of God becoming human in Jesus Christ becomes even more real and moving for us when we also realize Jesus died for our sins and he defeated death for us by rising from the grave, giving us the evidence there is life after death for us too! And how hopeful is that!
A couple of years ago, our Wednesday morning small group studied Anglican theologian N. T Wright’s book Simply Christian. In it, he begins his chapter entitled “Putting the World to Rights” with the following personal story [HarperSanFrancisco, 2006, pages 3-13]:
“I had a dream the other night, a powerful and interesting dream. And the really frustrating thing is that I can't remember what it was about. I had a flash of it as I woke up, enough to make me think how extraordinary and meaningful it was; and then it was gone…. Our passion for justice often seems like that. We dream the dream of justice. We glimpse, for a moment, a world at one, a world put to rights, a world where things work out, where societies function fairly and efficiently … and then we wake up and come back to reality.”According to Wright, our longing for justice “comes with the kit of being human.” But, unfortunately, although we all strive for justice, we often fail to achieve it. Wright goes on to say:
“You fall off your bicycle and break your leg. You go to the hospital and they fix it. You stagger around on crutches for a while. Then, rather gingerly, you start to walk normally again….
“There is such a thing as putting something to rights, as in fixing it, as getting it back on track. You can fix a broken leg, a broken toy, a broken television. So why can't we fix injustice. It isn't for lack of trying.
“And yet, in spite of failures to fix injustice, we keep dreaming that one day all broken things will be set right.Wright then asserts:
“Christians believe this is so because all humans have heard, deep within themselves, the echo of a voice which calls us to live [with a dream for justice]. And [followers of Christ] believe that in Jesus that voice became human and did what had to be done to bring it about.”Why would the Word become human and live among us?
Because, as John pointed out in Chapter 3 of his Gospel:
“God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him [the Son] may not perish but have eternal life.”May this hope and experience be so for you and for me.
Rev. Chris Miller
December 5, 2010
OYM Oriole-York Mills United Church, Toronto
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