Christmas 2018

Let's stand together for the reading of God's word.

This goes right here.

Yes, sir.

John 1 14.

The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

We have seen his glory.

The glory of the one and only Son who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Revelation 21:3.

Revelation 21:3

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Look, God's dwelling place is now among the people.

And he will dwell with them.

They will be his people.

And God himself will be with them and be their God.

Yes, sir.

Amen.

God, we thank you for this text this morning.

And Lord, we would ask that by your Holy Spirit you would speak into our lives.

Lord, you have a way to get through to our hearts.

You have the ability to get through to our minds.

Lord, sometimes, oftentimes, Lord, we're in a place where we've got the dots and we just need you to connect the dots for us.

So, Lord, as we consider your word and we consider these things in light of our own story, we ask that you would speak to us powerfully.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

You may be seated.

You may be seated.

And this Christmas, I wanted to take a break from our passage in Luke.

As many of you know, we've been going through Luke and we're nearing the end.

We're only a couple of months away from being done with the book of Luke.

But let's pause.

Let's take a pause on Luke and look for a little bit of time at the incarnation.

The incarnation.

If you would slowly consider with me this amazing idea.

The incarnation means enfleshment, to put on flesh.

Within Christianity, it refers to Jesus as the second person of the Trinity, taking on flesh and becoming the God man.

Here in the first chapter of John's gospel, he calls Jesus the Word.

And up in verse 1, he says the Word of God, or the Word is God, and then in verse 14, which we've read, he says that the Word took on flesh to dwell amongst mankind.

How about we go for a swim in the deep end?

Here are some things that I there are some things that I want to speak to you about this morning that may stretch you and challenge your way of doing life.

But I believe that these things are vital for us.

The Bible teaches that Jesus existed eternally as the Son with the Father in heaven.

In fact, Scripture says of Jesus in Colossians chapter 1, verses 15 through 20.

Colossians 1:15–20

Let me read this to you.

Things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or authorities, all things were created through him and for him.

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

And he is the head of the body, the church.

He is the beginning of the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.

For God was pleased to have all things, all of his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.

You see, Jesus is an eternal member of the Trinity.

He is before all things.

But I want to focus our attention this morning on the act of incarnation, of putting on flesh.

There's an author, Michael Frost, we're going to draw a lot from his writings this morning.

He says this the incarnation is not God's attempt to fix humankind by getting in and out as quickly as he can.

It was God's plan for fashioning friendship between himself and us.

It's like all true friendship: messy, frustrating, joyful, and unending.

In fact, our text says that he became flesh and was dwelling among us.

This is not the first time that humanity has had contact with divinity.

You all are Old Testament scholars, I can tell.

You know the w the the word well.

The Old Testament tells us of God's relationship with humanity.

God creates the world and places Adam and Eve in the garden.

The book of Genesis tells us from the very beginning that God spoke with mankind.

God spoke to Adam.

He also guided, or Abraham, he also guided Abraham by angels.

God spoke to Moses.

How did he speak to Moses?

Through a burning bush, right?

And through his presence in the tabernacle.

Moses had this amazing relationship with God.

Mount Sinai, hearing God's voice, him coming in this cloud.

God spoke to David when he was a young shepherd boy.

God spoke to the nations through prophets and seers.

But it was God's plan to send his Son into the world and to take on flesh and to dwell with us.

Now, last week when we are studying the gospel of Luke, Jesus gave a parable to those he was teaching in the temple about a landowner who sends to the tenants of his land wave after wave of messenger.

And then finally, the landowner determines that because of the tenant's refusal to listen, he will send his son, hoping that they might respect him.

God doesn't put the most important first chronologically.

Now, it would be easy to interpret that parable, the parable from last week, and think that the incarnation of Christ is God's plan B or His plan C.

But the order of things doesn't indicate priority.

Jesus isn't the third string quarterback.

No, God doesn't put the most important things first chronologically.

We see this in creation, right?

He creates the separation of light and darkness, he creates the firmament, he creates the water divided from the land.

He creates the fish of the sea.

He creates the animals and the vegetation.

And then he creates humanity.

And with the redemptive plan of God, Jesus comes quite late in the revelation, supernatural revelation of God.

Jesus comes on the scene maybe 4,000 years into creation's story.

And even the first Advent isn't the full glory of God.

In fact, in Hebrews chapter 1, verses 1 and 2, it says this.

Hebrews 1:1

But in these last days, he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.

This is saying, what I'm saying, that God has spoken in various ways, but most recently he has spoken through his son Jesus.

Jesus, here in John, is called the Logos of God.

That's the Greek word.

It's the word of God.

Now when John wrote his gospel, the account of Jesus' life, he could have referred to Jesus as the Rhema.

That's another Greek word for word that gets translated word.

Rhema means a short phrase or a short expression.

But yet when John wrote the gospel, he called Jesus the Logos.

That's the Greek word that he chose to use.

And Logos is translated full expression, the full communication of God.

The full communication of God, who is God, took on flesh to dwell among us.

The eternal Son, who is the full expression of God, took on flesh and lived among us.

Now, mind you, if you are new to Scripture, these things no doubt sound incredible.

We're describing God, and for many of us, we have faith that these things are true.

But maybe you feel like these descriptions are too much.

Maybe you struggle with the very existence of God or a detailed discussion over the acts of God from eternity.

These things seem unfathomable.

Well, first of all, if that's your position, if you struggle with belief generally, you need to know that the Bible doesn't need your permission to be true.

The Bible doesn't need your permission to be true.

I don't say that to be in polite, but truth isn't determined by our belief.

Rather, truth is as itself.

The very nature of being true means to exist.

We merely discover what is true and then determine how we will relate to it moving forward.

Does that make sense?

What is true is.

It's not determined on our belief, yes or no.

Second, how should we then evaluate the truth claims of Scripture?

I would suggest that it is an evaluation process no different from any other interaction we have with ideas.

We usually don't believe the incredible first.

Typically, we evaluate universal statements about reality, and then our agreement with those universal statements causes us to trust the source more.

So this is the question: what universal claims does Scripture make?

I'll give you four.

And I think I may have these here.

There I have three.

I don't know where the fourth one went.

Four on my notes.

Morality and justice are necessary and dependent upon a transcendent transcendent authority.

That's what the Bible claims, and that seems to line up with our human experience.

Second, humans have intrinsic value.

Right?

We know this to be true.

Our society is crying out for human rights.

The Bible affirms that this is something that is real and tells us where we can get human rights from.

Third, here we there are unseen forces that influence towards evil.

And the world appears to be intrinsically designed by a personal being greater than any human.

So the Bible, you well, first of all, you should hear the scripture describe reality, and you should think, wow, that is remarkably similar to my experience.

That then moves you to a place of greater trust in Scripture.

Before the Bible asks you to believe in the incarnation that God took on flesh and dwelt among us, or to believe that Jesus, the historic figure, was 100% God, the Bible describes the reality that you and I encounter and it lines up.

This is one of my favorite what we would call defenses or reasons for the reliability of Scripture, is that the way it describes reality lines up with how I experience reality.

But it's more than that.

Let's use a hypothetical example for just a second.

If I stood up here and said to you, your life purpose is based upon a jumping jack done by a pink elephant 7,000 years ago, you would hope that I would say 100 credible things first.

The pink elephant is what we would call incredible, hard to trust.

But if I first start by explaining the world that your human experience and your human experience is exactly as you have found it to be true, then I would be building trust with you.

But what if I could describe your reality and tell the future?

All of a sudden, my credibility with you would go up.

If I had an unblemished record for a thousand years of describing the rise and fall of superpowers, governments, you would feel like I was much more trustworthy source for describing something that is incredible.

But let's say that I not only describe reality and can tell the future, but that I had 140 different people over the course of 1,400 years write my message down with perfect harmony through a collection of writings over the course of three continents over this span of time.

Wouldn't that lead to my credibility?

No, I'm not up here this morning preaching about a pink elephant that did a jumping jack 7,000 years ago, but I'm describing God putting on human skin, living amongst us 2,000 years ago.

That is what the Bible teaches.

And the Bible makes accurate, universal claims about reality.

It tells the future with 100% accuracy, and it has perfect unity, even though it was written over time by a diverse group of people.

That's my three.

That messed up my slides up there.

I'm sorry.

Those are just three of a dozen reasons why we can trust the Bible's description of God and the incarnation.

I take a minute to say all that because when we look at the incarnation, we're studying a central theme of Scripture that's critical, but it's also supernatural.

Unless the Bible told us of these things, unless it told us they were so, we wouldn't come to these conclusions through scientific observation.

It's a matter of life and death that you believe these things to be true.

You cannot be a Christian without believing that Jesus is God in the flesh.

It is a central tenant, it's an essential tenant of Christianity.

And to believe the supernatural claims of Scripture, you must first determine that it scripture itself is a reliable source of truth.

So the Bible says to us in John 1.14, which we have read, that the Word, who is Jesus, that that's God, and that He became flesh and dwelt among us.

Now I've grown up in the church, and I've had this deepening view of the Incarnation.

Let me kind of walk you through it.

Personally, it started out, the incarnation, when I was in Sunday school, it was a cool trick that God did.

And then beyond that, I would say the next kind of thing that I thought of, the incarnation, was that God wanted to be more relatable to humans.

You've ever heard, you know, that that kind of youth group example of like if God wanted to talk to ants, like, or if I wanted to communicate with ants, I would need to become an ant, right?

To speak to them on their level.

So that's kind of the second degree of understanding this idea of incarnation.

It's true, it's true, but I don't think it fully expresses the idea.

Third is this idea of God had to take on flesh to accomplish the atonement work.

So God didn't want to just communicate with mankind through the incarnation, but his body was necessary in order to atone for our sins.

You see, the Bible teaches that all humans have sinned, and that sin is a fundamental disruption of the perfect state God intended for you to live in and to relate to him with.

God loves you, he wants to have a relationship with you, but he can't because sin is there.

And the way that sin is removed from the world is through the work of the cross, which could not be accomplished without Jesus having a body.

Very, very important.

But again, I don't think it's the full, the full expression of the incarnation.

It's this fourth thing, God modeled a coming close that we are called to.

For me, just moving into the neighborhood in Baltimore, the mission of God is the incarnation.

Right?

So it's not just the communication of God, it's not just the atonement, but it's this mission, right?

It's God um communicating and dying on the cross and relating to humanity, and then it relates to us.

It lays down a template where we therefore are called to go and live amongst the people that God wants to reach.

And kind of this fourth or the fifth thing here, the fifth thing here is this idea that the body itself is important.

For a culture that is progressively excarnate, which I'll define in a minute, we look at Jesus and see this living lesson that our physical presence and very body is meaningful in accomplishing God's will.

We'll spend the rest of our time on this point this morning.

Um I want to give you another quote.

Another quote.

But let's start with this.

Our culture, really, the age that we live in, is an age of disengagement.

We live in an age, we live in an age of disengagement.

Michael Frost, he writes this book, Incarnate.

Um, and it's really, I think the subtitle is The Body of Christ in an age of disengagement.

He builds, he he wants to talk about what it means, what the incarnation of Christ means, and then what it means for us.

But to get there, he builds his case by first explaining this idea of excarnate.

Excarnate is the idea of defleshing.

Defleshing.

In in pagan um societies and and in other countries, sometimes there are these rituals where they'll leave the dead out to be stripped of their.

Flesh based on their belief of the body.

In Michael Frost's book, he, which I've referred to this example before, he mentions and uses the example of the airport lounge as a parallel or as a metaphor of our culture.

The airport lounge, in an airport lounge, nobody is present.

Heads are down in their screens, earphones are in, the interactions are as minimal as possible.

It is a utilitarian place of people passing through.

Heaven forbid you ever make eye contact with anyone.

Right?

Have you been there?

While we may physically be there, we are as absent as we might possibly be.

The goal is to not be present.

That's excarnate, to deflesh ourselves.

The objective of the airport lounge is to get by with as little human interaction as possible.

Relationships made there seem to be pointless.

You'll never see them again.

And this is one of the examples that Frost gives of the excarnate experience.

And he says that the airport lounge is more and more emblematic of our cultural disengagement.

He also talks about our infatuation with screens as a substitute for physical experience.

Can you take out your phone for a second?

I'll do it with you.

Take out your phone.

Many of you, many of you have a phone like me.

A smartphone, right?

2007, Steve Jobs stood up on a stage and he's like, this is the breakthrough, right?

You got your phone, hold it up in the air, right?

Okay, so we plug it in and we're carried away.

Right?

You open up uh YouTube and you're carried away to some other land.

You open up your podcast and you're carried away to some other land.

You open up Facebook and you're carried away.

Do you remember the story of Philip?

God tells Philip he's in the middle of a revival and he says, go down south, um, and he just directs him down there.

And there's this eunuch that's riding along, and Philip's like divinely brought by God to share the gospel with this eunuch.

And the eunuch gets baptized, and he's probably the one that brings Christianity to northern Africa.

I mean, this is probably the origins of Christianity in Africa.

And as soon as the guy's baptized, all of a sudden, Philip is carried away to another place.

That's what our phones do.

They just carry us away to another place.

It's incredible.

Now, getting back to screens here, there's a substitute for physical experience.

We take in so much life through the medium of a screen.

We watch sports, concerts, theater, sermons, news, and even our friends' lives through screens.

And this can be helpful in a number of cases.

Some of you I've told you, you're not on Facebook.

You need to go get on Facebook because you can connect with people that maybe you can share the gospel with them, or you are up to date.

There is a utility to the network.

But when the screen becomes the default for human experience, or we are opting for this screen experience over human interaction, then we have embraced an excarnate position.

Even sexual experience has moved to the screens through the rise of pornography.

One of the most physical things in the body, the experience, a hu the experience that a human can have of sex has been intermediated by screens.

The world is going through this disengagement process.

The body is disconnected from the experience.

So after this lengthy unpacking, Frost opens up chapter 7 with this summary.

I want to read this quote to you.

There's three panes here, which we'll go through kind of slowly.

He says, I've argued that we are adopting an increasingly excarnate approach to faith, allowing our engagement with God to reside almost entirely in our imaginations.

I would also suggest that such a drift towards excarnation is made possible by a similarly disembodied approach to doing theology.

By developing a theology of persons that focuses chiefly or even solely on human as primarily thinking beings and not as fully embodied creatures, leads to any an insufficient anthropology that owes more to modernity and the enlightenment than it does to the holistic biblical vision of a human person.

And then this final sentence Excarnation, the steady disembodiment of spiritual life, so that it is less and less carried in deeply meaningful bodily forms and lies more and more in the head, demonstrates that insufficient theological reflection on the nature of humanness doesn't help.

Again, our culture, there is this excarnate move in the age in which we live.

Let me walk you through a few of these things.

The location of our body means very little.

Let's move from our location to our body, right?

So our location means very little.

We don't know our neighbors sometimes.

We don't know the history of our local area.

We don't care about local news other than personal pain points.

Have you noticed that the news is more and more regional and global?

It's even more and more difficult to sustain local newspapers, right?

As we have the access to the internet, local is being lost.

We don't see local physical area as a part of personal identity.

This is the idea of like if I ask you, who are you?

and you say you I you you explain your identity in association with your physical location.

Are you a Southeast Baltimore?

Baltimore?

Baltimorean?

Are you a Baltimorean?

Would you say that of yourself?

Would you say that you are a Fells Point resident?

Would you say, if I were like what is the first way that you would describe yourself?

Is it associated with your physical location?

Oftentimes it isn't.

Finally, we make a poor distinction between being at church versus watching church online.

You know, there's just this idea of like, well, I can experience my faith as much online as I were as if I was in physically in church.

And I would suggest there's a difference.

Let's talk about our bodies for just a second.

Body is extra, sometimes this is what is the thinking behind the excarnate age.

Body is extra trappings that we are happy to put off to get to heaven.

Have you heard this thought, this thinking in Christianity?

That we are eager to put off this body to get to heaven, like as if our bodies were extra baggage.

Now, I understand that we live in a fallen world and we bear in our physical body the marks of fallenness.

But the bodies, we leave this body, we get a new body.

Um we adopt a dualism between body and spirit, and then think faith is really a matter of the spirit.

This is really kind of one of the core issues, is this dualism where we we somehow see physical presence versus spiritual interaction with God.

And to distinguish between the two, uh we're we're we're breaking up something that God fundamentally kind of has put together.

And this last point, we use our phone to be extricated from the place where our body is.

We use our phone to be extricated from the place where our body is.

Yesterday, as I drove into the suburban neighborhood of Glen Burney to pick up the toys that we're gonna give away after church, I was looking at the houses and I was thinking of the suburbs, the suburbs.

I was thinking, what does it mean to embody the gospel here?

What would it be like to be planted by God in this neighborhood and see it as God's intentional act?

In other words, to put me here.

Having lived in the suburbs and now living in the city, I think the city has some of its value in the way that it forces an individual to be present.

As much as a city resident might want to disengage, it is all that much more harder to do.

People are in closer proximity to one another.

Problems and suffering are often related to physical issues of noise, smell, safety, convenience, and we suffer these things together.

You didn't know it was a blessing to live in the city, did you?

But I think there is this value of being more present by being in the city.

You and I are embodied souls on purpose.

When you move from this life into the eternal life, you will get a new body.

That is the teaching of 1st and 2 Corinthians.

Everything that God has for you cannot be accomplished unless you live in your body.

You can't obey God without your body.

You can't love without your body, you can't serve without your body.

The body you woke up in this morning has meaning.

Where you live has meaning.

Your human experience with God is in that God is intended for you.

Cannot be separated from the physical body that you have.

And so in John 1.14, it says, Jesus took on flesh, he dwelt among us, he was embodied, he took on a body, and he engaged the world with that body.

The process of embodiment took place at conception.

He was born into the world.

In Hebrews 10, can I show you this verse in Hebrews 10, 4 and 5?

Look at what this says.

It says this it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

You remember, you remember in the history of Israel, they had all these sacrifices.

Remember the Jews, how they would give these sacrifices?

You know, you're Bible scholars, you know how the Jews would offer these bulls and these goats.

Well, in the New Testament it says it's impossible for these bulls and goats to really take away sins.

Therefore, Christ came into the world and he said, Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a what?

A body you prepared for me.

Then if we jump down, it's important for you to under, yes.

So if we jump down to the next verse, 10, 9, and 10, he says, This, here I am, I have come to do your will.

He sets aside the first to establish the second, speaking of the covenants of God.

And by that will, when Jesus says, I've come to do your will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all.

Jesus, the word of God, took on flesh, took on a body, and he dwelled among us.

And he accomplished this great and holy work of being the sacrifice of God, the Lamb of God who takes away our sins.

The incarnation is more than just God doing a cool trick, it's more than a communication tool.

Jesus' embodiment was a necessary part of the redemptive work that began and continues through our embodiment.

Let's close with this passage that we read at the beginning from Revelation 21.

This is it.

He says this, and re and keep in mind, keep in mind, back in John 1.14, he took on flesh, the word took on flesh to dwell amongst us.

And here we have in Revelation 21.3, I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Look, God's dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.

They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.

Amen.

This is speaking to the future state.

So, so there's such in pop culture, so many people think when Christians talk about heaven, that we're talking about these disembodied spirits playing harps somehow without bodies, sitting on clouds, you know, with rainbows and Cupid, you know, next to us.

No, the body talks, the the scriptures talk about Jesus coming back to reign from Jerusalem.

And after a thousand years, the earth and the heavens are destroyed, and he creates a new heaven and a new earth, and that's where Revelation 21, 3 fits in.

God dwelling, making his dwelling place amongst people, dwelling with them.

The experience that Christians talk about regarding eternity is this eternal experience where we're embodied, but we are in the presence of God embodied, dwelling on a new heavens and a new earth.

There's much that we don't know about what that will look like, but we're given some significant indicators right there.

So this is my prayer for us.

May our eyes be opened more and more to this amazing reality of incarnation and its implications for our present reality and our glorious future.

Would you pray with me?

Lord Jesus, we thank you for your humility that you took on flesh and that you dwelt among us.

Thank you for being present in our world.

And that through that you spoke loud and clear that our presence, where we're at, in our bodies, has significance.

Lord, open up our eyes to see what that significance is.

Lord, help us to connect with our neighbors.

Lord, help us to see, even as we we recognize our own presence, Lord, help us to see the meaning behind that.

Lord, I pray that you'd rescue us from um, or rescue me.

I know I'm guilty of just running to my phone and my screen to extra extricate myself from where you really want me to be, where you want me to be present.

Lord, rescue me from that place.

Lord, help me to dwell, help me to dwell amongst my fellow humanity.

Help that us all to do that, Lord.

Thank you, Jesus, for your great grace upon us this morning.

And we ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Let's stand together and close with this song.