Sermon Text

The Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 20, 2009

A FLESHLY GOSPEL
Luke 1:39-45 (46-55)

By now, I think most all of you have gotten word that I will be retiring halfway through this next year – “hanging ‘em up,” as they say. I promise not to mention that too many times in coming months. I don’t feel like I’m old, yet, not “over the hill,” but I’m definitely getting there.

Still, there are many satisfactions about this stage of life. Our children are grown and on their own, and we now have the four grandchildren, too. That part of life is very satisfying.

I first started doing ministry during a seminary internship almost 40 years ago, and this next June will mark the 38th anniversary of my ordination. I’ve learned a thing or two in those years, and had the chance to teach a thing or two. I think I’ve gained a modicum of wisdom to go along with that experience. I may not have done everything I wanted to do in my professional life, but I’ve done most of what I wanted to do, and I will be ending my ministry in a wonderful community of Christ’s people.

I’ll tell you, though, the main thing wrong with this stage of life is my body. It’s not the wonderful, responsive machine it used to be! I have a growing list of things I used to be able to do and either can’t anymore, or know that I shouldn’t try!

I think it started at 40 with glasses, just a little help with reading small print. Then it was bifocals and trifocals, and one unsuccessful try at using contacts.

In addition to that, I keep having to ask Betty Anne if she would repeat whatever it was she just said. Hearing aids may be in the near future. The psalmist said it this way: “All flesh is grass,” and I’m demonstrating that every day!

So are you. We are human, fragile, finite, mortal, limited.

So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that, down through the centuries, the main agenda of most religious and philosophical systems has been, “What is to be done with our flesh?” Plato seemed to believe that you could think your way out of the flesh, through philosophical contemplation. Buddhists seek enlightenment and Hindus seek to overcome the weight of karma. The Greek philosophers spoke of our physical bodies as prisons, and saw the soul as seeking liberation.

This is also, I think, part of the reason behind our current fascination with the “Spiritual” and “spirituality.” We’re trying to get beyond our physicality, to get in touch with our “higher nature.”

At least, that was the conventional wisdom until Jesus came. Our Gospel Lesson from Luke for this Sunday, for all its high-flown poetry, has a very fleshly setting – a conversation between two pregnant women about their pregnancies. It’s Luke’s way of saying something similar to the beginning of John’s Gospel, where it says that the Word – the eternal, divine, world-creating Word – became flesh and took up residence with us. Something needed to be done about our flesh, and so on a star-filled night the almighty God slipped in among us, almost unnoticed, assumed the very flesh we would like to shed, and was born as one of us.

At the very least, it was a peculiar, unexpected thing for God to do. After all, isn’t God supposed to be the antithesis to everything that is fleshly? Isn’t it as we get rid of all this physical baggage that we come closer to God? No, say the Gospels. We are physical, frail, finite, and mortal. We can’t come close to God, and so God, in love and grace, comes close to us, becomes one of us. That’s what the idea of Incarnation is all about, God taking on our flesh. This is what Christmas means.

There are significant implications to this strange belief. First of all, if you’re going to meet this God, you need to do it here, now, in the flesh, because that’s where God has chosen to be. If you’re going to worship this God made flesh, you’re going to have to do it here, and not in some spiritualized, altered state.

You come here, to this place, saying, “I want to get closer to God.” And the Church in its ancient wisdom says, “Here. Take a bath. Have some bread. Drink some wine. This is as godly as we get.”

Jesus came among us, not to deliver us from our flesh and all that flesh demands, but to redeem us in our flesh, to ennoble our frail, fleshly existence by his presence. He makes of our flesh a sacrament, a means of his grace, an outward and visible sign of his inward and spiritual power.

That’s what we are celebrating at Christmas. Thanks be to God!