Christmas Day: The Visited Planet

How many of you remember the moon landing?  It will be 50 years ago next year. I remember the images of people watching the flickering black and white TV’s through store windows all over the world, even in countries that were our sworn enemies. It was a breathtaking and unifying moment for humanity. 

Apollo 11 was the first successful manned mission to the moon. Of the previous 18 unmanned attempts, 13 were failures. Most of us forget that this one almost failed too--the Lunar Rover almost didn’t land on the moon.  When astronaut Neil Armstrong finally set it down, he had had to override the automatic systems that tried to land it a location far too rocky. Even after he took over the controls, he had to abort three times before he could touch down.  When he finally shut down the systems, exactly 20 seconds of fuel remained.  

What words can describe this mission? Brave. Risky. Audacious. Hopeful.   What makes the human spirit capable of such imagination and courage?  What makes us dare to be so bold?  What makes us want to reach out so far beyond ourselves?

I thought of this mission when I encountered a phrase by the writer Philip Yancey, who wrote of our Gospel’s theme as “the visited planet.”  The common threads between the Apollo Mission and God’s incarnation of Jesus were two-fold for me—one, the cosmic implications of both God’s divine mission and the human Apollo mission; and two, the breathtaking risk and vulnerability and beauty that are contained in both.  It says so much about how high we can soar, when we are at our best.  And it says so much God’s love for us, that God came down and visited us not just as Spirit, but as one of us.

I don’t have to tell you this Christmas day that a baby has been born. That’s why we are here on a Tuesday! We sing the story in our hymns. If our whole Christian story were on a Google map, we would be zoomed in on that scene in Bethlehem.  We could see the details at an intimate level: the young mother, a humble manger, sheep and shepherds, cows, donkeys, straw, and probably, animal poop. All this helps us visualize that Jesus was, indeed, 100 percent human. And it seems a perfectly sensible place for at least two of our Gospels to begin the story about Jesus: at his birth.

Now John’s Gospel, today’s level, comes from a different perspective.  It’s tackling the story of this audacious, risky, breathtaking mission of God, to incarnate Godself into our very world. The Word made flesh. It’s a mission from another world.

Mixed media art by Trygve Skogran

So to grasp John’s point, we have to zoom out--all the way up into the cosmos.  Bethlehem is not even a tiny speck from here.  John ‘s big picture perspective is clear from the very start, with the words “In the beginning.”  We can’t help notice these are the first words of Genesis, and that’s exactly what John’s first-century followers would have noticed, too. It’s why John used them.  “In the beginning, the Word.”   

Now what was Word?  Word in Greek is Logos -- the principle of divine reason and creative order.  John is beginning to establish a very big idea here--that Jesus is this Logos.  He’s saying, “The very Word through whom all things were made, and challenged the darkness at Creation--that Word has come to us,” John is telling us, “to challenge the darkness we live in.”  Whereas the Genesis story climaxes with the creation of humans, the climax John points to is God’s next project--the arrival of Jesus--God as a most particular human. And so once again, God is saying, “Word is present among you. Now, let there be light!” 

This is not a different God. And it’s not a God version 2, for the Word is eternal, and has always been the second person of the Trinity. But this is a new mission from God--to be known to us, and by us, in a most intimate and saving way. 

What the birthplace of Jesus actually looks like on Google Maps

So if to know Jesus is to know God, then what does this Jesus tell us about God?

One, we learn that God is humble. The idea of a humble God was an oxymoron in John’s time. In fact, there were some at the time of this Gospel who didn’t think Jesus was as important as John the Baptist. We know John the Baptist as a wilderness prophet who ate locusts and wild honey, and dressed in clothes of camelhair.  If Jesus is so humble that he is being compared unfavorably to John the Baptist--?  It was very hard for people to accept that the God of power and glory would come to us in such a humble form.  Yet, this is the Jesus mission.  Not God as a warrior or king, God of Sun or Thunder. Instead, a God who said, “I am the Good shepherd. I know my flock, and my flock knows me.”

The next thing we learn about God in the incarnation of Jesus is that God is relationship.  First, there is God’s relationship with Jesus:  The Word was present at creation, but we did not really know the second person of the Trinity, let alone Word as God’s Son, living among us and with us, calling God his father. This also tells us about God’s relationship with us. Because if God is the Father, we must understand that God is giving up the Son for our sake. This is an outpouring of love: so committed is God to us that God sent the Son to be with us. The Son suffers a death as acutely as any other human would suffer.  The Father suffers the death of the Son. For so God loved the world. For so God loved us. God is relationship.

Finally, we learn something about God’s power, because the rocket fuel that powered God’s mission to us, is the power of love. The love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, the love of Jesus for us.  The love represented in every story Jesus tells us and every one he touches:  the love of the father for his prodigal son, the love of the Good Samaritan for his neighbor, the love of Jesus for the Canaanite woman, of Jesus for his friend Lazarus, and the sacrificial love Jesus showed in giving his life for us. This is not giving God giving UP God’s power. This is God showing us the ultimate power:  the power of love.

We recalcitrant and distractible humans apparently needed God in our faces to learn this. So God visited a planet known for its violence, and came to a people who had a history, God well knew, for scorning prophets, a people who would do violence to God’s very Son.

Like Jesus, we too are born in the flesh, in a world full of violence, a world at times chaotic, as well as achingly beautiful.  We are also born in the image of God. The Genesis story that John refers to also tells us:  “So God created humankind in God’s image; in the image of God God created them.”  It’s easier for us to understand being in the image of Jesus than the image of God the Father. It’s easier for us to know love when love comes down to dwell in our hearts. It’s easier for us to be the light of the world when the light has come down and pierced the darkness.  God approaches us as Jesus to show us what it means to be human, by showing us what it means to be divine.  

And it is easier to understand why we would send a rocket to the heavens when we remember we are in the image of the one who took the audacious risk of visiting our planet and becoming flesh to us this Christmas day. It was an act so cosmic that the great scientists of that time – the ones we know as the wisemen - were already on the road to Bethlehem by now, knowing something world-changing was happening under that star. It was a reaching act of love, seeking our hearts, meeting our own vulnerability with the vulnerability of God in Jesus. And we have never been the same.

The power of love fueled this act, and that same love empowers us to meditate on what Jesus shows us about the nature of God—God’s humility, relationship, and love so that we can reflect them as God’s image-bearers to each other.  Because Jesus has shown us how.  God has visited our planet and pitched a tent among us.  

So let us zoom down to that manger scene, at the smallness and tenderness and vulnerability of this little human baby who was sent to live his life as a teacher, and healer and prophet and way-shower to us—and also to endure great suffering on the cross to show us the power of love even over death.  And then, after we have appreciated that intimate scene for a time--let’s zoom out, and contemplate that of all the great projects the God of the universe could have undertaken, God undertook this one. For us. 

Oh the wonder of God’s love!! 

Lectionary Readings:  Isaiah 52:7-10; Psalm 98; Hebrews 1:1-12; John 1:1-14

Preached Christmas Day, St Gabriel Episcopal Church, Portland, OR