Advent Paradoxes: The Sanctity of Commonness

December 24, 1995

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Scripture: “What God has cleansed, you must not call common.” Acts 10:15b

You’ll remember, I trust...I HOPE you remember that the overall theme we’re following during this Advent season has to do with paradoxes. A paradox, of course, is a truth which may seem at first to be contradictory, to be at cross purposes with itself, to contain two elements which sound like they would cancel each other out, but which, may, in fact, find resolution when lifted to a higher level.

Christianity is full of paradoxes---You are never so free as when you’re willing to be a slave....Real life comes only through dying....The only way to have is to give away....

These are paradoxical statements, apparently irreconcilable, yet profoundly and powerfully true.

In the Advent season, as we prepare for Incarnation, paradoxes jump out at us....we’ve tried to touch on a few this year--The Surprise of Willingness...that God should be willing to come to humankind, after all we’ve done...and failed to do....You’d think He would have long since given up on us.

BUT NO! Even after that spotted, tattered record, so dismal and depressing, He comes. What a surprise.

The Sovereignty of Humbleness....You’re never so tall as when you stoop. Christ humbled himself... “emptied himself”, Paul said, taking the form of a servant...for our sakes. Why is He exalted now?

Precisely because He lowered Himself then.

And The Strength of Innocence...something about a little baby that pulls out the best in you. God knew what He was doing. It’s hard to be cynical in the face of unblemished purity. When we look into the face of that special child, we know that what we’re seeing is the Truth.

So we come today to the 4th Advent Sunday, to consider another paradox, one more of these mysteries that conventional wisdom says ought not to be so, but which God’s astonishing self-disclosure into the stream of human life shows us IS so.

I’ve named it The Sanctity of Commonness, to make it more or less line up with the other titles in the series. Matching them up like that is supposed to add a little homiletical validation.

Actually, The Hallowing of the Ordinary would express it just as well, or The Lighting Up of the Everyday...or The Radiance of the Drab...any of those would do. You could even call it “FINDING GOD IN THE MOST UNUSUAL AND UNEXPECTED PLACES IMAGINABLE, PLACES YOU WOULDN’T THINK GOD WOULD EVER CHOOSE TO EXPRESS HIMSELF, BECAUSE THEY DON’TS SEEM AUGUST AND LOFTY ENOUGH, AND YET, THERE HE IS, BRIMMING OVER WITH TRANSCENDANCE, BIG AS LIFE.

How about that? Just a tad long for a sermon title, probably. It would overflow the allotted space available in the bulletin, and Julie, whose word prevails in these matters would not like my proposing it in that form at all.

But that’s the Incarnation story, at least part of it, at least a good chunk of it, something shot through and through with paradox.

You see, the stunning thing about Incarnation---if it weren’t paradoxical, it would be an outright scandal---the stunning thing about Incarnation is the sheer earthiness of it, the physical, tangible, matter-soaked, get-your-hands-on, in-your-face, grubby, grimy earthiness of it.

Incarnation, after all... the word itself, literally means the “enfleshing”, the packing of Spirit, divine Spirit, into biological, human flesh. Think about that. Stunning is the right word.

There’s nothing like that, so far as I can tell...There’s nothing like it in any other religion. Flesh, sinew, the world, materiality isn’t held in high regard in most religions. Typically it’s repudiated in favor of higher values, spiritual values, as they’re called.

Buddhists seek escape from the material, and into a state of Nirvana, final nothingness...Hindus, through the process of karma, seek an increasingly upward mobility, away from the world and on toward pure spirit.

In most of the oriental religions, the physical world represents limitation, restriction, finiteness, even enslavement to the baser instincts. The trick is to get away from all that, and into a more rarefied, anti-materialistic state.

The Greeks, too, who lived contemporaneously with the Biblical era, and had such fertile philosophical genius....also tended to split reality, divide it into camps, material and spiritual, with the material, if not downright evil, at least suspect.

Plato, for instance, liked to say, “The body is the prison house of the soul.” There’s the division, neatly laid out. When you were through with that restricting jailhouse of flesh, that confining coffin, you were better off, because then the soul, the psyche, the spiritual part of you, the real you, could float away into space and be free. Material and spiritual, different worlds, with material invariably the step-sister.

Hebrews didn’t buy into that; Hebrews didn’t think that way, and Christianity is the offspring of Judaism, not Greek philosophy.

In Old Testament understanding, something Jews and Christians together share, that clear demarcation, that sharply etched dividing line between body and soul, flesh and spirit, natural and supernatural earthly and heavenly that you find in other religious expressions ISN’T THERE. You don’t find it.

What you find instead is an integration of the material and the spiritual a comingling, a mixing together, a crossing over, a psychosomatic union, if you will.

Who are we? The Bible has been trying to tell us all along...We’re a blending of the material and the spiritual, both “dust of the earth”...physical matter, AND the divine “ruach”, as Hebrews say it, the holy “breath of God”....

We’re not one or the other, pure biology, or pure spirit, we’re BOTH, held in tension...even paradoxical tension.

Modern medicine recognizes the truth of it now, just as the Bible has been saying. People don’t just have bodies; they ARE bodies. Treat an illness in isolation, and you’ll probably miss something important---the big picture---how it all fits together.

Did you see the segment on ABC News the other night....just last week...National Television, the Peter Jennings report. Medicine and Faith, they called it.....

A growing realization: The much closer relationship than had been thought between the patient’s beliefs, value systems, faith, and the patient’s physical health.

The best doctors have long known it.... Recent scientific measurements are now scientifically confirming it.

Faith-full people, Spirit people, religiously committed people do better after operations, heal faster, and even tend to live longer.

There’s a close relationship here.

Now, I don’t want to overstate it. And we mustn’t distort it. I’m not promising that tithing, for example, will add years to your life...though...well....

I heard a story recently about an aging millionaire who had led something of a dissolute life. He was nearing the end. It was clear he didn’t have a lot of time left, so he called for the preacher to come see him.

“Reverend”, he said, “I know I’ve committed some sins over the course of my life. I’ve done some things I’m ashamed of. Do you think it would make any difference in my eternal salvation situation if I donated 6 million dollars to the Church?”

The preacher was up on his Reformation theology. But he also thought about the Life Center they were trying to build, and needed so badly. He was in a bind. He scratched his head a minute, and then said, “Well, it’s worth a try.”

Don’t think I’m suggesting that spiritual blessing can be bought by punching the right physical buttons...or vice-versa, that faithfulness necessarily guarantees perfect health---We’ve read too much out of the Book of Job to be taken in by that.

BUT WHAT IS CLEAR, and becoming clearer is the Biblical understanding that there is a close intimacy between body and spirit.

These things overlap, and, in fact, what the Bible seems to want us to grasp is that far from being intrinsically evil, debased, corrupt, something to escape from INTO spirit, matter, flesh, world is precisely the staging area for the invasion of spirit.

What does it mean to be “spiritual” in the Biblical sense, the Christian sense? Does it mean to be otherworldly, ethereal, separated from life, as some seem to want us to believe? NOT AT ALL. It means letting the Spirit of God manifest itself in the midst of life.

Christianity is an unabashedly materialistic religion. That’s a scandal to many, especially to those who like to talk about a “spiritual” meaning of life, but that’s the nature of the Faith... and always has been.

The very first Christian heresy was called “Docetism”, from a Greek word that meant to seem, or to appear. It was basically a denial of the humanity of Jesus, in an attempt to exalt His divinity. He only seemed to suffer on the Cross, the Docetists argued. That wasn’t real; it was just a charade. AND THE EARLY CHURCH REPUDIATED IT WITH ALL THE POWER IS COULD MUSTER.

No, spirituality in Christianity doesn’t mean unearthly at all. It doesn’t mean pure and undefiled.

And it certainly doesn’t mean separated or removed. Christian spirituality always has some kind of material focus. Our faith is an EARTHY faith, centering around a God who takes a liking to the “earthy”. That’s our story.

Instead of staying up in heaven where He belongs, or where some think He belongs. He insists on becoming embarrassingly earthy.

He meddles in the affairs of an obscure, nomadic tribe in the Middle East; He rescues them from the slavery of a tyrannical despot. He reveals Himself through prophets who talk about things like justice, and honesty, and the proper treatment of the poor.... It’s astounding how unspiritual the prophets were in the familiar sense of the word.

And then, the ultimate in earthiness. He comes to earth in the flesh and blood of a tiny Baby, entering the world in the labor pangs and contractions of a young woman who may not have known until that night where her delivery would take place.

I remember a woman in the church in Monticello when I was serving there, who gave me a stern talking to, a sharp rebuke because I had used the word pregnant in connection with Mary’s pre-natal condition. That’s so vulgar, she said so disrespectful, so... so common.

You should say, “with child,” or “in a family way”...You shouldn’t use that explicit word in connection with our Spiritual Lord.” I didn’t realize it until later. She was a Docetist.

EXPLICIT IS EXACTLY THE POINT. The birth of Jesus was explicit, probably bloody... extraordinarily biological and earthy.

When we sanitize and gloss over the physical human part of Incarnation we’re not exalting spirituality, we’re actually diluting it, because God is intimately involved with the physical. That’s where God’s Spirit is, up to its elbows in the stuff of life.

Barrie Shepherd has written a little book entitled “Faces at the Manger”, and in one section of it, he does reflection on the animals who probably were present in the stable setting. A part of it is apt as a corrective to our sometimes fluffy, unearthly spiritualizing of Christmas.

“What about those animals”, he says....“It’s really quite amusing what we do with them, those creatures, in our Christmas cards and sentimental verse. We treat them as humans, for the most part. It’s hard to deal with them simply as animals, per se, so we dress them up into “The Lowly Beasts”, depicting ox and ass kneeling at the stall in absurdly awkward reverence.

Or we devise ridiculous TV cartoons about “The Night the Animals Talked”, or “The Racoons’s Christmas” quite forgetting that cuteness has no part at all in the original manger scene at Bethlehem.

Even our Christmas songs warble all too often about the patient ox, or the humble donkey....“the sweet breath of the kine, on the chill December breeze”. Have these people ever been in a real stable? Have they ever walked, or attempted to walk, across the floor of a humble peasant cowshed?

He goes on. To be perfectly honest, ours is not the first generation to be offended by the stark reality of that Bethlehem stable. Way back in 1635, the fastidious Queen Anne of Austria, instructed her royal architect concerning one of her building projects in these terms:

“The Church must be a sumptuous and magnificent sanctuary in order to compensate as much as possible for the extreme vulgarity and poverty of the place where the Eternal Word chose to be born.”

Barrie comments, “How tasteless of the Eternal Word. Now if only her majesty had been in charge.”

Then he adds, “Yet this is where it all took place. Not in some pseudo-rustic, plastic stable, floodlit on the lawn outside the church... nor in some over-ornate baroque or rococo ecclesiastical excess; but in the grunge and grime, the smell and din of an honest-to-goodness, honest-to-Godness cowshed somewhere in the hills of Palestine.”

Well, tonight is Christmas Eve....Sometime in the night, tonight, sometime before morning, we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the coming of God Himself into His world in human form.... Incarnation.

What are we to make of it? What does it all mean, this strange, materialistic story? More than we can express, that’s a cinch...More than we can comprehend. And certainly more than one pitiful human sermon can ever wrap around.

But would you let me, as we think about this truly unusual paradox of the divine infusing the human, the spirit invading matter....would you let me draw 3 very practical implications? I’ll have to do it almost without elaboration...and let you make further elaboration on your own.

1) First, doesn’t the earthiness of Incarnation show us unmistakably WHAT GOD IS INTERESTED IN, WHAT God is concerned about--namely, the ordinary, everyday stuff of ordinary everyday life.

That God should come at all shows that the physical world which He created, and called “good” is the arena of His activity, the stage on which He acts. It means that this is where He is to be found, where He’s always to be found, in the earthy, colorful, bloody tapestry of ordinary life, not apart from it, but within it...in the bone weariness of orange pickers, in the frustration and rage of ghetto dwellers, in the agonizing hunger of a Haitian baby, in the pitiful wail of a Bosnian orphan....

Here is where God is to be found, not way off somewhere, but in the midst of all those hurts and needs. If you’re looking for a spiritual meaning for life, then I can’t think of any better way to find it than to identify yourself with what God has already shown Himself to be identified with.

2) Secondly, we have a name for this spiritual earthiness, this revealing of the holy within the profane, the manifestation of the spiritual through the material. It’s one of the most important words in the Christian lexicon. We call it SACRAMENT...an “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”.

Jesus Christ is the ultimate sacrament... but any physical thing, any object, any material substance which is used as a means of providing insight into, or giving expression of the holy, can be said to have a sacramental quality.

So a farmer drives a plow through the wilderness, seeds and waters the land, and soon there is  bread to feed human beings. And one of the purposes of land is expressed sacramentally.

A Michelangelo takes a hog-bristle brush, greasy pigments, and a stucco wall, and soon out of that physical stuff people see God, or at least glimpse something of His majesty.

A man and woman stand before an altar and speak words in a marriage covenant, and then through the sexual act (which is not unclean, but in the context of genuine love sacramental), there are children and a home...and a part of God’s intention for humankind is fulfilled.

Things ....matter... stuff...is the medium of spiritual revelation. Jesus even said, “If you really want to be spiritual, give a cup of cold water in My name.... Imagine!

Don’t call common, Simon Peter came to see in a dynamic moment of revelation on a rooftop in Joppa....“Don’t call common what God has cleansed....” He may be working around you in sacramental expression, closer than you think.

3) Now, finally this...the invitational word, the redemptive word, the hopeful word...the point and glory of Incarnation.

God’s identification with the earthy, God’s getting down into the mud and grime of ordinary life means that no life is so beyond hope, no life is so corrupt and fouled up, no life is so sordid and dirty but that God can come into it and make a Christmas.

There’s the genuine JOY to the World, and the heart of our evangel.

Even if you have blown it before, even if you are addicted, trapped, enslaved, desperate...even if you think you’re so far gone as to be absolutely off the scare with respect to worth and value... even then.... stop long enough to look at that crude, physically sordid manger scene....GOD IS THERE

And THE VERY PRESENCE OF ITS EARTHY ODOR IS HIS PLEDGE TO YOU that He’ll go anywhere, and clean up anything so that you can know the blessedness of his redeeming relationship.

Hear the good news of Christmas. There is hope now for anyone... anyone. The Lord God of the universe, from His throne in a grubby manger, has declared it.