If you are reading this, it means that you’ve survived the holiday season. Congratulations!
The holidays are difficult. Some of our Crafters have had to leave their religious home for one reason or another. Many chose to leave as they have deconstructed their old ways of life and faith. Some have been told to leave as people have been threatened by their authentic selves. For these Crafters, going home for the holidays can cause serious stress.
Around the holidays, churches are packed. It is highly likely that you were convinced to attend church on Christmas Eve. Was it to make your grandmother happy? Or did you go so that your family wouldn’t think you were hell-bound? Maybe your mother whispered into your ear, “Just pretend that you are enjoying this,” as the minister got up with the same old Christmas Eve sermon.
Needless to say, somehow many people who are trying to craft their own faith end up in a church on Christmas Eve listening to an old white man kill baby Jesus.
You read that correctly.
Every Christmas, churches kill the baby Jesus. They proclaim the birth of God into this world in the beginning of the service and by the end, Jesus dies for our sins. And by killing baby Jesus, so many people are missing the importance of, beauty in, and life-giving meaning of the incarnation.
Incarnation literally means becoming flesh (think carne asada; it all comes back to tacos).
The idea that Christians celebrate at Christmas is that God became flesh and dwelt among us. For some reason people can’t be satisfied with that and have to attach all kinds of other toxic theology on to it (4 Toxic Theologies). The most popular toxic theology at Christmas is that God became flesh so that Jesus could die on the cross for our sins.
No. No. No.
First, Christians are not and should not ever be into child sacrifice (another post on that forthcoming). Second, saying that this little baby came to save us from our sins 30-some years later makes those 30 years insignificant. Jesus did some pretty incredible, revolutionary, progressive, challenging things in those 30 years. Maybe they mattered.
So, if you suffered through a Christmas Eve sermon with your family of origin and had to witness baby Jesus be killed, read these three reasons the incarnation is important. Maybe it’ll save the baby Jesus.
- Jesus made it clear that God loves flesh and bodies.
We’ve gotten the message that God doesn’t love bodies and God could never love sinful flesh. Although this message originated in Greek philosophy, it was carried into Christian theology by none other than the Apostle Paul (every progressive woman’s favorite mansplainer). Over and over, Paul creates dualisms between the mind and body or the spirit and flesh. The mind, according to Paul, is stronger and of a higher moral capacity than the body. The same is true for the spirit and flesh: the spirit is stronger and thus preferred.
And because conservative Christians love Paul more than Jesus, this thought that the flesh and body are lower — in some cases, to be despised — seeped into our consciousness.
So if we learn anything from the incarnation, it is that God isn’t like Paul. But seriously, God wouldn’t become something God doesn’t love. Jesus shows us that God loves flesh and bodies.
2. The incarnation — God with us — shows us that it is good to be human.
Here’s another distortion from Paul and his cronies. If you’ve been in churches that are conservative, evangelical, and sometimes even moderate, you’ve probably heard a lot of language about human sinfulness. You’ve probably been told that you have human desires and then godly desires, implying that the human ones are bad and to be overcome. Subtly as people digest this message, they begin to believe that it is not good to be human.
You may have also heard Christians from these groups spout off about escaping this broken, sinful world. That too is a denial of the goodness of being human.
We get glimpses of this goodness throughout the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. In the beginning, when God created humanity, God placed God’s image in the humans and blessed them. People now are referring to this as the Original Blessing. If that sounds strangely similar to Original Sin, it is on purpose. There is a progressive movement to begin to re-emphasize the centrality of the Original Blessing, rather than Original Sin. It is not a denial of sin, but a shift in emphasis.
It is good to be human because humans (and everything that was created) carry the fingerprints of the Divine. The incarnation reawakens us to the Divine that has been placed within each of us by showing us that it is good to be human.
3. The incarnation shows us that becoming better humans is the point.
The point of this whole thing is not to escape this world for the next. The point is not to get as many people as possible into the Good Place (great show, by the way). No, the point is that this baby whose birth we celebrated grows to teach a lot of wisdom about what it means to be human.
Some theologians (Elizabeth Johnson, specifically), even talk about Jesus being the incarnation of wisdom. In fact, when the Gospel of John talks about Jesus’ birth, it says, “The Word became flesh…” The Greek word for Word is logos, which carries with it a meaning of order or logic. But feminist theologians like Elizabeth Johnson equate logos with Sophia, another Greek term meaning wisdom. Sophia carries with it all kinds of really interesting history that will make another great post one day.
But the point is, Jesus is the incarnation of Wisdom. The purpose of wisdom is to help us live better lives and become better humans.
We become better humans by becoming more human, continuing the process of incarnation in our world.
Be good humans today.