Friday Nudge: A Deeper Understanding of Incarnation - Advent 4
Lighting the candle of love
Friends, we are so close to Christmas, to the birth of the Christ-child and the promise it brings of the eventual fullness of God’s reign! Yet still we wait. We wait in the quiet and the noise, the stillness and the busyness. And as we wait, we allow ourselves to deepen our understanding of Holy Waiting in light of the 13.8-billion-year universe. O Come, Emmanuel, Child of the Universe.
Speaking of Christmas, I will be taking the following two weeks off for a much-needed break. I will resume posting here on Substack the week of January 8, 2024. I pray that you experience the deep and sustaining hope, peace, joy, love, and light of Christ this Christmas and throughout 2024.
Yours in Earth community, Jessica
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Advent Reflection
Advent 4: A Deeper Understanding of Incarnation
I will sing of the Lord’s great love forever;
with my mouth I will make your faithfulness known
through all generations.
2 I will declare that your love stands firm forever,
that you have established your faithfulness in heaven itself.
3 You said, “I have made a covenant with my chosen one,
I have sworn to David my servant,
4 ‘I will establish your line forever
and make your throne firm through all generations.’”[c]
5 The heavens praise your wonders, Lord,
your faithfulness too, in the assembly of the holy ones.
(Psalm 89:1-5, NIV)
In the birth of Jesus, we understand God as both fully human and fully divine. Over the course of centuries, in various interpretations and emphases, often one aspect or the other has been emphasized. Sometimes his divinity has been held up and focused on; at other times, it is his humanity. At times, some Christians have been uncomfortable with one aspect or the other. For those who find Jesus’ complete divinity unnerving, there is a discomfort (or even disbelief) in recognizing God as a power above and beyond human beings; to point toward the other-worldly aspect of God; to suggest that there is a way and means to God that is outside of the realm of the observable, outside of the realm of the ‘believable.’ Others find the reality that Jesus was born from a woman’s body, out of pain and blood and struggle, and that he had the same bodily experiences as most of us, to be uncomfortable. To recognize Jesus as fully human means to look at other humans and what they experience – especially refugees, the poor, racialized peoples, and those within the LGBTQ2S+ community – and not look away.
And there are still others who hold the reality of this both-and reality of Jesus, that he was born fully human and fully divine, and somehow let both realities in, even when they lead to more questions than answers, more wondering than less. Especially when this dual reality leads to more questions than answers, more wondering than less. In this fourth week of Advent, I invite us all to sit at this place of letting both things be true and let the questions come forth.
As we sit, I want to invite us to go even deeper; for what we have learned about the emergent universe, about its story of beginning 13.8 years ago, and its growing and expanding, evolving and surprising, deepens the reality and truth of the incarnation even further.
For Jesus was not just fully human and fully divine; he was also fully a being of the universe, too! He was also an aspect of the universe reflecting upon itself. In first-century Palestine, into a world of power and corruption, as well as a world of faithfulness, tenderness, and love, Jesus was the universe reflecting on itself. When we read biblical stories, we are reading human understanding and interpretation of that universe self-reflection.
For Christians, the birth of Jesus is about a way in which God wanted to become incarnate in and through the universe. Jesus wasn’t just human; he was fully a part of God’s good creation, and fully a part of the universe itself. God wasn’t just divine; he was the expression of divinity in and through the entire 13.8 billion universe story!
The universe is not God; God’s creation is not God. But God permeates and empowers every part of creation, every part of the universe, from the moment of the Big Bang and through to today. For Christians, we learn about this through the birth of Jesus. The incarnation teaches us that matter matters, that all that which is born of and through the Earth matters, and that all that has come forth from the initial elements of 13.8 billion years ago matters. And, the incarnation teaches us that all of creation, all of the universe, has become the place in which the full divinity of God has become manifest. The full power and mystery of God, while not contained by creation within the universe, is present to us within the universe story.
And so, for this Advent reflection, I invite you to reflect on this deeper dimension of the incarnation. What does it mean that Jesus is fully of the universe, that he was fully an Earth creature emerging from a 13.8-billion-year process? What does it mean that Jesus, as an aspect of the universe reflecting upon itself, is also fully divine? Whatever your own theological perspective on the understanding of Jesus as fully human and divine (and your comfort level with that both/and reality), in what ways do these questions help to increase your questions and your wonder, your faith and your experience of God?
Next week, as you celebrate Christmas and find your place at the manger, I invite you to think of that manger, and the baby who is in it, within the context of the 13.8-billion-year emerging universe. I leave you with these words from Fr. Neil Vaney, a Catholic priest:
“Through his DNA, Jesus took on not just Mary’s biological past, but the genetic inheritance of the Semitic peoples. …He inherited chemical bonds laid down in the cooling of supernovae, structures that developed in plants, muscle and tissue structure found in animals, and finally the embodied spirit unique to human creatures. In taking on this inheritance, he became connected to every being at every level of this entire cosmos.”
Happy Advent, my friends. And Merry Christmas. May God’s love surround you, may the profound connection with the cosmos sustain you, and may the embodied love of God through the Earth community fill you and make you whole. AMEN.
What have you learned in this Advent reflection series about the universe, the birth of Christ, and your faith?
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