EXTENSION OF THE INCARNATION

Sermon delivered on the Second Sunday of Christmas the 4th January 2009 by Fr Nicholas JG Sykes at St. Alban's Church, 461 Shedden Road, George Town, Cayman Islands.

Scriptures: Jeremiah 31:7-14    Ephesians 1:3-14    John 1:1-18

John 1: 12 "To all who received Him, who believed in His Name, He gave power to become children of God."

COMMEMORATION OF THE INCARNATION

The Church Fathers such as St. Irenaeus expressed the thought very strongly about the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ that God was made the Son of Man so that men could be made sons of God. Today the 4th of January we look can back over most of the Twelve Days of Christmas, today being the eleventh day, and of course the pre-Christmas period before that in Advent, and we can consider whether our observance of Christmas has in fact promoted God’s purpose for the Incarnation as the Church Fathers saw it. As always we see a large number of interests taking a piggy-back ride on the genuine commemoration of the Nativity (or Birth into this world) of Our Lord. We could think of the joyful solemnity of the Nativity as the root of it, from which springs the stem of the original plant. We tap into its energy and nutrition by grafting onto that stem a large variety of other plant cuttings. As they grow, some of them adorn the original Christmas plant very well, and can be considered to express its meaning; but others that we graft tend to suck the life and form out of the original plant, so that it is either killed or turned into something unrecognisable. Then that unrecognisable thing no longer expresses the Nativity of our Lord as an essential perspective on the Incarnation. In days gone by we bemoaned the fact that certain communist countries banned the celebration of Christmas. Now in our own countries of the West a more subtle sort of silencing is going on, such as Birmingham in England for many years officially celebrating something called Winterval, or the Winter Festival, and people of historically Christian communities becoming content to send "Happy Holiday" greetings to their fellow-baptised rather than Christmas greetings. Without doubt, our real enemy in all of this is, as St. Paul says, not flesh and blood, not a merely human adversary, and as Christians we have to engage the enemy effectively and develop the necessary attitudes and skills to do so.

EPIC OF ENGAGEMENT

The Incarnation is itself, after all, an engagement, of an unimaginably epic nature. We used to speak of a telephone giving an "engaged" tone - in a more accurate expression than in the term "busy" signal. A person can be busy on his exercise machine for example, but to be engaged, somebody else is directly involved. So a person can be engaged in a meeting, or engaged to be married, or engaged in battle, and that always involves other parties to the engagement. The Incarnation is clearly the engagement of God with Man. Indeed we can think of that engagement too under the forms of meeting, marriage and battle. The Incarnation fulfils such yearnings as are expressed in Psalm 85: "Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him: that glory may dwell in our land. Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other. Truth shall spring out of the earth; and righteousness shall look down from heaven." In the grace of God that meeting, that engagement, between heaven and earth, actually took place. The ancient yearnings and myths became reality at a particular point of history. That meeting of heaven and earth is what Christmas, along with its precursor the Annunciation, is meant to express, even extravagantly at times, no matter. We are, after all, expressing the greatest epic.

ENGAGEMENT IN BATTLE

Now the Incarnation engages God and Man in battle too. In the Old Testament Jacob wrestles with God and will not let Him go until He blesses him. God's blessing of Jacob was a redemption from His own hands that were too strong for him. Perhaps there is a glance back to this when in our first lesson from Jeremiah this morning, the prophet declares: "Say ‘He who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd keeps his flock.’ For the Lord has ransomed Jacob, and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him." Man feels a resistance when God engages him. Christians too will feel this resistance against what they have given their allegiance to. In the Old Testament Israel's subjugation by Gentile nations was something the Lord redeemed them from, and yet it was to discipline Israel that the subjugation was provided or allowed in the first place.

THE BATTLE

So when the Word, as St. John describes Him, was in the world, in spite of the fact that the world was made by His agency, the world resisted Him. "He came unto His own, and His own received Him not". His own people did not receive Him. His own world did not receive Him. The Author battled for recognition from the cast of His own plot. And even for those who did receive Him, though this is going further into the Gospel than St. John's Prologue, there were battles ahead, of recognition and understanding. Even His most rock-like disciple, when he recognised Him as the Christ, fell back immediately and became to Him the voice of Satan. To this day, then, as God engages man for battle, He engages him in battle also. The baptised soldier and servant of Christ is pledged manfully to fight under His banner, against sin, the world and the devil, but the location of that battle is first always the baptised soldier and servant's own soul, and secondly, the baptised soldier and servant's own immediate family, employment and other circumstances. Just as for the Incarnation God engages man in battle, so when the soldier and servant of God engages those around him in the Name of Christ, there are many battles to be fought and won. When we as the church engage and fight, then we may rightly be referred to as an extension of the Incarnation. When we refuse to engage and fight, then our identity as members of Christ and His church is called into question.

FOLLOWING THE ENGAGEMENT OF CHRIST

The church is described in Revelation as the Bride of Christ: God and Man are engaged ultimately to be married. Yet that engagement is not without cost: it is an engagement in battle simultaneously. The engagement of the Incarnation involves the shedding of the lifeblood of the Christ: just as there was the shedding of blood by S. Stephen, by the Innocent children of Bethlehem and indeed in the Circumcision of Christ. Jacob prevails over the one he wrestles with, to the extent of obtaining his blessing, so the rulers of men are allowed to prevail over the Christ in the shedding of His precious blood, to the extent of the ebbing of His life on the cross. In that passion and death, however, lay the fulfilment of the engagement that He was given to accomplish, and being victorious, His release from the task; and now we are called to take up the terms of our engagement, and, nothing daunting, by the power of His glory and His accomplishment, follow after Him. As is declared by S. Paul in our second Lesson, "For God has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of His will, according to His purpose which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth."

QUESTIONS

1. Identify elements in your Christmas celebration that expressed the meaning of Christmas, and others that may have served to stifle it.

2. Why is it that God's "engagement" of man must involve battle? Is the outcome worth it?