God in the Neighborhood

John 1:1-18

It takes Luke around two thousand words and Matthew around a thousand to tell the story that John tells today in two short phrases:

And the Word became flesh, and lived among us.

It’s one of the few times John’s story of Jesus seems concise, or simple, but those two phrases are also among the most powerful, everything-changing words in scripture or history:

Καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν

The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

Other translations say the Word, made flesh, pitched a tent among us, made a home with us, or moved into the neighborhood.

It’s bizarre – we’re supposed to notice how bizarre – that the almighty, all-creating, unlimitable God not only becomes flesh and blood, but moves into the neighborhood, moves in with intent to stay, to live the way we do, with the same sort of daily chores, and food, and headaches.

It’s bizarre. And it gets more bizarre when you and I, two millennia later, think about how our timeless, eternal God seems to choose one particular moment and place in the whole scope of human history to save all history.

It’s so bizarre that, over the years, any number of Christians haven’t believed it at all. There’s a lot of theological ink spilled over what’s called either “the Scandal of the Incarnation” – the absurdity of the idea that God who is all powerful would become limited, human, and mortal – or “the scandal of particularity” – the ridiculousness of the idea that God who has all eternity at God’s disposal would hang our salvation on one moment and person in history.

Lots of Christians over the centuries have have believed that this isn’t the way it worked after all. That it made more sense if God wasn’t really human – just looked human, dressed up as us to help open communications, but didn’t really suffer the liabilities of hunger and thirst and itches and sore hips and mortality and sweat and dirt. Or that our salvation doesn’t really have as much to do with Jesus of Nazareth being fully God, as with God’s general good intentions toward humanity.

But the Word became flesh, real flesh, the same flesh you feel when you pinch your arm, catalog your aches and pains, or smell at the end of a hard workout. The Word became flesh, and moved into our neighborhood. Close to us, just like us, the whole fullness of God, glory and power and grace and truth, living next door.

In spite of how bizarre it would seem if we hadn’t been telling each other this story for the last two thousand years, in spite of how bizarre it is still to imagine that God would move into our particular neighborhood – would pay property taxes, cram all the glory of God into a three-bedroom split-level or the MEND apartments right across our parking lot – still God absolutely moves into the neighborhood, bringing everything God is and has and could be into the suddenly crowded boundaries of our flesh and time and space.

This isn’t a vacation home for God. This isn’t camping during a mission trip. When the Word becomes flesh and makes a home here, God doesn’t leave anything of God’s self behind. God doesn’t leave behind enough of the grace and truth and light and glory and power to fit in to human limits. Instead the whole fullness of God becomes flesh just like yours and moves in among us.

And if God does that, if God moves wholly and completely into our neighborhood, our embodiedness, our sense of home and our personal space, then I think God means for us to do the same.

I think God wants us to bring the fullness of ourselves to God’s neighborhood: to bring every bit of your habits, my limits, our messiness, the bits of ourselves we don’t much like, into God’s neighborhood:

Into the holiest spaces we know.

Into our prayer, into our church.

Into our identity as brothers and sisters of Jesus, as children of God.

I suspect many of us have parts of ourselves, experiences or habits or history, that we’d like to leave behind when we come to God, or that we think we have to leave behind before we can be good enough to come to God.

But God brought all of God’s self into our limited flesh and our ordinary neighborhood,

and so we can – and must – bring our whole selves – our broken bits and saggy bits, ambition and dreams, flaws and failures and foolishness, our powerful potential, our self-doubt and occasional stupidity and shame – into God’s holiness, into our life as children of God.

This is the time of year when the news and culture focus on what we want to leave behind. We make resolutions about shedding excess weight, bad habits, debt or regrets. But this is also the time of year when we are reminded that God leaves nothing behind when becoming us, moving in among us, and God isn’t willing to wait for us to pack and discard our baggage before we come close to God.

God moves in among us before we’re ready, and expects the same of us: that we move close to God before we’re perfect and prepared.

What would it mean to you – in the light of God’s Incarnation, on the threshold of a new calendar year – what would it mean to you to bring everything of yourself right close into the presence of God?

To BE God’s own, God’s child, as close to God as Jesus, with every flaw and failure and secret hope and silly habit you’ve struggled to leave behind – not hidden from God or from you, simply part of you, close to all the fullness of God.

I suspect that our flaws and failures would hold us more gently, that our excess baggage would be lighter, that self-doubt and over-confidence would both become gentler on us and on our neighbors, that our potential and its risks would be less scary, that bad habits would be easier to break.

Because moving our whole selves, the fullness of our human limits and potential, into God’s glory, isn’t about reveling in our failures, or clinging to our sin, but about refusing ever to hide from God what God alone can redeem, and love, and transform.

That’s what God does for us, when God becomes flesh, and what we are called to do in our own flesh and God’s neighborhood, this time of year, and always.

John phrases this truth as simply as he can, so that we can hear, and believe, and act.

To all who received him, who committed their trust to him, he gave power to become children of God.

Because the Word became flesh and made a home among us, and we have seen his glory, the full glory of God, full of grace and truth. From God’s fullness we have received, grace upon grace.