Dear Friends,
If you're tripped up by the apparent false start of Advent, you're in good company. Christians do New Years weird. We don't start with fanfare and champagne; we kick off with minor keys and cries from “lowly exile.” Tish Harrison Warren notes that part of the usefulness of Advent is to “make Christmas weird again, to allow the shock of the incarnation to take us aback once more.” I like this because the Incarnation of the Son of God is nothing less than an earthquake, and it should strike us as such.
Our problem is that we tend to get comfortable with strangeness. We lose the wonder. We drag glory down and call the holy works of God “normal” when they are anything but. We live in miracles.
Our Youth Fellowship is working to keep the Incarnation strange by spending a few weeks of Advent getting stuck on the miracle of God becoming man. This week we are talking about the meaning of the Incarnation, and we'll focus on one verse from 1 John: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” (4:9).
Not only does John offer the Incarnation as the proof of God's love, he also points to God's final purpose in it: so that we might live through him.
An easy way to lose the wonder is to forget prepositions. Christ did not come so that we could live next to God, near God, or even under God. Jesus took on flesh so that we could live through him. “In” is another appropriate preposition Scripture uses.
St. Athanasius, boldly flirting with blasphemy to underscore the glory of the Incarnation, put it this way: “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” This statement should startle you. But the apparent overstatement helps us to get the shock: If we think that Jesus came to give us any other life than his very own, we've missed the Gospel. Scripture is clear: we live in Christ. Not beside him. Not across from him. But in him. Again, we live a miracle. In taking on human form, Jesus has made us “partakers of the divine nature” not bystanders of it (2 Peter 1:4). How is that for weird?
Happy waiting,
Director of Youth Fellowship
