Sermon by Anne Robertson ~ "God in a Box"

This is Advent. It is the four-week period in the Christian year when we are supposed to prepare our hearts for Christmas. It's the time of the year when I get e-mail from liturgical purists, reminding me that I'm not supposed to allow Christmas carols to be sung in church until Christmas Eve. You see from last week how well I listen! I think that's a lost battle in a culture that starts celebrating Christmas the day after Thanksgiving. The cultural Advent, the time when our culture starts preparing for Christmas, begins at Halloween.

Even though I don't choose to buck the culture on when Advent is celebrated, and we sing Christmas carols in full force on the first Sunday after Thanksgiving, I do agree with the church's basic point that to get the full spiritual benefit of Christmas, you have to prepare for it. And in a way, I think singing Christmas carols in Advent helps with that preparation because it helps us to remember what it is we are celebrating: The birth of Jesus, who we call the "son of God."

Back early this year when we went through the Apostle's Creed line by line to see what it meant, we talked about the confusion that is created when we talk about Jesus as the "son of God." We use father-son language only because we don't know any other way to talk about the mystery than the way Jesus tried to describe it to his disciples. But that language makes some people think that Jesus is somehow a demi-god, second in command to God the Father; and it lays us open to the charge by some that we worship not one God, but three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The theological answer to that is, "No, no, no!" What Christian doctrine teaches about Jesus is that Jesus IS God...that in some way we can't get our human brains around, God is the sort of being capable of being in many places at the same time. God, as a spiritual being, has the power to be both here in a human body and there in heaven, still running the show, at the same time. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit, multiplies that millions of times over, by saying that God is able to be present within any human being that will invite the Spirit in, as well as being outside of time and space.

I don't understand how that can happen. But I do believe that God is a being greater than and qualitatively different from human beings, so I trust that God can do things I can't do and even things I can't quite understand, because my brain is limited to understanding the dimensions and laws of earth. So, first of all, preparation for Christmas is an act of humility. It is the recognition that what the Bible claims happened on Christmas is something we are not capable of fully understanding.

Part of the wonder of Christmas, however, is that it is not just a matter of our humility. This is the time when we first recognize that humility is a characteristic of God. That's what Paul is trying to say in the Philippians passage. God does not have to do this. God doesn't have to come and live a human life...that's one of the advantages of being God. God is in charge. God gets to do what God wants to do, no questions asked. But God gives up the advantage. Out of love for the people God has created, God decides to give up the power and the glory-to pour as much of Him as will fit into a human body and, as Peterson's rendition tells us, "move into the neighborhood."

Many of you know I have a book coming out in April called Blowing The Lid Off The God-Box. When I started writing that book, I was convinced that we did a lot of damage to our faith by trying to put God in a box, and I began writing to say that you can't put God in a box. But as I wrote, I began to realize that if God couldn't go in a box, I had just thrown out Christmas, because that's exactly what Christmas is all about. God agrees to go in a box...to enter human flesh with all of its limitations. God in the body of Jesus would see how much he was needed everywhere. But he would also realize that in the box of a human body, he couldn't be everywhere. He would get tired like other people. He could only be in one place, with one group of people at a time. There wasn't even radio or television to broadcast his teaching in multiple locations.

God's coming at Christmas, which Christians call the "Incarnation," from the Latin meaning to be in flesh, was an act of humble self-limitation. It was an act of solidarity, to be able to really feel what it was like to be a limited human being. And so I saw that the problem that tends to spring up in religion is not the notion of God in a box, but our attempts to say that the part of God we see in the box is the only part of God there is.

God in the human flesh of Jesus is God complete, but God limited. I know that sounds weird, and this is not a perfect analogy, but imagine a MacDonald's. Any one MacDonald's restaurant is completely and fully MacDonald's. It sells whatever MacDonald's sells, it is a true representation of all that MacDonald's is. It is also just a tiny bit of what MacDonald's is. To say that MacDonald's was no more than that one restaurant would be wrong. There is the whole corporate structure that works behind the scenes to make the restaurant what it is. There are places like Ronald MacDonald House, which the restaurant earnings make possible, there are MacDonald's in Germany that sell beer and thousands that speak other languages and do things differently than the MacDonald's in the US.

Like I said, I know it's not a perfect example, but it gives us some way of describing how we can say that Jesus is both fully God, but also God limited. God is in a box made of human flesh, and we can fully know the nature of God by looking in that box. But God is not limited to that box. We can't put a lid on it and say that God can't leave. We can't keep the stone across the entrance to the tomb. God has entered the box and moved into the neighborhood, but God will blow off any lid you try to put on in order to confine God there. In fact, that's just what God did on Easter...away went the stone, off went the lid, and then God spilled out all over the place on Pentecost, causing such a ruckus that people thought the Disciples were drunk.

We celebrate all of that together when we celebrate Holy Communion. We have the symbols of the box in which God came. The bread and wine symbolize human flesh...the body and blood where God decided to dwell...the body and blood that made up the human being named Jesus. Remembering is the opposite of dismembering. In this act we remember. We re-member. We first recall that the body was once whole...that God was actually born just like any baby...grown from an embryo in a mother's womb...coming into the world in the most limited form human beings have to offer...a baby. A poor baby. A baby washed up and put in the box of a manger...a feeding trough.

We next remember that the baby grew to be a man...a smart man, a kind man, a skilled carpenter, a fierce prophet, a wise rabbi, a devout Jew, a strident reformer, an ardent pacifist. Then we take the whole body, the whole loaf, and we break it, just as Jesus body was broken by the betrayal, the scourging, the mocking, the brutal execution on the cross. The body is broken, the blood is shed. The time of confinement and limitation is finished.

But nobody knows it yet. They think the box is empty now, and they bury it, putting a lid on the open manger, saying that God cannot come out now. They have misunderstood. They didn't realize that the God who would agree to dwell in the box would not agree to be confined to the box, and Easter morning everything is different. The lid is blown off, the box is transformed, and the resurrected Jesus breathes the breath of God into his disciples, just as God once breathed the first breath into Adam. That's what we remember as we share in this meal. We remember the sharing of the body of Jesus when it was whole, as the disciples shared with Jesus' living body at the Last Supper, but we also remember the sharing of the many pieces of Jesus' body, as the Spirit enters into each one of us as individuals. In the act of eating and drinking, the body of God becomes part of each of our bodies. God enters into our own box and consents to dwell there; to become biologically part of our own bodies.

And it doesn't end there, either. The MacDonald's franchise started with one restaurant, but the idea was always to make more...to spread across the world so that everyone would be able to go there for a meal...not just the wealthy, anybody. And so with this meal. It began with one-with God in a box. Then it spread to twelve and then to three thousand and it continues to be our job, as the liturgy says, to be the body of Christ for the world.

That's what Christmas is about...that is what we prepare to receive. God in a box is a gift to us, and like all gifts, it is given that we might bless others with it. To receive the baby in the manger is to receive a responsibility and a mission, the mission that Jesus gave as his last instruction to the disciples before his ascension: "Go into all the world and make disciples." In Jesus, God shows us that nothing at all can keep us from the love of God, and commissions us to both show and tell that to the world. God comes to us in a box. Will you accept the gift? Amen. This is Advent. It is the four-week period in the Christian year when we are supposed to prepare our hearts for Christmas. It's the time of the year when I get e-mail from liturgical purists, reminding me that I'm not supposed to allow Christmas carols to be sung in church until Christmas Eve. You see from last week how well I listen! I think that's a lost battle in a culture that starts celebrating Christmas the day after Thanksgiving. The cultural Advent, the time when our culture starts preparing for Christmas, begins at Halloween.