The Saturday Stoke #18
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Welcome to this week’s Saturday Stoke, a short inspirational podcast designed to encourage and challenge you on the path ahead—it’s a place where, if I’m doing my job right, I’m spurring us all on toward love and good deeds. It’s a podcast that feels like home and tastes like fresh sourdough.
Thanks to all who joined me last week and explored the heights with me. Today is the winter solstice—the darkest night of the year. The solstice begins at 11:19 this evening. It’s one of my favourite days of the year.
Today, I want to spend a few moments thinking about Christmas, namely, the Incarnation of the Word of God. Because, of course, that is what the season is all about it.
In her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard asks a poignant question about the way things used to be; about the holiness of the world. Dillard believes we’ve drained the light out of holiness, that we’ve muted the singing mountains. “Did the wind use to cry, and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of earth, and living things say very little to very few.”
It’s sad to think about the holy mountains keeping quiet, and we humans moving about the earth in a kind of silent noise. Silent because our noise is a language unknown to the order of God. “We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it,” continues Dillard, “we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree.”
Don’t you feel it sometimes? That we’ve drained the light from the holiness of the world. Perhaps that is why I love this time of year—and yes I know I’m most likely in the minority here with the darkness of winter. But to me, it heightens the spiritual moment of Christmas. It draws beautiful contrasts between the very real darkness of days and nights with the very real hope of Glory that pierced the darkness and brought joy to the world.
Do you find yourself looking for the light of hope during this dark time of the year? Short days, long nights; winter storms, days of cold rain and blankets of snow.
Christmas songs like “O Holy Night” and “I Wonder as I Wander” conjure feelings of awe. It’s easy—at least for me—to picture myself out wandering beneath the stars during the Christmas season thinking about the impossible-ness of things like the Incarnation.
I think sometimes the “seasonal-ness” of everything can drain the holiness out of the Incarnation. And what happens to it? It then ends up being one of those words that get tossed around during the month of December like an old picture from our high school yearbook. We like to think about what the old photo represents but we certainly don’t want to revisit those times—better to keep it at a distance right?
How many times have I heard pastors and speakers talk about this idea of God becoming man, and the thought just disappears into the poinsettia background of lights and candles, lost in the nostalgia of Christmases of times past—the enormity of it doused by the sugary feel-good-ness of the season.
Do we really consider the “grand miracle,” as C.S. Lewis once called it, of the Incarnation?
Let’s take a moment and really consider the holiness of the Incarnation.
To do so, let’s go all the way back to Mt. Sinai. Something extraordinary happened in our world at Sinai. God announced himself to a man. Moses said to God, “I want to see your glory. Will you show me your glory?”
“Come up to the mountain,” God said to Moses, “and I will show you my glory.”
As a quick side note, have you ever wondered why Moses asked to see God’s glory? What was in Moses heart and mind that prompted him to ask such a thing?
My friend Lacey likes to think of the humility of Moses’s inquiry. I asked her about that once and she explained how it would take someone of humility to ask something a child would ask. There’s an innocent audacity to such a question. Think of a child and how their ability to ask parents the most innocent and intimate questions. Remember, before he asked to see God’s glory, he met with God regularly in the tent of meeting. So, I think her observation is insightful. Such a question probably did come from a place of beautiful intimacy—from a humble heart. And think about how when the Israelites encountered God’s glory, they were afraid they’d consumed by it. They didn’t want to die, so they sent Moses. And he had no trouble going. Because he longed for it.
I also believe his question came from his innate sense of wanting to be at rest with God. Augustine said we are restless until we find our rest in God. Why? Because being with God, that’s our proper place, our intended home.
Think, for a moment, of Eden. Adam and Eve enjoyed unfettered access to God. They communed with him in the garden before sin entered into the picture. This was man in his proper home, in his intended relationship with God. Adam and Eve, we can assume, enjoyed and became familiar with God’s glory and presence in their lives.
But sin broke this relationship. After Adam and Eve ate the fruit, God came to them, speaking out of the storm—which becomes the new normal for man’s interaction with God. The rest of the theophanies in the Hebrew Bible occur with God speaking from the storm.
Think about how God veils himself within the fire and smoke of Sinai.
After Moses asked to “see” God’s glory. YHWH, which is God’s very intimate and holy name, consented and explained how their meeting would happen.
“But no one can see me and live,” said God. “So I will hide you in the rock.”
God comes to Moses cloaked in glory; as is his practice. Throughout the Hebrew Bible, whenever God reveals himself he does so in the concealment of natural phenomena.
Now the moment arrives for God to show Moses his glory. And just before he comes he proclaims “who he is” to Moses. This is the big reveal, and it wasn’t something seen by Moses, it was something heard! The passages reads:
“The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness!”
In this wonderful, terrible, intense, moment—a moment in which Moses asked to see God, God lets him hear him. Meaning, he hears God describing what kind of God he is. At this moment when the mountain stands drenched in the holiness of God, God proclaims Himself to man. Who is this God? He is merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithful.
For so long, whenever I read that passage, I passed over God’s proclamation to get to the fire and glory of the scene. But it’s the main point of the scene!
Let’s keep that scene and proclamation from God in our minds, and set it aside for a moment, and let’s step into Bill & Ted’s time machine and speed forward a couple of thousand years. John the Beloved begins his Gospel account not with the man Jesus picking his disciples or getting baptized or being born. No, he goes all the way back before the beginning of creation.
In the beginning was, what? A man? Something to see? In the beginning was the Word—in Greek, this term is “logos.” This Word was not only with God, but he was God. And through this Word, this logos, the entire universe was made out of nothing. This logos, this holy Word of God, possessed life itself—the life and light of all mankind.
And then, this Word, this holy logos, became flesh and dwelt among humans.
After John says that the Word became flesh, he no longer uses the term “logos.” He uses Son of God. And, eventually, Jesus the Christ.
Don’t miss this wonderful transition in the timeline of love and salvation. Remember, the first-time man asked to see God’s glory, God responded with his words, proclaiming who he was—the kind of God he was. And time marched on, and Israel wandered in the desert and the nation split and was ruled by bad kings, and exiled, and over and over they cried for help, and hope was promised. And then, God fell silent for over 400 years.
And, then, the Word came again. But not on a holy mountain dripping with the presence of God—a mountain upon which only one person could travail—a mountain that, because it held the presence our Holy God himself would consume even the animals if they came near—this time, the Word was revealed for all of mankind to see.
The merciful, graceful, loving, steadfast God shows up among the people of the world. They can see him, and touch him, he is “God among man.” And this time, he does not speak to man from the storm or consume a mountain with fire. Instead, he comes with flesh and bone, a vagabond man without home or food. He lives among mankind, cloaking his glory in the flesh of humanity.
And he touches the blind eyes of man. He reaches out and heals the sick and calls out with a real voice and snatches his friend from the grip of death. He prays with his friends. He eats with his friends and enemies. He tells stories to anyone who would listen to him. He protects the weak from the unjust. He speaks truth to power. And shows everyone the way—his Way.
The same God who once cloaked himself in the glory cloud on Sinai has now descended to earth and veiled himself in the skin of man!
Behold, he walks among us! And we see him, the Glory of Heaven. he is the walking, living, breathing, ADONAI!
It is nothing short of mind-blowing to think that before, man heard God on the mountain. Now, he sees God through the veil of humanity—revealing himself, yet concealing.
Oh, the mystery of God’s steadfast love. Oh, the glory among us. Oh, the beauty of heaven. Wholeness among the people!
Think of the power in the acts of Jesus. Power going out from him correcting the breach that was introduced when Eve took the fruit and shared it with Adam!
Think of God, touching man, with holy hands.
He is Jesus, the Christ, the Adonai, Lord of All, because he is GOD. It is no mere position that Jesus holds, like that of earthly leaders and rulers. He is the living Word of Heaven itself. Help us, Lord, to understand the mystery, wonder and terrible beauty of the Incarnation!
Here’s a quick hack for drinking in all the wonder of the Incarnation this Christmas season. And it’s not much of a hack. It is simply, to think about it. To think of your position as a lost sheep needing a shepherd to rescue you from the darkness.
This is why I love the darkness so much this time of year. Because I know it is only temporary. I see only beauty in the dark nights because they are full of the hope of Glory.
After her thoughts on how we’ve drained the holiness from the earth, Annie Dillard wrote:
“I am sorry I ran from you. I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. For you meant only love and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid.”
Let us not run from the Love that has come for us. Let us not fear the God of Sinai. But rejoice that love came down, cupped our faces in real hands and said, “I’ve come for you, my love. You are free.”
Stay stoked my friends.
Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash
