Grace and Truth: A word from pastors

During Christmas we remember that God has come close, as close to us as a soon-to-be born child is to her mother: God in a womb, God in our flesh. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you,” the angel says to Mary. “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son … the Son of God.” The messenger delivers the good news: “The Lord is with you.” That’s the gospel: The Lord is with you, God is with you. Everything else we say about God and ourselves and the world is commentary on this announcement: The Lord is with you—with us in joy and suffering, with us in our friendships and loneliness. That God is with us doesn’t mean our lives will be free from loss, from heartache. As Simeon, the man at the temple, tells Mary as she brings her newborn to be circumcised, “a sword will pierce your own soul, too.” Simeon prophesies the death of her child while she holds Jesus in her arms. The angel’s peace-filled words linger with Mary while she carries the presence of God for the world, even as she ponders Simeon’s ominous warning: the promise of a violent future. God will be with her, even as she will endure the torture of separation from her grown child when the sword pierces Jesus’ side and pierces Mary’s soul, too, as Simeon predicted. What does it mean for God to be with Mary, and with us? It means that the story of God cannot be separated from the stories of human beings, from Mary’s life and now from our lives. We name God with our lives. We describe God with our words and actions. We share God with what we do and say; because in Jesus God has become flesh; because in Mary we see God’s nearness, God becoming internal to human life; because now God is still with us—incarnate, enfleshed, dwelling within us, making a home in our lives. During the seasons of Advent and Christmas, we remind each other of the gospel: that God is with us, that God has chosen life with us on earth, that God will not be God without us. The incarnation of God in Jesus means that God cannot forsake us because God has chosen human life as God’s life. Mary’s body proclaims the good news that God is not foreign to humanity but inside human life, within our lives, on our side. Her womb reveals the eternal decision of God to be for us, to join our struggle, to share in our suffering and joy, to love the world through us. The story of Mary and Jesus assures us that nothing will separate us from the love of God. That’s what the doctrine of the atonement is all about: the promise of our “at-one-ment” with God, the union of God and us in Jesus Christ. “Humanity is at one with the divine in Jesus,” writes theologian Kathryn Tanner in Christ the Key. Incarnation brings us atonement with God, our oneness in Christ through the Holy Spirit, who rests upon us now as the Spirit rested upon Mary. Christmas invites us into a mystery: the story of God’s birth as a human being, as one of us. Not the divine as separate from human. Not heaven as divorced from earth. Not God as above and us below. But God as transgressing those boundaries in order to be with us forever, an intimate presence, as close to us as flesh and blood. “The Lord is with you.” The angel’s words to Mary are also for us, as we share in her bewilderment at the announcement of the mystery of God in the flesh: God within her, God within us. Such news invites us to wonder at the surprising beauty of a world transfigured by God, creation as God’s embrace of our lives. With God’s incarnation, we now live in a world of ordinary miracles. To believe is to let God astonish you with the Spirit’s presence, to feel your way into God’s mundane wonders and find yourself at the edge of words, where poetry is born, where reason tumbles into faith, where something or someone births hope within us, God’s world reaching through our world, the new life of God all around us—in the eyes of a friend, the face of a stranger, the touch of a loved one, the words of a passerby. “Christ who is all and in all,” as the apostle Paul wrote. Isaac Villegas is pastor of Chapel Hill (N.C.) Mennonite Church.