When I was in seminary at Vanderbilt Divinity School, I took a class entitled “Writing Your Spiritual Autobiography.” It was hands down one of the best classes I’ve ever had, and I feel like I use the wisdom gained through that experience every day. The very first week, we were challenged to write to the prompt “word made flesh: what word, that when uttered aloud, took on flesh and gained a life of its own.” I knew immediately what word I would write about: “soup spoon.”

You see, when I was a kid, my family would drive from Michigan to Illinois to spend Thanksgiving with my maternal grandparents and my uncle and his family. And, as many heteronormative households do, before the meal, we split up into gendered groups: my grandpa, dad, uncle and cousins in the living room and my mom, grandma, aunt and I in the kitchen. Even at nine years old, I knew this was customary, for the women to prepare the dinner and I was eager to be helpful. And so I grabbed a handful of cutlery and began setting the table. To my dismay, I had set out soup spoons instead of tablespoons, and the women in my family began to tease me gently, asking if I thought everyone had big mouths because I laid out soup spoons. 

To this day, whenever I look at a soup spoon or when I contemplate setting a table, I have a visceral memory of that Thanksgiving.

So even with this simple memory, I know that words can take on lives of their own. That’s why some words have been banned, why some books are labeled “dangerous,” why cultures have our own lists of words that are polite and rude. Words matter. Our language matters. 

I find great meaning in the Genesis 1 creation story and in its echo in our Scripture for today, John chapter 1. God’s Word, not the Bible, as many more conservative Christians would put it, is Emmanuel, God-with-us. The Word is actually made flesh and dwells among us, here on earth, having human experiences and human emotions and human living and dying. The Word is the revelation of God to the Creation, and that Word could be known through the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who taught us how to live and love. 

So today, how do our words take on flesh? What words do we put out in the world that we want to have a life of their own? Let’s revisit our advent themes: Hope, Peace, Joy, Love.

How do we make Hope take on flesh?

 Some of us have made it through this year relatively unscathed, some are intensely lonely, some are angry and confused, and many have not been able to weather the rolling sequence of storms that have come relentlessly. Something that has become clear to me throughout 2020 is that we don’t all have to hold on to the same piece of hope. For some people, Hope is embodied in babies, young children and the young adults who show us how to advocate for climate action. Hope is embodied in the frontline healthcare workers and first responders who have saved millions of lives through their vital work this year. And for others, hope is embodied in overcoming diagnoses, chemotherapy treatments finished, and learning to walk and talk and move after serious injuries. Or hope could be in the new year, just seeing the calendar say something other than “2020” or in the photos of vaccine doses begun. But whatever piece of hope you are hanging onto, even if it’s not for yourself but it’s for others around you, how can you live as though it is real? As though the hope will come to fruition? As though the way things are will not last forever? Because they won’t...

What does it mean for Peace to live among us?

Many around the world want peace to take on flesh and have a life of its own. From the violence of systemic oppression, of war and conflict, of terrorism and threats of nuclear war, to the domestic violence, sexualized violence, abuse and economic exploitation...peace is needed in many places and situations. I have been taught, through friends and colleagues in the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America~Bautistas por la Paz, that peace is not an endgame, a destination to reach and an accomplishment to check off a list. Instead, peace is a way of being, a method of traveling through life, choosing to live in the way that Jesus taught instead of giving in to the temptations of supremacist thinking that pits people against each other. And of course we never should forget that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice.” For peace to take on flesh, each of us must speak it into being and behave it into being, making its presence in the world more real than the tension that divides us. 

If Joy had flesh, what would it be like?

The third Sunday of advent, also called Gaudete, “Joy,” Sunday, marked by the pink candle, is my favorite Sunday in advent. In a way it is the most abstract of the Sundays, especially as we think about what it would mean for Joy to take on flesh and live among us. Joy is often a surprise, bubbling up or erupting out of situations that seem laughable, or even tragic. But on Joy Sunday, we tell the story of Mary and we recite the Magnificat, the song of praise that she sang when visiting her cousin Elizabeth, as they both rejoiced in the special babies growing inside them. The joy Mary felt as she sang about the powerful being torn down from their thrones and the lowly lifted up, the hungry being fed and the poor being cared for, that was a joy welling up from such a deep place that even the situation of living in the Roman Empire-controlled region of Judah could not overcome it. Joy is not fleeting, it is not fragile. How can we bring Mary’s Joy to life, to make Joy into flesh, to allow it to burst forth and live on its own? Perhaps by embracing the message of the magnificat, the message of reversal of power and the vindication of the oppressed. When we take steps to advocate for justice for the “least of these” then we are, with Mary, giving birth to Joy. 

How can we live so that Love has flesh and dwells among us? 

Love. In our lives, surely each of us has encountered love. Not just the temporary burst of adrenaline in lust or satisfaction in a feeling of appreciation, as in “I love cheese” or the “in love” feelings we have in the early stages of romantic attraction. But the Love that knows no bounds, that teaches us to be better than we are, that changes the world by showing that another way of living is possible...have you experienced this love? This is the Love that came to Earth in the figure of a tiny infant, the world-shaking power that became vulnerable to explode human understandings of who and how God is so that we would know the expansiveness of the Divine’s care for the Creation. When we live with Love toward our neighbors, refraining from judgement, advocating for the poor, sharing tenderness with our enemies, accepting and inviting and sharing hospitality, Love takes on flesh. Love takes on our flesh, shows up wearing our smile, and is known in the world in our likeness, even as we are made in God’s image.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. And together with God, the Word called all things into being, and God called everything in Creation “good, very good.” We are always in an advent of sorts, waiting for and with God as God continues the work of speaking good things into being. When we embrace the themes of advent in our daily lives, when we join with God to speak and live these words of hope, peace, joy and love into being so that they take on flesh, they live among us, we are doing the work of Christmas. So let each of us take on this sacred call, to breathe life into Hope, clothe ourselves in Peace, sustain Joy and embrace Love every day of our lives. May it ever be so. 

Sermon preached December 27, 2020 for Burton Community Church.