sermon notes from the Vineyard Church of Milan 09/01/2013
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This is good news of great joy that is for all the people…this will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.
Glory to God in the highest heaven
And on earth, peace to those on whom his favor rests.
Think of your primary images of Christmas: peace, joy, beauty, wonder, light, life. All of which are true, and potent. But because we come to the Christmas Story with such warm associations, even love, there some powerful and meaningful aspects that we are almost sure to miss.
One of the striking elements we are insulated from by the silent nights and Christmas lights and chestnuts roasting on open fires is just how much of the Incarnation is fundamentally disconcerting, challenging, perhaps even uncomfortable.
On Christmas, the holy, blessed, strong, good and pure creator of the universe becomes a weak, messy, fragile infant who depends on weak, messy, fragile, sinful creatures to puree his bananas, wipe up his spit ups and change his diapers.
At heart, the Christmas story is a story of God making peace with that which we are least at peace with about ourselves. It’s a story of him embracing us where and how he finds us, and it’s a story that invites us to embrace him where and how we find him – which, on Christmas, is in the middle of that which we find most disturbing about ourselves.
God does all of this so that the depth of his love for us might be fully revealed.
And so that, as we embrace him, we would be transformed in our capacity to embrace others.
So that, in other words, as the angels sing, there would, in fact, be “on earth, peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
As we’ve been looking at Love’s Tension around the topic of outsiders, we’ve found ourselves again and again having to consider the role of disgust and love. Because disgust is what makes us want to push others away and make them outsiders. And love is the thing that dismantles disgust so that we can embrace outsiders and create breathing room for them to become insiders.
Perhaps you’re familiar with this summary of the Law from the gospels: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And love your neighbor as yourself.” Love’s labor – overcoming disgust in order to embrace – is at the center of this, and not just in the loving your neighbor as yourself part of it, as we’ll see in a bit.
Here’s the thing this Labor day weekend: Love’s labor is the labor of overcoming our disgust responses – relaxing, suspending, undoing, overriding disgust – so that we can embrace the outsiders that God desires to welcome as insiders. Love’s labor is the labor of Christ-directed hospitality toward the disfavored, the discounted, the disconnected, and it begins by dismantling disgust. Love’s labor begins not with the act of hospitality, but rather with the internal choice to set aside our disgust responses and open our hearts toward the other in love.
And Love’s labor begins by welcoming God. God, who has been an outsider to us, desires for us to embrace him, first. To make him into an insider. To make room in ourselves for him to be included in our circle of self. And then we can get on with the joyful and challenging business of welcoming others.
What we’ve been describing as Christ’s Radical Inclusion – God’s extraordinary embrace of sinful human beings, welcoming them into himself, making outsiders into insiders and dismantling disgust along the way - began with his birth as a human baby, and that’s no accident. Because birth and what follows is one of the primary places in our human experience where love and disgust meet head on, and where more often than not, love wins – at least for those to whom the babies are given to welcome.
A reminder about how disgust works before we continue.
Disgust starts with what psychologists call “core disgust.” Core disgust protects the body from contamination centered on eating and oral incorporation – we feel it towards food, feces, slimy water, etc. But we also feel disgust in other areas. Especially socio-moral disgust (revulsion centered on social and moral judgments – those people who do those things or think that way, or this or that disgusting activity or thought), and animal-reminder disgust (revulsion centered on things that remind us of our mortality, that we are needy animals who will someday die).
Now, back to thinking about how brilliant Jesus is, and how our embrace of him – Love’s Labor that opens up a God-connection in our lives – empowers our embrace of others. That is, how our embrace of Jesus empowers Love’s Labor, a participation in Jesus’ salvation work in the world through Radical Hospitality.
Welcoming a baby is a radical inclusion, isn’t it? For a mother, this child that is part of her own self for 9 months – the ultimate insider - becomes a literal outsider, and then Love kicks in to high gear and the child becomes an insider, not in the biological sense, this time, but through the mother’s profound embrace. He becomes her son, her family. And through the embrace of others, this brand new self, an outsider to the world until his birth, becomes an insider at different levels to all kinds of groups of insiders. To fathers and brothers and sisters and extended families and households and neighborhoods and churches and cities and states and on and on.
In the ancient world, when people would first hear the Christmas story – without the benefit of years of singing Christmas carols, and exchanging gifts, and kissing beneath the mistletoe; when it was a simply an account about how a proposed Messiah figure came into the world - much about it would be uncomfortable to digest, even to the point of provoking feelings of disgust.
For example, the woman pregnant with the Son of God is a poor, unwed, teenage girl. The kind of person who, in that culture, would have been naturally rejected, spit out, pushed away. The revulsion we might feel is socio-moral disgust.
And Jesus is born not in the brand new high tech maternity wing of St. Joseph’s hospital (get it, St. Joseph?), but in a stable for farm animals. In their feeding trough. The revulsion we might feel is socio-moral disgust.
And the first people to visit him are shepherds. People who work with animals all day long, and as a result were thought of as dirty, uncouth people. Who have been sleeping with sheep before being woken by the angels that night. Who come to visit the Son of God without showering first, without squirting the Purell antiseptic gel on their unwashed hands. Again, socio-moral disgust.
What’s up with all that? It’s almost as if God is trying to make a point.
Because he is.
To understand God’s point, let’s talk for a minute more about disgust.
Various studies have shown that disgust is rooted in our unease with our mortality. Our discomfort with the reality that our bodies have needs and, without those needs being met, they will die.
So anything that reminds us or confronts us with our physiological needs can trigger disgust. Food, excrement. Blood, broken skin, injury, deformity, illness, snot. Dead bodies. Aging.
(Side note: this is part of why there is always pressure to separate and quarantine and move out of view anything that might provoke disgust. From garbage dumps to old folks homes to hospitals to clothing to slaughter houses to pre-packaged and prepared food to suburbs and on and on…because the disgust response always wants to push away, to expel…which is great for rotten food, but maybe not so good for the person who loses a limb in an accident, or is born with a deformity, or loses hair in chemotherapy, or is visited by an angel and becomes pregnant with the Messiah.)
Disgust plays a big role in our conception of God, because we like to conceive of God as having no needs. As being immortal, untouched by death.
So we have something like a disgust continuum. God at the top - least disgusting. And the "lowest" creatures at the bottom - most disgusting. Worms, snakes, insects, slugs, farm animals, pets, people (and we have a continuum of people too) working our way up to the divine.
[This is a big part of why we don’t like disgusting things in our sacred spaces. Disgusting things are “lower” and we feel like they should be separated from God who is “higher.” Interestingly, the greater one’s death-anxiety, the greater aversion (a mild form of disgust) one has to the idea of Jesus experiencing or being affected by body fluids, body flaws, bad hygiene, or physical vulnerability. In other words, the less comfort you have with the idea of your own death, the more likely you are to say incarnational images make you uncomfortable, to say they are demeaning to Jesus, to say they are unrealistic, or to say they are unbiblical. Also, the greater one’s death-anxiety, the greater one’s aversion to profanity. Think about how you felt when I said “pissing” (in church!) last week. It doesn’t necessarily reveal how you feel about your death (although it might!), but it does illustrate this discomfort we tend to have about mixing things on opposite ends of the disgust continuum.]
Now here's where things get really interesting. As we’ve explored, Love and disgust are intimately intertwined. When you deeply love someone, you widen the boundaries of your self in order to include them on the inside of you, where disgust plays a less controlling role. The two become one flesh, as the scriptures describe marriage. Which means all kinds of things that might otherwise disgust you, don't – or at least, disgust you less as your love grows. You might pick up your spouse’s Kleenex, but not a stranger’s. You'll spit on a napkin and clean up your child’s face. You'll change your baby's diaper. Maybe even your aging Father's.
Think about this: you kiss your husband or your wife and it’s not gross at all (or at least, I hope not!) But your 10 year old, who has never experienced that kind of love, is all weirded out by it. Ewwww.
In fact, some of the most beautiful and powerful images of love in our world are images of people who have entered into places where mortality and need are on full display, unmasked, and embraced the people and problems and wounds and needs they find in those places, without shirking back. (Think about Mother Teresa…)
Love, in other words, does violence to our instincts for disgust.
The Disgust Response must always be surrendered for Love to come.
Which brings us back to the incarnation. God entering into our neediness. God becoming a mortal, needy human being. A baby born in blood and placenta. Pooping meconium. Spitting up. Growing up to scrape his knees. And have pimples. And the other things that go on with adolescent boys. And eventually to die a naked criminal.
Now, are we beginning to see why?
The LORD’s love for us is so immense, so deep, so powerful, that he expands the boundaries of himself to include us, so that that which might expect would produce disgust – our mortality, our sin, our neediness - is no obstacle to him.
And not only does he include us in himself, he becomes one of us. And the lowest kind of us, at that. As the prophet describes, one who carries our infirmities, who is despised and rejected. One who touches lepers, and invites traitors and prostitutes to be his closest friends, and eats – has table fellowship – with those society has already spit out.
Because he has come to embrace that which we are most ashamed of, that which we are most afraid to look at straight on, and said to us, “I love you. Even at your worst. Even at the point of your greatest need. Even at your most fragile and vulnerable. Even at your most unwashed. Nothing about you can keep me from embracing you.”
And now, this Labor day, the question is before us. Will we embrace him as he clothes himself with that which is most discomforting to us? In the midst of our sin. Our mortality. Our need. Our brokenness and deformity.
Because if we do – if we embrace God in his embrace of us, if we embrace Jesus at his neediest, blood soaked and sin clothed, outcast in the stable and on the cross – as the poor shepherds did, and the rich Magi did, as Mary did and as the women who washed his body and prepared it for burial did – we can be transformed by His love. A love that will empower us to love ourselves. To love ourselves without the disgust that separates us from the unsavory parts of our selves, and makes us wear masks and pretend to be that which we are not. A love that empowers us to confess our sin, to name it without shirking back, without shame, and in the process find forgiveness and healing.
And we can be empowered to love our neighbors as ourselves. To practice Radical Hospitality. To resist the impulse to crinkle our noses at them, or spit them out, or be nauseated by them – even at their worst, even at their most fallen or unbeautiful or impure. But instead to embrace them as brothers and sisters, joining them in their mortality and neediness, empowered by the love of the Savior who was born to us.
This is the fellowship of Christmas. This is the fellowship of the Cross. The fellowship of all who share in mortality, and need, and hunger, and sin. A fellowship that God has entered into as a full participant, in order to redeem and rescue us and restore us to one another and to himself.
Love the Lord Your God with all your heart, soul, strength, mind. Love your neighbor as yourself. This is not some high, heavenly spiritual ideal. This is down to earth, dirty in the mud, changing diapers Love. This is Love’s Labor.
This is good news of great joy that is for all the people…this will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.
Glory to God in the highest heaven
And on earth, peace to those on whom his favor rests.
If
we are going to follow the way of Jesus…
If
we are going to create breathing room for the disfavored to find favor, for the discounted to count, for the disconnected to connect…
If
we are going to be a church that practices Radical Hospitality – the embrace of the outsider in Jesus’ name…
If
we are going to be a church committed to being centered set – embracing an identity and purity that comes from being “In Christ”…
If we are going to do any of this, we need to engage ourselves in Love’s labor, counting the cost and counting Jesus worth it.
Here’s why I’m absolutely convinced this is the only option Jesus gives to us as his followers.
The great commandment – Love the Lord you God and Love your neighbor as yourself – is followed immediately by the story of the good Samaritan. A story we talked about last week that is all about Love overcoming disgust for the sake of radical hospitality, turning outsiders on both sides of the story into insiders.
When Jesus tells his disciples, just before his execution, that he has a new command, what is it? It’s his command to love one another the way he just loved them. And how had he just loved them? He’d washed their dirty feet. An action so disgusting that Peter almost wouldn’t let him do it. Until Jesus told him, unless you let me wash your feet, you have no part with me.
And what practice did Jesus give us to do, whenever we are together in his name? We are to eat bread that he says is his body, broken for us. And to drink juice or wine that he says is his blood, shed for us. And we are to do it together with one another, breaking down all socio-moral boundaries to be gathered around one family table together, in common neediness before the uncommonly needy God revealed on the cross.
[Communion having to do with socio-moral disgust / animal-reminder disgust - intertwined with purity/sacrifice/mercy - in the end a proclamation of “the Lord’s death.” A proclamation that simultaneously announces that he has embraced our mortality (love doing violence to disgust / disgust doing violence to love) and an invitation for us to embrace him while he is clothed in our mortality, so that we can join him in embracing one another still clothed in mortality.]
Practical Suggestions:
1. Love your mushrooms as you love your Lindt. Embrace a disgusting food. Learn to eat something that disgusts you but that you know is actually good / healthy / beneficial and perhaps delicious to others. Commit yourself to the process until you find yourself no longer having a disgust response to the thought, sight, taste, texture of the food. If you are a Jesus follower, engage in the process prayerfully, asking Jesus to teach you something about himself / about your sinfulness / about his calling on your life.
2. Dine In with an Outsider. Make a goal to have an outsider over for a meal (or go to their home for a meal) between now and Christmas. Somebody you wouldn’t normally. Somebody who is an outsider for social, moral, or physical reasons.
3. Imagine Jesus Clothed with Your Disgust. As you come to the Lord’s supper, picture Jesus on the cross, clothed in the thing that most disgusts you about yourself. Whether it’s something social, moral, or physical. See him loving you even though you’ve been clothed in it. As you receive communion, picture yourself embracing him, carrying him from the cross to prepare him for burial, even though he’s clothed in it too.
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