In the days after Christmas I sink deeply into the mystery of the incarnation. My tug toward the incarnation goes back to Christmas Eve in my home church when I was a teenager. We’d finish singing “Silent Night” at the end of the service. The final reading was from John 1. Then our pastor would stand at the top of the center aisle with the Christ candle aglow in his hands. Holding our own small Christmas candles, we would file by him as we exited. There was no benediction. John’s Gospel was the final word.
The light we carried spoke the words for all of us. The words of scripture echoed in my head out into the cold: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. Those words have echoed in me ever since. I couldn’t explain what I, we, scripture, or the church meant by them. I just experienced those words of John as a deep conviction, a centering truth, a consoling reassurance that whoever God was, God wanted to be with us and for us, as one of us.
It was only later that I gained the theological concepts to surround the conviction that the Word became flesh. I welcomed the theological words and their histories. When I learned to read Greek, I laughed aloud when I realized that John told us that God literally wanted to “tabernacle,” or pitch the divine tent in the human wilderness. Growing up on the Nebraska prairie I had little trouble imagining a God of expansive plains, of grand horizons, of thunder and heat lightning seen from miles away. What I read in John’s Gospel was that God was also willing to pull up right next to us and pitch a tent on that prairie.
