Keeping the Tension of the Incarnation in Our Worship Practices
Theologians through the centuries have struggled to explain adequately the profound miracle of Christmas: the infinite deity takes the form of finite human flesh. The Incarnation powerfully declares that the physical realm is good; it is not something to be abandoned, broken though it is. Rather, creation will be redeemed (Rom. 8:18-23).
Our various practices within the church declare that God is at work in the common, ordinary stuff of life, and as such, the church pushes back against the gnostic tendencies of culture. When various philosophers declared that the highest spiritual attainment involved leaving the physical realm behind, Christian beliefs about incarnation and bodily resurrection declared that the created world is not to be discarded. The sacraments themselves proclaim that God communicates to believers not only through spiritual realities, but also through the works of his hands. The water used in baptism, and the bread and wine used in the Eucharist, are a sacramental means of grace—that is, they are an outward sign of an inward grace. God uses the material world to communicate in ways we can understand—through our senses. God becomes accessible. The holy becomes known through the common.
The temptation for today’s church, however, is to mistake the common for the holy. In our desire to make God accessible—or in an effort to make God relevant—we sometimes translate the divine into such ordinary elements that we lose the sense of the sacred. Recently in England, for example, a church held its first Lego baptism. That is, the baptismal font was made of Legos. The holy sacrament in which God cleanses a person from sin was depicted as a child’s toy. This stands in stark contrast to baptismal fonts earlier in church history, which often were constructed to reflect theological aspects of the biblical narrative. Many baptisteries were octagonal, for example, to symbolize the eighth day—that is, the first day of the week, the day of Christ’s resurrection. It serves as a physical reminder to new believers that they are baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus. “Through baptism, the Christian is brought into that eighth day, the first day of the new creation” (Steven D. Bruns, Introduction to Christian Worship: Grammar, Theology, and Practice, 2019, 184-85). The common, ordinary octagon pointed to a higher truth and helped congregants to focus on a greater reality. The function of these ordinary physical objects is to draw the believer into a deeper understanding of God.
The church has long used symbolism in its services to point to greater realities. Dome-shaped architecture leads the eye (and the mind) toward the heavens. Banner colors signal the change of church seasons. The two candles on the altar can point to the two natures of Christ. Stained-glass windows teach the stories of God, as well as demonstrate the necessity of the light of Christ to illumine the stories of our own lives.
But in using common objects to show the way to Christ, we must take care not to reduce Jesus to something common, manageable, or understated. The tension of the Incarnation must be maintained: God became man, the infinite took finite form, the provider of all things hungered, the One who watches over all slept at his mother’s breast, the supreme ruler became subject to Roman judgment. The church must never be so enthralled with God’s immanence that we lose a sense of God’s transcendence.
We rightly celebrate God taking on flesh and presenting a gospel for all people—rich or poor, Jew or Gentile, male or female. The Christ child was laid in a manger rather than a crib; the birth was announced to shepherds rather than noblemen; the adult Jesus ate with prostitutes and tax collectors more often than with the religious elite. Jesus appeared in common, ordinary ways to save common, ordinary people.
But Jesus was not common. The Holy One broke into a world of unholiness so that he could make it holy.
Throughout the Old Testament God made it clear that a separation exists between the holy God and creation itself. The fall of Adam and Eve resulted in a separation of humanity from God and brought brokenness into the world. Those who would approach the mighty God must be cleansed—the priests, for example, needed to follow strict purity regulations in order to serve in the Temple (e.g., Leviticus 21). To approach the Living God in an inappropriate manner resulted in death (2 Sam. 6:6-7). When the prophet Isaiah had a vision of the throne room of God, he could not help but cry out, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isa. 6:5). And, of course, the entire sacrificial system was instituted to bring honor to God and to cleanse the people who would worship the one true God. The Lord had made it clear: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2).
This understanding of the otherness of Yahweh and the people who worship him is part of what makes the Incarnation of Jesus so paradoxical. We are called to be separate, yet Jesus was born into a common family in a common place. He was not born into nobility, protected and separated by the wealth and walls of a palace. When he entered his ministry, he did not choose as his disciples the trained Torah scholars in Jerusalem. He gathered a rabble and visited village after village to heal the sick, cast out demons from the oppressed, and give hope to the poor. Although the Old Testament laws required separation from what was unclean so that uncleanness would not spread among the community, Jesus’ ministry overcame uncleanness and spread cleanness throughout the community. Lepers, for example, were required to live apart from a village so their illness and ritual impurity would not spread (Lev. 13:45-46), but this did not prevent Jesus from drawing near to heal. Even though Jesus could heal with a simple command from far away (Matt. 8:5-13), he chose to approach lepers and touch them when he brought healing (Matt. 8:1-4). Rather than the disease spreading to Jesus, his cleanness spread to those who had been unclean, and thus he brought social as well as physical restoration. In addition, those who had lived immoral lives—such as the sinful woman who anointed Jesus (Luke 7: 36-50)—were brought from unholiness to holiness by the forgiveness of Jesus. The apostle Paul confirms that those who once lived in debauchery have been transformed by their encounter with Christ: “[Y]ou were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11b). Christ’s ministry to the common people was not a ministry of celebrating what was common, but of transforming it.
The call to be a holy people of God did not end with the sacrificial, cleansing death of Jesus. Rather, the call was strengthened because now the people of God are empowered by the Holy Spirit to defeat sin and live in a way that honors God. The Levitical call to holiness is echoed in 1 Peter 1:15-16: “Instead, as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct, for it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’” In our lives, we are set apart to honor God and point the way to the better life that is only possible in Christ. Our worship practices and our ethics must be set apart so that we can point to the God who is holy.
We must maintain the tension between a holy God who enters into the common and a God who transforms the common into the holy. If we lose sight of the former, then we are in danger of believing God is inaccessible. If we lose sight of the latter, then we are in danger of making God in our own likeness—a deity who simply affirms our current condition but offers little beyond it.
As we consider our worship practices, we should ponder where the balance lies—because how we worship says something important about who we worship. In what ways do our worship spaces, furnishings, liturgies, hymns, and preaching emphasize the God who enters into the common stuff of life—the God who is with us? In what ways do our practices emphasize the God who is holy, sacred, and other? Do we maintain the balance between the two, and do we teach our congregations to do the same? Especially in the sacraments, we must maintain the mystery of a holy God who meets us in common elements to communicate immeasurable grace and love. Or, as Hebrews 12:28-29 so eloquently describes it, “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for indeed our God is a consuming fire.”
Suzanne Nicholson is Professor of New Testament at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky. She is a Deacon in the United Methodist Church and serves as Assistant Lead Editor of Firebrand.