December 29, 2013
Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Vicksburg, MS
Year A, First Sunday after Christmas, John 1:1-18

            A few years ago a quote attributed to Nelson Mandela’s presidential inauguration was floating around the Internet and was even attributed to the Nobel Peace Prize winner on posters and other printed materials. It was pithy and profound, and you may have heard it. Supposedly, Mandela said, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.”[1]

            This is terrific in many ways, and I’ll come back to the quote itself. But I have to say I was disappointed to find out this was not Mandela, not the man imprisoned on Robben Island for decades for demanding equality in his native South Africa, not the man I studied this semester in Christian ethics for his commitment to nonviolence and forgiveness, not the man who actually bore witness to the light of Christ in his own life, by actions such as inviting one of his white prison guards to be part of his presidential security detail.
          This quote came instead from celebrated spiritual guru Marianne Williamson, who used to appear pretty regularly on Oprah. And while admiring and even, in her own words, loving Jesus Christ, Williamson does not profess Christianity, at least not any orthodox Christianity. Instead Williamson says that Jesus was a human being who “while on earth completely self-actualized and fulfilled in all ways the potential glory that lies within us all.” In that way, Williamson says, Jesus is our “evolutionary elder brother.” She would actually make a pretty good Episcopalian, since we as a group can be kind of waffle-y on topics like the Incarnation, on whether Jesus was indeed God.

            But what we believe about this is important. Who Jesus is matters since our belief in—and perhaps it’s better to say our trust in—Jesus Christ—our trust in Jesus as the Christ—of course determines the shape of our lives. And while we say the creed each week, I’m not sure we spend a whole lot of time thinking about this, about the very nature of God. As my dean at Virginia Seminary likes to point out, we tend to spend a good bit more time fighting about things that are pretty secondary—things like sexuality—than taking the time to consider the big questions, questions like what does Jesus’s identity mean to me today, right now?[2]

            If Jesus is, like Williamson believes, like many believe, merely a fully actualized human being, then we have to consider what this says about God. Now, please be clear that I am not bashing Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other religious tradition for that matter. But if Jesus is not God, I personally cannot get to a loving God. I simply do not have the wherewithal in and of myself to seek out God. Thankfully, though, I don’t have to, we don’t have to. God comes to us.

            As the evangelist of the fourth Gospel tells us, God comes to us, to the entire world, in the Incarnate Word and reveals Godself to us through Jesus Christ. This is a remarkable and incredible claim and if we confess this claim, that Jesus is God, then that claim necessarily transforms our lives. No longer is God distant, no longer is God hidden from us, but God in the Incarnation proves Godself to be with us, as near as you to me.

            God comes to dwell with us; literally, in John’s Greek, God pitches God’s tent with us. God makes a home with God’s own creation, which the evangelist tells us comes about only through the eternal Word. The claim that Jesus is God, that the Word was with God since the very beginning, that the Word is in fact God and that through the Word all things came to be, links God intimately with each of us (and actually very particularly with those I, in my selfishness, would rather not have to deal with, namely the poor, the lonely, the oppressed).

            Not only does the Word participate in creation, but the Word comes down and experiences all that you can throw at a human being, from the prosaic to the profound—the womb, puberty, persecution, denial and betrayal by those closest to him, a painful and shameful criminal’s death on a Roman cross.

            In claiming that Jesus is God, we claim that God knows what it is to be human, and not just what it is to be human, but to suffer physical and emotional torment. That God knows hurt and sorrow and disappointment. That God knows the full range of thoughts and feelings and emotions that you and I feel, that you and I would rather not even admit to.

            We hear in the Collect for Purity each week that to God all hearts are open, all desires known, and from God no secrets are hid. We believe in an all-knowing God, but through the Incarnation, we can affirm that God knows what it is to be human and so knows what it is to think and feel all that we do. Knows what it is even to doubt.

            That Jesus is God is an incredible claim that we all know and say every week. But it bears repeating again and again. And it bears consideration since it’s one that’s not easy, at least for me, to assent to. I do have doubts, and great sympathies for those who say that Jesus was merely a remarkable teacher, that he was not divine, since it is beyond belief that God became man amongst a persecuted and impoverished people in a tiny corner of the world some 2,000 years ago. It is beyond belief that God comes to us as a totally helpless infant, entrusting Godself to God’s own creation. To a carpenter and a girl. It is no doubt a remarkable claim.

            But to choose not to accept this is to choose a life in darkness. And I’m not saying it’s to choose condemnation, but in rejecting Jesus as God, we miss out on the light, on being able to fully see, to fully take in all that God entrusts to us. Without the light, we simply muddle through in darkness, continually bumbling and stumbling over obstacles we could just as easily avoid—fear, resentment, greed—all that stuff that blinds us to God and to our own true identities as God’s beloved children. 

            In affirming that Jesus is God, we affirm that God loves us immeasurably, that God cherishes us, enough to come to us as a human being, desiring concrete human relationship with each of us. And in affirming that Jesus is God, we affirm that nothing—not even death, not even death on a cross at the hands of God’s own beloved creation, hands that just as easily could have been yours or mine—nothing can sever this relationship. And in affirming that Jesus is God, that God loves us immeasurably, we are emboldened to live as Jesus lived, to love as Jesus loved—radically and without fear.

            We are, as Williamson writes, powerful beyond measure. But true power, the power to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves, the power to welcome the stranger, to care for the least among us, the power to seek and serve Christ in all people, the power to forgive and understand our own forgiven-ness, true power, true, real life-worth-living power, can only come in knowing that God desires us relentlessly. So much so that God comes down to us, that God has been one of us, that God identifies with us intimately, that Jesus is indeed the eternal Word, the Christ.

[1] Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1996), 165. A number of articles can be found on the misattribution by searching online for “our deepest fear,” “Williamson,” and “Mandela.”
[2] Ian Markham, “Nature of God: Classical Account” (lecture, Systematic Theology 501, Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, VA, October 16, 2013). Markham said, “This [Classical Account versus Process Account of God] is about as fundamental a question you can get. And in class we’re all very relaxed about this. Compare our attitude on this to our attitudes about human sexuality. Nothing is more fundamental about what we agree on about God. We need to be as mellow about less fundamental things.”