the spirituality of incarnational living
Lectio Divina sacred texts: the spirituality of incarnational living
“Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself,
unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does,
these things the Son also does in like manner. John 5:19
It is not so much ‘what would Jesus do’ but ‘how does Jesus do it’.
Dorothy Sayers says it far better than I: “For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever the game he is playing with His creation, He has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.”
He is, and has always been, Immanuel: “God with us; the God who became just like you and me.
Everyone wants to worship the journey of Jesus without doing the journey of Jesus–R Rohr
For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and the things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. —George Eliott, quoted in Terence Malick’s film, A Hidden Life; 2019
In every age God has had his quiet ones. Retired, from its noise and strife,
withdrawn from its ambitions and jealousies, unshaken by its alarms; because
they had entered into the secret of a life hidden in God. We must have an outlet for the energies of our nature. If we are unfamiliar with the hidden depths of eternal life, we shall necessarily live a busy , fussy, frothy, ambitious, eager life. But the man who is intent on the eternal, can be quiet in the temporal. –fb meyers
God, who created the universe in all its splendor, decided to reveal to us the mystery of the divine life by becoming flesh in a young woman living in a humble village on one of the small planets of God’s own creation. Jesus’ life is marked by an always deeper choice of what is small, humble, poor, rejected, and despised. –Henri Nouwen
What is the one treasure the church has? The incarnational presence of God-- to love God and love our neighbor.Go practice being the incarnational presence of God in the world. –Adele Calhoun
The first Incarnation of God did not happen in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. That is just when it became human and personal for us, and many people started taking divine embodiment seriously. The initial Incarnation actually happened around 13.8 billion years ago with the “Big Bang.” That is what we call the moment when God decided to materialize and self-expose.
Two thousand years ago marks the human incarnation of God in Jesus, but before that there was the first and original incarnation through light, water, land, sun, moon, stars, plants, trees, fruit, birds, serpents, cattle, fish, and “every kind of wild beast” according to the creation story in Genesis 1:3–25. This was the “Cosmic Christ” through whom “God has let us know the mystery of his purpose, the hidden plan he so kindly made from the beginning in Christ” (see Ephesians 1:9–10). Christ is not Jesus’ last name; it’s the title for his life’s purpose. –-R Rohr
Madekeine L'Engle honors the unique role that Jesus as Christ plays in creation: Don’t try to explain the Incarnation to me! It is further from being explainable than the furthest star in the furthest galaxy. It is love, God’s limitless love enfleshing that love into the form of a human being, Jesus, the Christ, fully human and fully divine. Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, Christ, the Maker of the universe or perhaps many universes, willingly and lovingly leaving all that power and coming to this poor, sin-filled planet to live with us for a few years to show us what we ought to be and could be. Christ came to us as Jesus of Nazareth, wholly human and wholly divine, to show us what it means to be made in God’s image. Jesus, as Paul reminds us, was the firstborn of many brethren [Romans 8:29].
...the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call His name Immanuel (God with us) – Isaiah 7:14 For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us. – Isaiah 9: 6
Have this attitude among yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, .taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. —Phil.2:5-9
Can’t improve on God's strategy– to reveal who He is: self-limiting and self-emptying humility; entering into specific time, place, people and limited Himself to 12 men and human skin and frailty, with no ‘plan B’. –PRH
I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement [at-one-ment] with God."-- Another Turn of the Crank, Wendell Berry
God’s first “Incarnation idea” was to pour out divine infinite love into finite, visible forms. The Big Bang is our scientific name for that first idea, and “Christ” is our theological name. Long before Jesus’ personal Incarnation, Christ was deeply embedded in all things—as all things! Through the act of creation, God manifested the eternally out-flowing Divine Presence into the physical and material world. Ordinary matter is the hiding place for Spirit and thus the very Body of God. – R. Rohr
“... now , in my present situation... I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face. ... It has something to do with incarnation. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it” – Marilynn Robinson, Gilead
As a human being, Jesus Christ was as subject to the daily as any of us. And I see both the miracle of manna and the incarnation of Jesus Christ as scandals. They suggest that God is intimately concerned with our very bodies and their needs, and I doubt that this is really what we want to hear. We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing and even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are, not where we wish we were. We must look for blessings to come from unlikely, everyday places--out of Galilee, as it were-- and not in spectacular events, such as the coming of a comet. – Kathleen Norris
Krista Tippett with Fr. Greg Boyle: Krista: What your ministry so bespeaks is this incarnational heart of Christianity, that it always comes down to relationship between people—that's where we discover God. Fr. Boyle: Well, it’s relational, but it’s also — I think we’re afraid of the incarnation. And part of it, the fear that drives us is that we have to have our sacred in a certain way: It has to be gold-plated, and cost of millions, cast of thousands or something. And so we’ve wrestled the cup out of Jesus’s hand, and we’ve replaced it with a chalice, because who doesn’t know that a chalice is more sacred than a cup, never mind that Jesus didn’t use a chalice?
So God became a person "that we could hear, see with our eyes, look at, and touch with our hands" –1 John 1:1
"Faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart." —Christian Wiman
Our culture values ‘upward mobility’: staying on a secure career path, maintaining the status quo, appearing to others as an interesting person, succeeding in business, politics, sports, academics, or even spiritual practice…. The world ….. suggests to us, in thousands of ways, that we really should try and to become a center of attention. ….. being seduced into desiring to become an object of interest rather than a subject of compassion. The way of Jesus is radically different than the spirit of the world. It is the way of downward mobility. It is going to the end of the line, staying behind the sets, and choosing the last place. It goes against my inclinations, against the advice of the world surrounding me, and against the culture of which I am a part. Yet, it is the way to the kingdom and the way that brings life everlasting.
-–H Nouwen
