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Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Brothers and sisters, looking at the gospel reading for today, especially where it says the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, please be seated. Christmas is here, isn’t it wonderful? As the song says, it’s the most wonderful time of the year. But you know what? Christmas is weird.
A virgin teen gets pregnant by a spirit and an angel tells her about it, and her fiancé gets directions about their life in dreams. The girl has the baby and she puts him in a feed box, and then there are angels and shepherds. It’s just weird. But the non-religious side of Christmas is pretty weird too. Okay, we put dead or plastic trees in our house and then decorate them. We get candy out of a sock hanging on the fireplace. We send cards to people we don’t usually communicate with all year. Some people hope for snow in Texas. That is weird. Yeah, elf on a shelf, hippos for a present, and then disputes over a song about someone staying or leaving. And then to cap it off, there’s this old guy that lives at the North Pole, and he lives there with elves and reindeer. Once a year, he packs a sled full of toys and visits every house in the world, going down their chimney and putting those toys under said dead or plastic tree. And he’s scary.
Santa Claus is scary. He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good. Wow! And we let our kids sit on his lap and send him letters? People say Christianity is weird, and it is. Christmas and Christianity are weird.
In the gospel reading today, it says the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God’s Word became flesh. God’s Word—that is, His will, His message, His promise—became flesh. That is weird. And this weirdness has a name. We have a fancy name for it in church. It’s called the incarnation. A fancy word for God becoming flesh. God becoming human. Of course, this incarnation is in the person of Jesus Christ, whose birth is the celebration of Him becoming flesh, becoming human. In Jesus, God becomes human and chooses to dwell with us. This is so central to the Christian faith, so vital, so weird.
This is so weird because it kind of begs the question: Why? What kind of a God would want to dwell with humans? Especially when you consider how weird we are. And what I mean is the weird things that we do—things that are wrong, things that are sinful. Especially when we know that things are wrong and we do them anyway. Or just the opposite, right? That’s sin.
In Romans chapter 7 in the Bible, St. Paul said this about this—about knowing what’s wrong and doing it anyway. He says, “I don’t understand my own actions. For I don’t do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. For I want to do what is right, but I don’t. I don’t do the good I want, but the evil I don’t want, that’s what I do.” He says this frustration. We know what’s wrong, we know what’s sinful, and we do it anyway. It’s kind of weird. We know we shouldn’t hurt others, but we do. We know it’s wrong to lie, cheat, steal, gossip, be selfish, greedy, or prideful. We’ve all got our own little guilty pleasure sin that we know is wrong, but we like it anyway. Oh, what pitifully weird creatures we are.
Sin dwells in us. It lives in us, and it comes out of us. I guess what’s not weird is that it’s part of us. It’s in our nature. We even confess that in the confession: we are by nature sinful and unclean. So what does God do about this? What does He do with us, His weird creation? Well, He does something weird. God became flesh, as the gospel says. He became human.
But the incarnation of Jesus wasn’t just some cute, predictable, hallmarky Christmas kind of thing. Jesus came into our weird, sinful world and became part of it. Jesus joined our weirdness, and He does something weird in it. Jesus not only dwells in our world, but He also suffered in it and died in it. That’s a weird thing for a God to do. Speaking about injustice and things that are unjust, a human could die for human sins. Only a human can do that in real justice. But in God’s justice, it’s only God’s death—the sinless Son of God—that would be big enough to do the job. That’s why the incarnation is needed.
We need somebody to come into this world to dwell with us and die for us. What’s really weird about it is that becoming flesh and coming into our world is that God does it for us. Not for His sake, not for His entertainment, not for His pleasure, but He does it for us. In spite of our weird and sinful behavior, Jesus comes into our world, God incarnate, and dies for us. Not only in spite of it, but because of it—to forgive us. To forgive our weird, sinful behavior.
And God weirdly forgives us instead of punishing us. Jesus takes the punishment. That’s weird. And God forgives us instead. That might be even weirder. All of this—the centrality of the incarnation to Christianity—it’s not only just weird to other religions; it’s detestable.
They’ll argue, “What kind of a God becomes flesh? What kind of a God becomes human? What kind of a God gets dirty, or hungry, or fills a diaper? What kind of God deals with sinful people, much less wants to dwell with them? What kind of a God dies?” Why would God do that, they ask.
And, well, Christians, we’ve got a weird answer for that. Why does God do this? Because He is madly and passionately in love with you. He’s madly and passionately in love with His creation, with all humans, with you. God wants to save you and to forgive you of your weird sinfulness, and He’s willing to die for that—willing to die for you for that.
The incarnation says that although God is so big and almighty and He can do anything, God is also so small and humble that there’s nothing He won’t do for you. I’m going to repeat that because I thought it was really good, actually—I just came up with this. The incarnation of Jesus says that God is so almighty and so big that He can do anything, but He’s also so small and humble that there’s nothing He won’t do to save you. And it doesn’t stop there. There’s more weirdness to come.
Because not only was it weird enough that Jesus would die for us, He got back up. Jesus rose from the dead and is still alive, still incarnational, still dwelling with us. Why? So that we can live too, so that we can live forever. This is the weird way that God destroys death, forgives our sins, and gives us life. And you know what? We’re okay with that. That is weirdness that we can hang on to.
And all of it we take by faith. We’re okay with it, we believe it, we receive it. We receive it by faith—all of the weirdness of God becoming flesh, dwelling with us, dying for us. It’s a gift we receive by faith. Jesus said this in John 11: “The one who believes in me will live even though they die.” Yeah, that’s weird, but that’s Christianity.
That’s our faith—the incarnation of our God becoming flesh to dwell with us, to suffer like us, and to die for us. To the world and other religions, yeah, it’s weird, but to those who believe, it is wonderful. Yes, it still is the most wonderful time of the year.
Maybe we could call it wonderfully weird. That’s Christmas. That is Christianity. It’s weird, it’s weird, but it’s full of wonder. And wonderfully weird is not something we should shy away from. Like I said, we should take a hold of it. We should embrace it; we should flaunt it. Embrace the weirdness; there’s your lesson for today.
As Christians, we hear all kinds of different definitions of Christianity. Some of it is really syrupy and sentimental or moral or therapeutic or political. That’s not what Christianity is. We’re much weirder than that, okay? We’re much more wonderfully weird than that. The world needs to hear that. It needs to hear the true, wonderfully weirdness of Christianity. They need to hear the wonderful weirdness that God became flesh and dwelt among us to live with us, to suffer like us, and to die for them too.
Maybe you know people that need to hear that good news. Or maybe you’re the one that needs to hear it today—that God is madly and passionately in love with you. Yeah, Christmas is weird. Christianity is weird. But hey, this is Austin. We’re supposed to keep Austin weird, right? Well, Christians, we’re doing our part. Truly, wonderfully, truly wonderfully weird. We thank God for that. In His name, Amen.
Now, may the wonderfully weird grace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
