Incarnation: A Reflection on Advent in Three Parts, III – Cynthia Holder Rich

In these posts, I have been discussing incarnation – the Incarnation, where God chose to enter into human life in human form, as a tiny defenseless babe, that God might be tested and stressed  and be made to struggle and hurt and ache and suffer, and die, in every way we humans do.  And, incarnation, where God continues to choose daily to enter into human life in us vulnerable, fallible, weak humans, who are made in God’s own image, who are the bearers of Christ in and to the world. God makes this loving, perplexing, oft-incomprehensible choice, employing us who are small-minded, who settle for tiny, boundaried totally inadequate visions of God’s world and our own lives, us who are too often blind to the neighbors with whom God showers us as blessings through which to learn and grow and thrive, and thus to serve and grow God’s realm in the world. Incarnation is an amazing evidence of God’s lavish, prodigious, continuing grace to those God favors.

This Advent season, white people in our society, and in the church, who have never “gotten it” are getting it – big time. The bad has gotten so bad over the past weeks and months and years, the cumulative pressure of so much oppression, so much violence, so much bloodshed and death – some of it captured on camera, so that even known conservatives who have rarely been known to “get” signs of racism in our society in the past are showing indications that they are “getting it”, if only at a small, primitive level – so that maybe, just maybe, this Advent is a moment in time when the truth of incarnation, the incarnation of Jesus that is in every believer, the image of God in which every human created by God is made – perhaps this truth is making its way into consciousness in a way that has not happened lately.

Times of great oppression and violence drive people of faith to confess faith. New confessions are born in the fire of suffering, bloodshed and death, times when the very Gospel of our Lord is at stake. Such a time drove leaders of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church (DRMC) of South Africa, the “coloured” church in the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa family.  The DRMC was birthed by the Dutch Reformed Church, a body that had bought into, invested, and collaborated with the racial separation policies of the apartheid era long before apartheid was made law (in 1948) to such a degree that it began a policy of separate development of churches, so that people of diverse racial background would not have to come to the Lord’s Table together (let that sink in for a moment). Such was the sorry state of incarnational theology among white Reformed Christians in South Africa – that people made in God’s image were to be prevented, “because of the weakness of some”, from partaking together at a feast where Jesus is the host. One response was the writing of the Confession of Belhar. Belhar has much to say about and to an Advent theology of incarnation, much that is instructive, equipping and encouraging for we who seek to stand up to the injustice of our time. Here, some examples of confessional wisdom I suggest white Christians would do well to remember and keep in focus in this time of fire and storm.

• Unity is…a gift and obligation for the church…and simultaneously a reality which must be earnestly pursued and sought, which the people of God must be continually built up to attain….
• That this unity must become visible that the world may see that separation, enmity and hatred between peoples has been conquered in Christ…
• that we must experience, practice, and pursue community with one another…together know and bear one another’s burdens, thereby fulfilling the law of Christ that we need one another and upbuild one another, admonishing and comforting one another; that we suffer with one another for the sake of righteousness; pray together; together serve God in this world; and together fight against all which may threaten or hinder this unity…
• that God’s lifegiving Word and Spirit has conquered the powers of sin and death, and therefore also of irreconciliation and hatred, bitterness and enmity, that God’s lifegiving Word and Spirit will enable the church to live in a new obedience which can open new possibilities of life for society and the world;
• that the credibility of this message is seriously affected and its beneficial work obstructed when it is proclaimed in a land which professes to be Christian, but in which the enforced separation of people on a racial basis promotes and perpetuates alienation, hatred and enmity…
• …the church must…stand by people in any form of suffering and need, which implies, among other things, that the church must witness against and strive against any form of injustice…
• that the church as the possession of God must stand where the Lord stands, namely against injustice and with the wronged…

The Confession of Belhar affirms and claims the foundation of incarnational theology for the people of God, those who are sealed with the sign of Christ. How different the church would be if we all saw unity in Christ as something we were mandated to pursue! How transformed our ministry would become if we saw as our responsibility to model this unity to a world that needed to see this witness to know and come to believe that Christ had and has overcome death, and sin, and division! How much of a change would we live through in our witness if all pastors, and all leaders, and all people in every pew felt called to stand where the Lord stands, namely, against injustice and with the wronged? This is the stuff of identity, of vocation, of an embodied ecclesiology before the God who has made us a little lower than God.

In this Advent season, God is calling us to recognize the incarnation of Christ in all who are around us, and all who stand in the streets, and all who preach and blog and stand before assemblies of the powerful to demand justice.  God is using this time of holy preparation and mystery that we might learn to see Christ in the guise of the other. God is calling white people, white Christians, particularly, in this holy moment, to open our eyes to a reality that has been much-too-long hidden from many – to see our own unity with people whose life experience, and understanding of life in the US, and skintone differs drastically from our own.  God calls us in this moment to live into the reconciliation to which Jesus calls us with people who are different from us. God calls us in this time of waiting and watching to open our minds to opinions and perspectives that are different from ours – and to understand that that does not make those opinions and perspectives invalid. Let us hear the call of “coloured”, South African Christians, sounding even today in the Confession of Belhar, to pursue community and reconciliation, so to model the truth that Christ has overcome death and division. The world needs the hope that incarnation offers. The world needs it, and God, our God, in whose image we are made – God calls us, all of us, to this holy work.

Cynthia Holder Rich serves as the Sr. Pastor and Head of Staff of First Presbyterian Church, Findlay, OH, and as Director of ecclesio.com.