The Incarnation and the Resurrection – An Easter Sermon

St. Mary’s Episcopal Church

Happy Easter! It is truly a joy to be with you all today as we gather together to celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. But before we talk about that, we need to talk about something else. We need to talk about Christmas. Christmas? Just bear with me for a moment.

Christmas is the celebration of the Incarnation, that is, when God became human. Incarnation means enfleshment, when God took on flesh, when Divinity came down to be in humanity so fully that God actually became a person. God made us. God made all creation, it was all good. When God made humans, there was something special about them. God placed God’s very image onto people. God wanted this close relationship with us, but we turned away from Him, we strayed, we got far away from God. We neglected, we rejected, we abused that image of God in each other and in ourselves. We, who were made in God’s image, the God who is love, were implanted with that, and did not live up to the expectations that one would expect for a creature made in God’s image.

So God wanted to reconcile us, and God tried all kinds of ways to get us to come back to Him. And finally God said, I will go out there to the people to achieve reconciliation. And that is the Incarnation, God going to us in humanity. But it is not just the birth of Jesus that is the Incarnation. It is just the beginning of it that we celebrate on the Feast of Christmas. The Incarnation is Jesus’s whole life. It is the fact that he was a vulnerable baby nursing at his mother. It was the fact that he was a surly teenager who made his parents worry. It was the fact that he had work to do in this world. It is the fact that he embraced humanity so fully that he enjoyed all the things we enjoy. Jesus liked a good party. That is one of the chief criticisms of him by his opponents. They said he ate too much and drank too much. He was a glutton and a drunkard, they said. To fully enter humanity he enjoyed all that, but he also had to enter into the suffering and the pain, the agony and the disappointment, the loneliness and the abandonment. He went to the cross on Good Friday, which is a profound implication of what it means to become human. For God to enter into humanity, God had to go down unto death. Not just any death, not a calm, peaceful death, but the worst kind of death that was imaginable. In the crucifixion, God would fully enter into the suffering that we experience in this world.

All of the Incarnational stuff from Christmas to Good Friday is the first part of what God is doing to reconcile humanity to God. God is going to humanity in its fullness. This is Part I.

Today is the beginning of Part II, the Resurrection. This is God coming up. This is God saying that death does not get the final word. While God went to humanity, embracing everything we experience, in the Resurrection and on to the Ascension, that human Jesus is now going back up into divinity, and pulling us along with him. Before he died, Jesus, in John’s Gospel, says, I will lift up all people unto me.

These two things, the Incarnation and the Resurrection, are working together to bring us back into full relationship, to be reconciled fully to God, the God who is love. Imagine a wound on a body and the surgeon sutures it by going down and up and down and up to pull the skin back together to heal that wound. That is what God is doing in the Incarnation and the Resurrection. God goes down to pull us up, to bring us back together, to bridge that gap, to allow the wound to heal.

So we celebrate, not just that Jesus Christ is risen, but we celebrate this amazing work of reconciliation that God is trying to achieve in this world through Jesus. We have Part II and Part II.

And there is a Part III. That is the part where we, who by virtue of our baptism died with Christ and we rose with Christ, are invited to engage in that work of reconciliation. To draw close to others, and to love. To embody that original vision and dream that God had when He implanted us with God’s image. To live in a world in which we have healing and unity and reconciliation. It is not easy work. It feels like it is harder work than ever. We are isolated from each other by technology, politics, and culture that pull us apart. But God is inviting us to a different way, a way to pull close to each other, and to love.

When the surgeon stitches up the wound, that is not the end of the project, that is when the healing begins. That is the work that we are engaged in at this time. We have a God who so loves and adores us that God came here in the Incarnation so that no matter how much we strayed, God would find us. No matter how far we went away, God would come to where we were and pull us in, and invite us to be healed and to help heal. In the name of the risen Christ, God invites us to be incarnate, to be resurrected, to help reconcile this world in love.

AMEN.