The Irritation of Incarnation

Incarnational Theology emphasizes that the Father has sent Jesus as one of us. God does not scorn the human condition rather God dwelt in the fragility of the human body (Phil 2). This human form brought the Glory of God down from Mt. Sinai to the streets of Nazareth. The fullness of God somehow, someway was displayed in the limitations of the God-man Jesus. He embraced those limits to model for us how to be present, really present. Jesus was a “manger wetter” as the poet Stephen Mahan states. This is not sacrilegious, this is sacred. God experienced human flesh and in it opened up space to observe his kindness. (Rom 2:4). The incarnation continues as we are sent (John 20:21) and now the Divine is being downloaded into the ordinary. An Incarnational God leads us to inhabit the world not as one fearing but as one searching; searching how the Kingdom of God breaks into the crevices of our world through tangible touch. This imagination is a burst of light into my life offering me a framework for being available in my local context.

Cost and Consternation

I’ve had the joy of meeting many young Incarnational Theologiz-ers springing forth with fresh vision about this vital spirituality. I too drank a firehose of books years ago that helped me visualize incarnation as a refreshing path forward in the world. Yet I’ve sadly observed that many with all this incarnational ideation often lose steam with little on the ground sustainable actualization. It’s not mentioned often that many who leap into “doing justice” burn out from discouragement or fizzle out because of boredom. It's one thing to learn about the content and another to live into the content. My suspicion is that our imagination for Incarnational Theology is still elementary and quixotic. For all my fervor, my imagination needed to be filled out with the cost and consternation. I’ll be honest, incarnation is a thorn in my side, and it’s exceptionally inconvenient and even irritating at times. Many days that I press into the mystery of the incarnation and attempt to move it into practice I get a bit ornery, straight up grumbly in my spirit. The incarnation confronts me with a private emotion; I don’t love people. I don’t hate them but I don’t love them either. I know that’s not cool to say as a church planter and community cultivator. I have sentimental love, maybe even theological love but practical love comes and goes for me.

I live in a cold, economically depressed part of the country that is fighting for progress. I’ve lived here for a few years now, buying a former abandoned drug house, gutting it and renewing it. We’ve had multiple families do the same, taking the plunge into this pocket of the city extending renewal. All of us champion a missional-incarnational life but we know it’s not a pretty scene at times. The sidewalks are littered with trash, the roads are peppered with boarded up houses, the gang violence can make you nervous to go for a walk and mental illness on the streets is no longer interesting, it actually frightens your children. My wife and I scratch our heads at times wondering “how the Gehenna did we end up here?”

Relentless Disappointment

The deeper we dive into this particular place the more inconvenient our lives get. I’ll give you some examples: people knocking on my door looking for a ride at weird hours when I’m exhausted laying on the couch, sitting and listening to a neighbor’s drama when I’m privately stressed on my way to an appointment, pouring the energy of love into someone and having them steal from you, cultivating trust with another and having them go "Gollum" on you. You can read about incarnation in a book and idealize it but translated to real life it is invasive. There is relentless disappointment in the up close and personal space of incarnation. The sheer dashed hopes can do an angry-dance on your perseverance. Sure I can gain applause outside of my hometown when I speak about incarnation but on my streets few are impressed. I preach and teach incarnation but I want to be truthful, I have a hard time in good conscience making it sound sexy.

The Curriculum is People

Yet something continues to happen on a subterranean level in our community: we are being discipled by the phenomena of being with people. The curriculum is people; they expose our attitudes and our actions. There is resistance within me. I do not want to bear with others. My un-love regularly rises to the top and I can feel it floating on the surface of my heart. At that point I either tackle it or pamper it. God is not interested in a professional compassion he wants to take us through the labor process of birthing the real thing. This practice of tangible love has brought me face to face with my own limits, impatience, stubbornness and resentment. Trying to be present, really present in a particular place has ironically made me aware of what is present in me. Everyday I’m challenged to bail on beholding the beauty and brokenness in others. Will I stay? Will I lean in? This is the battle ground in my heart. I share all this to summarize that I love Incarnational Theology but we must speak about its proletarian irritation to be truer to its actuality. We must be careful not to perpetuate the abstraction of "being incarnational" or we do a disservice to the Incarnation. To know the incarnate God you must experience the pain of incarnation.    

What America can learn from the European church

Mike Breen (church planter consultant) and Paul Maconochie (pastor at St Thomas, England) have some great insights from across the Atlantic>

In England things are quite different. Churches are often half empty and the attitude of many of the British people towards evangelical Christianity is pretty negative (to say the least!). A large church in England might have 300 people. Obviously, this is a really foreign reality for people who have grown up in a culturally Christian United States. However, there are some things that we as British Christians are learning that may be useful on both sides of the Atlantic. Britain has become a mission field again in the true sense of the word and the remnant believers have had to change and adapt in order to remain effective as God’s people.

I live in Sheffield, a northern, post-industrial English city where about 2.5% of the population attend church on a Sunday. This means that the vast majority of people in our city never go to church. Ever. For us, ‘Build it and they will come’ does not really figure any more. Instead, we have had to learn afresh what Jesus meant when he said ‘go and make disciples.’ One of the most important lessons we have learned is this:

Incarnation is better than intervention.

Intervention says “I really want God to touch my life and make it better. But God is a little scary; I think I need a Pastor to stand between him and me.” Of course we never actually come out and say this; we just act as if it is true. Instead of going to Jesus directly we expect our Pastor to go to Him, praying, fasting and reading the Bible and then to instruct us in what he has learned at the worship service. In return, we pay out tithes and turn up on a Sunday morning before going back to our lives, and to be honest, not changing too terribly much.

These things are all good and I am sure that God likes it when we intervene to help people, but I believe that God actually has a preference for incarnation. He does not want to help us from a distance, through our Pastor. He wants to be in every part of our lives. I love Eugene Peterson’s translation of John 1:14; he writes:

The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighbourhood.

God wants us to access His presence in community and His Word amongst each other. He wants to deal with us directly, and He wants us to do the same with the Last, the Least and the Lost.

In recent years in our church we have seen an incredible thing – every day members of the church who consider themselves to be missionaries even while they still live in their home city, and who actually live that way. They believe that if you’re a Christian, it means you’re a missionary. There isn’t really a choice in the matter. They have found that life-on-life engagement with others allows our contagious faith to spread. They share their time, energy and resources with each other and move into the lives of those they are trying to reach. In a city where no-one goes to church, we have begun to see people come to the Lord in the hundreds, most without ever darkening the door of the church.

For those of us with an "intervention" approach to faith, I believe Jesus brings the challenge of incarnation.

Question: If you are a pastor are you unintentionally teaching people that for them to access God they need to hear your preaching, worship as your church-band plays, grow closer to God through your programmed class?

Excerpted from Mike Breen's Blog

Learning to Love My Wife

My wife and I just celebrated 12 years of marriage. About two years into our marriage I began to see who I really was. I vividly remember brushing snow off my car in the morning and asking two questions "why do I live in New York" and “why did we have that argument last night.” The second one was obviously the more pressing question. I began driving to work haunted by something much deeper about the reason for that argument we had the night before. For some reason I had an epiphany on that bitter cold snowy morning, “Dan you love yourself more than you love her... really, you do.” I remember realizing this and not being able to get away from it. All day it pressed on me. It was like steam on the mirror was evaporating and I was starting to get a better look at myself. The more I saw the more that sad reality about myself sank in. I had gotten into rut of interaction were I was first looking out for my own needs, my own desires and my own concerns. Sure, I loved her, thought of her, cared for her but I realized my energy was first being spent on myself. She in essence was getting leftover love.

I don’t know how it happened. It wasn’t just about arguments. It was the framework of how I existed in our marriage. I was overwhelmed by how self-oriented I was, how selfish I was, how much concern I had for myself. I began to recognize its present effects: I couldn’t just sit and listen to her for long periods of time, it was an exception when I asked her if I could serve her in some way, I didn’t do the work to learn how to sexually please her body and mind, I did not encourage and empower her to tackle something she uniquely enjoyed, I was afraid to give her freedom because I was afraid my own wants wouldn’t be met, I didn’t work to converse and download with her first, I was unsympathetic to her pressures, I drew hard lines between what she did and what I did in our relationship, I precisely critiqued her instead of being patient to coach her through weaknesses in her life, I was automatically defensive when she asked something of me, I expressed insecurity that she wasn’t giving me the emotional attention I needed and the list could goes on. The shame that overcame me seemed unbearable. How could I kill this me-monster?

I truly wanted to love her like Christ loved the church (Ephesians 5:22-23). Christ loved with self-emptying love, self-sacrificing love, self-humbling service for the sake of raising up the beauty of the church. Love like this does not come natural.

I could not just kill my own self-love and selfishness. I had to begin a journey of redirection. To be honest, in the beginning it became a psychological game to me. I was challenged to see how often I could heap active love on Tonya. I realized I wasn’t just going to shut off the self-obsession. I had to wean myself off of that addiction by giving myself a new one. That new one was her. I took an act-as-if approach; I worked on practical concrete ways of loving her over myself before I felt genuine emotions or motivation. I was hit or miss in my consistency, but something was transforming in me. I began to find joy in watching her feel contentment and joy. I really started to get an emotional return from her heart fulfillment. All the while I was becoming less conscious of my own internal voice clamoring for attention and wants to be met. I didn’t realize it at the time but learning to love is learning to enjoy someone else’s needs being met. I’m convinced that because I toiled to submit to the life giving truth in Ephesians 5:22-23 God’s spirit began to change my character.

This next aspect isn’t talked about much but men struggle with issues of feeling inadequate and insecure in their identity. Most men when confronted with inadequacy or feeling like a failure turn in on themselves and become even more of a narcissist. I see this by how we amp up indulging in what gives us pleasure or personal excitement. I additionally see this play out in how we try harder to prove to others we are something to be reckoned with or pouring ourselves into succeeding at work. I stumbled into discovering that the beast of inadequacy had less power on me because my sense of self-esteem received an adrenaline boost by learning to be a lover. In a weird way it felt powerful to know my wife was satisfied, secure and deeply cared for. In my marriage, the most intimate and vulnerable place in my life, I was finding a rich sense of satisfaction in knowing she was well loved; she felt like the crowned jewel of creation.

I learned a theological lesson because of this. Being a lover leads to honor. Jesus was exalted and honored by the Father because of his self-emptying love for humanity. In many ways learning to be a serious lover leads to restored honor.

Incarnation vs Status

We all have in us a desire to measure our spiritual health. The apostle Paul says we all desire law; some sort of litmus test for ourselves. It feeds us what we feel we need; “See I’m doing, see I’m arriving, see I measure up, see I’m climbing, and see me compared to them.” Its popular to talk about being the church instead of going to church. But what does that truly mean and how is that fleshed out ? I’ll tell you one thing it certainly will collide with, our yearning to measure our spiritual achievements. There is a drive in all modern Christians to “Attain Status"

"I go to church on Sunday’s while they sleep in and watch TV."
"I’m a Sunday school teacher."
"I’m on the worship team."
"I lead a program in the church."

The current institutional church has elevated these types of roles and many others like them as achievements in spiritual growth. In a weird way they have become sign posts for us that indeed “We're really doing church now”.

Status is a position that we climb towards that once attained feeds us a sense of internal pride, strength and security. In church planting models these opportunities for status (disguised as service) are waived around for people to latch onto in order to grow the church. “who will be responsible for chairs, kids program, worship, promotion?” But this paradigm has fundamentally handicapped the people of God from actually being the church. These ladders to climb do not teach people to be missionaries.

In a truly missional church teaching people that "Everyday Incarnation” is what Jesus envisioned as church is an uphill battle. Weaning people off of “Attaining Status” and onto “Everyday Incarnation” is a cultural and personal clash for most of us. The mode of Jesus entering into the brokenness of our world using the tools of; conversation, hospitality, peace-making, invitation, active listening, feasting, interactive teaching and eye-contact to share the message of the Kingdom of God has significant implications on us as church-goers. We need to reorder our priorities, lists and commitments because of Jesus incarnation. There are direct implications on our sense of private space and time. We need to echo the movements of Jesus.

For example I sometimes hear in our missional church “I don’t feel like I’m doing anything or I’m not doing anything for the church”.

So my response often is:
"Have you had someone in your neighborhood over for dinner lately?"

"Have you served someone in the church community that has a physical or emotional need?"

"Have you offered to take a shut-in grocery shopping or given a bottled water to the homeless man on the corner or offered to babysit a single mom’s kids?"

"Have you had a cup of coffee with someone to converse about the study from this week?"

Everyday incarnation takes intentionality. When we break down the tower of going to church and attaining status we can then see what's really pressing in the Kingdom of God. Interacting with people that are in our circles of influence with Gospel intentionality is more like church than we can imagine. When this is done as an extension of a committed community of Jesus-followers, the church is awake and alive. This is how to be the church; the living body of Christ in the world, in the neighborhood and amongst other believers.