The Art of Incarnation: A Sermon

During this holiday season, as I hang up lights and decorate the tree with ornaments, I can’t help but to think of the world around us. The world in which we dwell is decomposing, falling apart at the seams, and festering in its misery. It is a place where the powerful monopolize resources and where the good, the little glimpses of hope that flash here and there, seems to drown in the backwash of injustice. Yet, amazingly, there is an expectation that still persists: the incarnation. In fact, it is through the incarnation that we find ourselves in the presence of a trickster God, a God who is not settled with anything less than transcending the traps of our culture through art.

Art is a big word, and I think we sometimes use it carelessly, throwing it around nonchalantly as an adjective (“She’s really artistic.”), as a noun (“I don’t get art—I mean, why isn’t coloring in a coloring book art?”), and as an adverb (“He artistically crafted the sermon to bring enlightenment to the congregation.”). So, first things first, let’s take a look at its meaning so we can see what a weighted and powerful word we toss around so easily.

There are many words in our language that are derived from art and its root, -ar, meaning to join, to fit, or to make. In Latin, we have the word articulus, derived from artus, which means literally a joint in the body; and we also have the word ars, which means skills such as those done by an artisan (a “joiner” of things). In Greek, we have the word arthron, which means joint, as in “The wrist is the arthron that connects the hand and arm,” and harmous, which describes the stiff joints (as opposed to the somewhat more flexible bodily joints) made or used by artisans such as stone masons, carpenters, and, hopefully, by dry wallers and framers. The thing well-made, called harmoi, denotes order, structure, and beauty. This is very Greek: who wants a carpenter to use flexible joints when framing a house? We could apply this idea of harmoi to language, for what would our words be without conjunctions, “jointing” words? It would be babble that is indecipherable and inarticulate, a vapor that vanishes the moment it is touched by light. To be understood when we speak or write, we need order.

Lewis Hyde, in his book, “Trickster Makes this World,” says that the “eternals are vulnerable in their joints. To kill a god or an ideal, go for the joints.” He talks of the mythic tricksters and of their ability to make stiff joints flexible and to keep the cosmos porous. We can see this in the Yoruba myth of Eshu and the palm nut oracle. Eshu is said to dwell in the market place, at the crossroads, and in thresholds, all places that are articulated or in some way “jointed.”

In our culture, I see Ralph Waldo Emerson as sort of a mythic trickster, albeit loosely. For Emerson, human experience was important, especially in terms of our understandings of religion and its role in our lives. In his essay from 1838, “An Address Delivered Before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge,” Emerson says that we “have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead.” He sees revelation as on-going, something that depends on our experience and ability to hear God speaking. He says: “The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man;—indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office for a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake.” Emerson rips apart our notion of the divine as for only one or two persons (God and Jesus). Is it any surprise that Emerson was never invited back to Harvard? If we would only listen and experience God, as we shall see in Mary, we could become children of God.

As we heard in the Scripture reading, the Song of Mary is a powerful work of ars that sees the reversal of the status quo in the world. It is the song of praise from an improbable event: God becoming a human. Inconceivable! In a way, God here is the trickster figure: he is, quite literally, killing himself, or at least killing the expected ideal of God-ness. He is making himself vulnerable in the joints. In the song, Mary claims that the hungry are filled, the rich made poor, the lowly exalted, the rulers deposed, and the “proud in the imagination of their hearts” humbled. This is a reversal of order, an attack on the traps of culture, a masterful work of ars. Later in Luke (4:18-19), we see that Jesus picks this reversal up and expands it, proclaiming “the year of the Lord’s Favor.”

As we can see, art is important because it plunges us into the realm of the experiential. We live in a planet where we can see, touch, taste, smell and hear. It is not a report of what is, but rather, a mode of being that shows us what can be. It is not static, given and done, but always changing. Marcel Proust, in his novel,“Swann’s Way,” says it nicely: “But when a belief disappears, there survives it—more and more vigorous so as to mask the absence of the power we have lost to give reality to new things—a fetishistic attachment to the old things which our belief once animated, as if it were in them and not in us that the divine resided and as if our present lack of belief had a contingent cause, the death of the Gods.”

The belief of the variable and dynamic nature of ars can be seen in our practice of the Eucharist. What is it that we offer to God? Wheat and grapes? No. The wheat and grapes are transformed through the artisan qualities of the baker and brewer into bread and wine.

The challenge, then, of the artus worker is to carry this over into our often static modes of being Christians. Why not open the canon (yes, the Bible) and expand it so that our brothers’ words are as living scripture to us, so that our sisters’ acts be as the breath of God in our ears, so that our neighbors’ experiences are as valuable as the life of Christ in our eyes, and so that our children are little walking incarnations of God, the same God who sent Jesus? We are not entrapped, but free.

May the trickster God be with you

and grant you courage

to be artus workers,

snapping the joints of culture and

condemning the god of stability.