Incarnation Means Solidarity

THESE SCRIPTURES move with us from Christmas to Epiphany, drawing us into the mysteries of the divine life in the world. The incarnation is a call to notice where the Spirit surprises us with God’s presence. Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe guides our vision: “Christ is, indeed, to be found in the present but precisely as what is rejected by the present world,” he writes. Christ “is to be found in those who unmask the present world, those in whom the meaninglessness and inhumanity and contradictions of our society are exposed.” God’s mysteries are revealed among the rejected and despised, the people who expose society’s promises as the hypocrisies of political brokers who ensure the prosperity of the millionaires and billionaires—and, soon, the world’s first trillionaire.

To believe these scriptures about God’s presence is to realign our solidarities, to become conspirators with the One whose justice is liberation from the economic, political, and social patterns that are destroying life. These structures that organize our world for the benefit of the powerful are in the midst of collapse. They are “passing away,” as Paul claims. We’re always living through human self-destruction, with the United States as an instance of history’s cycles of cataclysm. If we want to go on in hope, then we must love those God has created, and give ourselves to the despised and rejected, to our neighbors caged in prisons and segregated from us by the border. There, God will astonish us with epiphanies: life’s survival on the underside of history.

January 3

Wisdom Incarnate

For this week the Revised Common Lectionary includes passages from Wisdom of Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon, two books not in Bibles from some Protestant publishing houses, although most Christian traditions include them in the canon.

In Sirach, the power of God takes the form of Woman Wisdom who dwells in creation. She is like the mist, covering the earth with God’s presence. She lives in the clouds, the pillars of the sky. She rides the waves of the sea. She has a tent in Jerusalem, where she lives with God’s people.

With this biblical character as background for the prologue to John’s gospel, the incarnation is a transgender moment in God’s story. In John’s gospel this Wisdom of God becomes the Word of God. Jesus the Word is Wisdom the woman. “Jesus is Sophia incarnate,” writes Catholic theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson. A long-standing tradition in the church names this link between Wisdom and Jesus as Sophia-Christology. Sophia means “wisdom” in Greek. To talk about a Sophia-Christology is to talk about Jesus’ identity as Sophia, as Woman Wisdom.

The Wisdom of Solomon retells the story of Exodus as the responsibility of Sophia, the one who delivered God’s people from a nation of oppressors (10:15). She sheltered them with a cloud and guided them with a pillar of fire. The exodus from slavery was the work of Sophia, who led the people through the sea and into freedom. In Ephesians 1, Jesus incarnates Sophia’s liberation in the church: Christ is our “redemption,” our deliverance in his/her sharing with us of “wisdom” (verses 7-8). Christ is the Sophia of God, calling us into her work of liberation.

January 10

Apocalyptic Solidarity

“And just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove” (Mark 1:10, NIV). The baptism of Jesus tears through the border between heaven and earth. The Greek verb here is schizomenous, having to do with gashing something open, ripping apart. God slashes through the sky. This is the beginning of an apocalypse. Imagine scenes from the Left Behind books and movies: judgment unleashed from the heavens, fire and brimstone, cosmic devastation.

But this apocalypse doesn’t initiate an inferno. Instead the Spirit of God swoops down—the Holy Spirit like the dove who returns to Noah on the ark with an olive leaf, a sign of life. The Spirit is like a bird at the beginning of Genesis who hovers over the waters, who broods over the oceans. The apocalyptic arrival of the Spirit at Jesus’ baptism declares God’s solidarity with earthly life, God’s commitment to human community. The sky tears open to reveal that this Jesus will embody God’s movement in the world. “You are my beloved,” the voice announces. This one is God’s love made flesh.

Baptism is our communion in this divine love, our union with Christ’s life. In baptism we give ourselves to God’s love—to be “caught up” in God’s life in the world, writes Anglican theologian (and former archbishop of Canterbury) Rowan Williams, “so that we may grow into wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.” We are revelations of love, signs of God’s delight in creation.

January 17

Silent Mysteries

“The word of the Lord was rare in those days” (1 Samuel 3:1). For a generation, the people knew only the silence of God—until one night when a voice startled Samuel. He thought Eli was calling, an elder in need of assistance. Eli wondered if this might be the night when God returned with a word of guidance. “If he calls you again,” Eli told Samuel, “you shall say, ‘Speak Lord, for your servant is listening’” (verse 9). Sometimes God speaks, but most often we listen to the mysteries of silence.

Dan Rather once asked Mother Teresa of Calcutta about her devotional life. “What is it that you say to God when you pray?” She answered, “I don’t say anything; I just listen.” Rather followed up: “What is it that God says to you during prayer?” Mother Teresa thought for a moment, “[God] doesn’t say anything. [God] just listens.” Teresa and God, sitting together, both quiet, each listening to the silence.

In a letter to her spiritual director, Teresa confessed her doubts about God’s presence. “In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss,” she wrote, “of God not being God.” She added, “If I ever become a saint, I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’”

Prayer is patience in the darkness of night, listening for a voice.

January 24

God’s Reign Has Come Near

Simon and Andrew drop their fishing nets, leaving their father alone to manage the family business. They abandon their responsibility to the social order, the economy, and family values, all because God’s reign has come near. The advent of the gospel shifts their commitments, their allegiances.

In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul describes this shift as a “passing away” of the current “form of this world.” The systems of power, the moral codes, the value structures—none of those deserve the deference of our political will or our economic lives. Instead, Paul writes, buy without possession and live without ownership. Deal with the world without making deals with the powerbrokers. Protest without a proposal for political reform. Because the form, the structure, the core of this order is a sham.

“Abolition is a synonym for the end of the world.” With that line, historian Saidiya Hartman summarized the demands heard in the streets in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The call to defund the police is what abolitionism sounds like today—to dismantle a world order built on genocide and enslavement, to disarm the officers who preserve imperial power. “‘Defund the police,’ and even calls to abolish the police,” writes African American studies scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker, “seem like reasonable propositions when the institution appears immune to any more moderate reform.”

The United States is the city of Nineveh in the story of Jonah. The only hope is to embrace repentance as a structural overhaul. The question for us is how we will love our neighbors as the present order passes away.

January 31

Demonic Punishment

Jesus sets people free. That’s who Jesus is: God’s liberation in the flesh. In Mark, Jesus liberates a person from demons, from a power that imprisons him, an unclean spirit that defiles him. Demons are emissaries of the dominion of sin—sin as a social order, sin as an overpowering violence. The ministry of Jesus, as the biblical scholar Matthew Thiessen explains in Jesus and the Forces of Death, is God’s redemption of the world from “the demonic forces that plagued humanity.”

The demonic is a way to talk about the reign of sin in our society and our lives, a system of sinfulness that rejects what is good for our neighbor and us. Sin is a power around us, invading our lives, possessing us, holding us captive, imprisoning all of us in a cage the size of the world.

When visiting people in prison, I’ve developed a practice of prayer that includes a word of exorcism. I offer an exorcism for the place—for God to cast out these demonic institutions from our society—and that Jesus would set the captives free. Incarceration and detention operate within the demonic realm of cruelty, of punishment as dehumanization. “Capture, imprisonment, is the closest to being dead that one is likely to experience in this life,” George Jackson wrote from Soledad prison in 1970. Incarceration “was like dying,” he explained. “Just to exist at all in the cage calls for some heavy psychic readjustments.”