What words do you use to talk about this time of year?
There are so many words that people use to talk about what happens in our culture in December. In the church, we speak of Christmas, but this has become a loaded term in our culture. It is more popular to wish people “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas” in order to avoid offending those who don’t share Christian faith. I’ve also seen bumper stickers that said, “Don’t take Christ out of Christmas,” as a reaction to the abbreviation “Xmas.” (Of course, I like to tell folks that I abbreviate Christmas this way because the Greek word for Christ begins with an X. In fact, early manuscripts of the Bible would abbreviate Christ as “XC”, the first and last letter of the word.)
Another word used in the church to describe this time is Advent. Yet there are many in the church who don’t know the meaning of this word. For what it’s worth, it is from the Latin verb meaning “to come” or “important arrival.” Now that makes sense! We are spending time to celebrate an important arrival, the arrival of God in flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. But why do we keep celebrating it year after year especially after Christ rose again from the dead? The reason we still celebrate is because we’re still waiting for another important arrival – Christ’s second coming. We remember during this season that Jesus came as the Light of the world, as a baby in the manger.
The word that has inspired our Advent sermon series this year is Incarnation. Again, it is a word with a Latin root meaning “in flesh.” God took on flesh by His incarnation. What does that matter to us? It matters that the eternal second Person of the Trinity became a man so that He could obey the law and suffer in our place on the cross so that we could be reconciled fully to God. It has implications for how we live our lives today. That’s what we’re going to explore together as we preach through this series. For now I will leave you with a paragraph from Jill Carattini, managing editor for a daily email list I recommend called “Slice of Infinity”, to whet your appetite for our time together beginning this Sunday:
Though the word incarn is now used infrequently, it was once used medically, describing the flesh that grows over a wound. Applied to healing, the word refers to the recovery of wounded flesh due to the presence of new flesh. The Incarnation, the astonishing event at the center of Christianity, the story that has inspired music, architecture, and hope, is God’s way of doing exactly that: Christ comes in flesh to cover our mortal wound. God comes near in body and in weakness to bring healing to weak and wounded bodies. Indeed, God’s own body is mortally wounded only to rise again in flesh and blood. This may seem a foolish mission, but to the blind who receive their sight, the lame who now walk, the diseased who are cleansed, the deaf who hear, the dead who are raised, and the poor who have good news brought to them, it is the most beautiful foolishness ever known.
In Him,
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