It was question and answer time at the worship workshop. Pastor and Author Thomas Long had been speaking on the theme of worship all morning to a group of people gathered in a church fellowship hall in a suburban neighborhood in Indiana. Dressed in sweatshirts and jeans, they had given up a Saturday of golf and gardening to sip coffee and listen politely as he rambled through discussions of Vatican II, Calvin's view of the Lord's Supper, the pros and cons of children's sermons, the development of the lectionary, the meanings of baptism, and other assorted topics about worship. Now, the lecturing done, he gulped down a little coffee and asked if there were any questions.
A hand shot into the air. It belonged to a fiftyish man with plump cheeks and rimless glasses who was, judging by the way his hand waved and bobbed, eager to speak. "There's one thing about our worship service here which really gripes me," he complained. "To me it's like fingernails being scraped across a blackboard."
"What's that?" he cautiously asked, fully expecting him to say something about gender inclusive language, newfangled hymns, politics in the pulpit, or sermons on tithing. But it was not one of these issues which caused his aggravation.
"The announcements," he declared. "I just hate it when the minister spoils the mood of worship with all those dull announcements." Heads bobbed in vigorous agreement all around the room. The announcements were out of favor in that corner of Indiana, no question about it.
Thomas Long said he knew what the man meant. You're soaring above the pews on Sunday, your wings catching the strong breeze of the Spirit carrying you upward from "Joy to the World" toward the choir's lofty "For Unto Us a Child is Born," and then, thud ... the Christian Education Committee will meet in the library on Thursday at 7:30 .... " Like Icarus striving for the sun, you find your wax wings suddenly melting, and you plummet back to the world of flesh, dust, and committee meetings.
The announcements do seem like a bag of peanuts at the opera, an ungainly moment of mundanity wedging its way into an hour of inspiration. What he tried to say to the questioner was that he understood how he felt and that, yes, the announcements were often rattled off without care or passion, and, yes, they did sometimes seem to be somewhat uninspiring, but that, after all, the details of the church's institutional life were important, and five minutes of them couldn't hurt, and so on ....
After the meeting Rev. Long realized he blew it. He didn’t give the right answer. What he should have said is that, properly understood, the announcements are one of those places where the rubber of the church's theology hits the road. Indeed, it just may be that by moving seamlessly from "Holy, Holy, Holy" to "the telephone crisis counseling ministry is in need of additional volunteers," by punctuating its soaring praise with the commas of the earthy details of its common life, the church is expressing in its worship one of its most basic convictions about the character of God: "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us ..." (John 1:14).
That affirmation about the eternal Word becoming flesh comes, of course, from the poem which opens the Gospel of John. The poem begins with violins and soaring phrases: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ... " (John 1:1). With these ethereal phrases at the beginning of John's gospel, it is no wonder that the church selected, as a symbol for John the Evangelist, the high flying eagle. If John's poem had ended after the first line, the noble Greek philosophers could have voiced their admiring approval. They, too, wanted to mount up with eagle's wings, to leave the earth behind, and to ascend into the celestial heights to be with God and his logos, his Word.
But John's poem does not end with the first line. The eagle suddenly dives toward the ground. The violins give way to the blunt thud of a bass drum. Heaven crashes to the earth. The closing notes of the hymn fade, and it is time for the first startlingly earthbound announcement in Christian history: "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us ...." It is here that John and the Greeks part company. The very idea that the ultimate meeting between humanity and the logos of God would come, not when we ascended to the airy pinnacle, but when the logos descended to the fleshy depths was, to employ the term of New Testament scholar Raymond Brown, "unthinkable." John's poem, Brown says, does not claim ....
... that the Word entered into flesh or abided in flesh but that the Word became flesh. Therefore, instead of supplying the liberation from the material world that the Greek mind yearned for, the Word of God was now inextricably bound to human history.1
The conviction that God refused to float in sublime isolation above time and space, but became in Jesus Christ, flesh and blood, sweat and earth, is the doctrine of the incarnation, and what it means, among other things, is that we do not escape the mundane to encounter the living God. Indeed, the announcements in worship became symbolic of the Christian truth that it is the "fleshy" details of life, the working and the serving, the community projects and the committee meetings, the being born, the marrying, and the dying, which are the arenas for our encounter with God-become-flesh in Jesus Christ. When the announcements about soup kitchens, new babies, people in the hospital, Bible studies, and meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous begin, "Holy, Holy, Holy" does not end; the church is simply confessing that these are the places where that holiness is to be found. "The Word became flesh ... "
Now the church has always known that affirming this doctrine of the incarnation was like carrying around a lighted stick of dynamite. On the one hand, it is capable of blasting away virtually everyone who prefers less fleshy brands of religion. For those who seek religious experience and inner peace through the inward path of meditation, for example, there is John insisting that the path of God does not end in rarified spirit, but in flesh. In other words, however many inward turns the path may take, it eventually leads out to the world of flesh where we are called to meet Christ in human community. One of the telling criticisms of the electronic church is that it also isolates the viewer from the "fleshiness" of human community. As one observer put it, the television church offers religious experience in the safe and sterile environment of one's own living room and not among "sniffling children, restless teenagers, hard-of-hearing grandparents, and sleepy parishioners." Moreover ...
When you watch television church, no one asks you to participate in a visitation program. No one challenges you to hold the attention of a junior high Sunday school class. No one asks you to take meals to shut-ins.2
In short, it is all pure religion and no messy entanglements with human flesh. All of which is fine until the old eagle John swoops to earth with his announcement: "The Word became flesh ...."
On the other hand, the doctrine of incarnation blows up all naive notions of the inherent and natural holiness of life. It was God who became flesh, not flesh that became God. In the movie about Saint Francis of Assisi, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, the birds and all of nature preach their granola-flavored goodness to Francis. In the church's story, however, Francis preaches to the birds, and therein lies the crucial difference. All of creation was fallen -- all of it. To use John's language, darkness was everywhere. In Jesus Christ, God entered creation, became flesh, and all of the darkness in the world cannot overcome the light of that saving act.
The incarnation means that, appearances to the contrary, all of human life and history is infused with holiness, but this does not mean that life is a lark or that we are called to sing as a hymn the words of the popular song, "Everything is beautiful, in its own way." Anyone who has seen the torture chambers of the Nazi regime, any surgeon who has removed a malignant tumor, any reformer who has tried to clean up government, knows that everything is not beautiful in its own way. To affirm the incarnation does not imply that life is rosy or that people always do the right thing or even the best they can. It does not mean that people do not waste their lives, get hurt, or hurt other people. It does not mean that there is no hardship, no drudgery, no evil, no tragedy. It would be an illusion to pretend otherwise. What it does mean is that there is no corner of experience so hidden that grace cannot find it. There is no soil so sterile that the seed of holy wonder cannot grow in it. There is no moment so dark that it can extinguish the light of God which even now shines in it. Christians do not bubble around celebrating life. They celebrate God who enters the life of creation in order to redeem it. "The Word became flesh ...."
When Christians say, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth," they do not mean that God is everything, but they do mean that God is in everything. "In everything," wrote Paul to the Romans, "God works for good with those who love him ... " (Romans 8:28). The theologian Robert McAfee Brown likes to use in his writing the musical metaphor of themes and variations.3 There are many musical compositions, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for example, which begin with a clear, identifiable musical pattern, or theme. What follows in the music is a series of variations on this theme, the theme being repeated in ever more complex combinations. Sometimes the texture of these combinations is so complex that the theme is hidden, seemingly obscured by the competing and interlocking notes. But those who have heard the theme clearly stated at the beginning of the work can still make it out, can feel the music being organized by the theme. In Jesus Christ "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth ...." That's the theme of all of life heard clearly by the ears of faith, and those who have heard that distinct theme can hear it being sounded wherever the music of life is being played, no matter how jangled are the false notes surrounding it.
In her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard told about seeing a mockingbird dive straight down off the roof of a four-story building. "It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem ..." she wrote. The mockingbird, wings held tightly against its body, descending at 32 feet per second toward the earth, spread his wings at the last possible second and floated onto the ground. Dillard said she spotted this amazing display just as she rounded a corner. No one else was there to witness it. She connected the event to the old philosophical question about the tree falling in the forest. If no one were there to hear it, goes the conundrum, would it make a sound? "The answer must be," she stated:
... I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.4
Because in Jesus Christ the Word became flesh, truth and grace are at work in every place, whether or not we sense them. What we can do, of course, is to attempt to master the theme and then to try to be there wherever in life it is played anew. If we wonder where that might be, one good place to begin is by listening in worship to the announcements.
1. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (I-XII) (The Anchor Bible, Vol. 29), (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1966), p. 31.
2. Philip Yancey, Open Windows (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1985), p. 73.
3. See, for example, chapter eighteen in Robert McAfee Brown, The Bible Speaks to You (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1955) , pp. 231 ff.
4. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as quoted in Yancey, p. 24.