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    Incarnation: The Surprising Overlap of Heaven & Earth
    Incarnation: The Surprising Overlap of Heaven & Earth
    Incarnation: The Surprising Overlap of Heaven & Earth
    Ebook91 pages1 hour

    Incarnation: The Surprising Overlap of Heaven & Earth

    By Bishop William H. Willimon

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    Jesus defies simplistic, effortless, undemanding explications. To be sure, Jesus often communicated his truth in simple, homely, direct ways, but his truth was anything but apparent and undemanding in the living. Common people heard Jesus gladly, not all, but enough to keep the government nervous, only to find that the simple truth Jesus taught, the life he lived, and the death he died complicated their settled and secure ideas about reality. The gospels are full of folk who confidently knew what was what--until they met Jesus. Jesus provoked an intellectual crisis in just about everybody. Their response was not, "Wow, I've just seen the Son of God," but rather, "Who is this?"--from the Introduction
    The church uses the concept of “Incarnation,” (from the Latin word for “in the flesh”) to help us understand that Jesus Christ is both divine and human. The Incarnation is the grand crescendo of our reflection upon the mystery that Christ is the full revelation of God; not only one who talks about God but the one who speaks for and acts as God, one who is God.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAbingdon Press
    Release dateNov 19, 2013
    ISBN9781426775185
    Incarnation: The Surprising Overlap of Heaven & Earth
    Author

    Bishop William H. Willimon

    Will Willimon is a preacher and teacher of preachers. He is a United Methodist bishop (retired) and serves as Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry and Director of the Doctor of Ministry program at Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina. For twenty years he was Dean of the Chapel at Duke University. A 1996 Baylor University study named him among the Twelve Most Effective Preachers in the English speaking world. The Pew Research Center found that Will was one of the most widely read authors among Protestant clergy in 2005. His quarterly Pulpit Resource is used by thousands of pastors throughout North America, Canada, and Australia. In 2021 he gave the prestigious Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale Divinity School. Those lectures became the book, Preachers Dare: Speaking for God which is the inspiration for his ninetieth book, Listeners Dare: Hearing God in the Sermon.

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      Book preview

      Incarnation - Bishop William H. Willimon

      Intro.jpg

      We are on our way to a great adventure. We will travel to wonderful, mysterious places you cannot visit on your own, destinations so exotic you must have a guide to lead you there. You will be told secrets that the world does not openly discuss. Your world will be expanded, your life enriched and changed. In the Belief Matters series we will joyfully explore the riches of the faith, the adventure of Christian believing, the gift of Christian theology. We are going to dare to think like Christians. While there is nothing to be gained from overly intellectualizing the faith, there is much to be lost in dumbing down Jesus Christ. For one thing, the church doesn’t delight in insoluble cerebral puzzles—life does. As a pastor I discovered that people bring to church bigger, bolder questions than I pose in my sermons. They ask: Why am I unhappy? Is death the last word? Why can’t I keep my promises? Is this all there is? If Jesus is the Redeemer, why doesn’t the world look more redeemed?

      Hucksters, religious and otherwise, prance the Web pronouncing, Six simple steps to . . . or, The secret of happier . . . The church need not prove the lie behind the allure of simple truth—life does. All around us we see the sad wreckage of those who believed the reductionistic deceit that it’s all just a simple matter of . . .

      More important, Jesus defies simplistic, effortless, undemanding explications. To be sure, Jesus often communicated his truth in simple, homely, direct ways, but his truth was anything but apparent and undemanding in the living. Common people heard Jesus gladly—not all of them, but enough to keep the government nervous—only to find that the simple truth Jesus taught, the life he lived, and the death he died complicated their settled and secure ideas about reality. The Gospels are full of folk who confidently knew what was what—until they met Jesus. Jesus provoked an intellectual crisis in just about everybody. Their response was not, Wow, I’ve just seen the Son of God, but rather, Who is this?

      In this series we explore the riches of Christian believing, wading into deep, faith-engendering waters that provide essential refreshment for disciples. In each book a skilled pastoral theologian will talk about what a doctrine means and why this set of ideas is important for you to think through. The series opens with my invitation to think about the Doctrine of the Incarnation. Hold on to your hats; this may be a wild ride. The Doctrine of the Incarnation makes it possible to say what Christians must say about Jesus Christ. We never needed a Doctrine of Incarnation until we met Jesus—a material, fully human being just like us who was also the eternal unlike us.

      Matthew says that when Joseph was told (in a dream) that his fiancée was pregnant—and not by him (God seems to enjoy delivering news like this when we are asleep and defenseless!)—Joseph bolted upright and broke into a cold sweat. Having his world rocked required Joseph to rethink everything he once knew. Joseph could warn us: thinking about the jolt of Incarnation can be a bumpy ride.

      Take my hand; we are about to enter deep water. Join my astonishment that Christians don’t just believe that Jesus was much like God; we think God is who Jesus is. And because we know that God is like Christ, we know the way the world is moving and what we must do to move with the grain of the universe.

      Currently we are experiencing an outbreak of spirituality. As for me, I pray for a counter resurgence of incarnationality. In Christ, heaven and earth meet; God gets physical. In seeing Jesus, we believe we have beheld as much of God Almighty as we ever hope to see this side of eternity. Whoever who has seen me, has seen the Father (John 14:9), is an astounding statement for anyone to make—particularly if that person is a poor, unemployed, homeless, wandering beggar eventually tortured to death by the government.

      On so many occasions Jesus taught us by throwing out a parable beginning with, The kingdom of heaven is like . . . He made God’s realm mundane by saying, A woman was kneading dough to make bread or A king set out to make war or A man had two sons. He revealed heavenly things through earthy, time-bound parables. This inextricable mix of earth and heaven, temporal and eternal, mundane and mysterious characterized everything Jesus did and, so his first followers came to believe, everything Jesus is. We’re at the heart of the Christian faith: Almighty God, the same being who hung the heavens and flung the stars in their courses, became a man who lived in Nazareth.

      The Doctrine of the Incarnation is thus our human attempt to make sense out of an event that has happened, is still happening—heaven and earth overlapping, interlocking in a Jew from Nazareth who lived briefly and died violently. Then three days later, the women shout, He’s back! God here. God now.

      The Doctrine of the Incarnation is our attempt to think about that.

      —Will Willimon

      chapter1.jpg

      My first summer of college, bumming around Europe, I sprawled with other students in the middle of the night, near Amsterdam’s Dam Square. A student whispered, Want to see God? Take this. I awoke the next morning at the base of the queen’s statue with a bad headache, without a vision of God.

      Who doesn’t want to see God? Atheists and theists alike are able to read human history as a long search for, and often a wild fantasizing about, God. However, the atheist’s, Is there a God? is a less interesting question than the biblical, Who is the God who is there? Ninety-five percent of us already believe God is. But there are contentions among us: What does God look like? What does God expect of us?

      8473.jpg

      And the most pointed question of all: Does God care about me?

      It’s fine to ask big questions about us and God. Trouble

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