What if God was one of us?

For most of us who regularly populate church pews, hearing that God “became flesh and dwelt amongst us” as it says in John 1:14 is pretty standard Christmas fare.  If you listen closely to many a Christmas carol playing everywhere from your car radio to the local Starbucks you’d think everyone believes it, too.   We sing with gusto and without thought, the words of Hark, the Herald Angels’ Sing: “Veiled in flesh, the Godhead See, Hail the Incarnate Deity.  Pleased as man with men to dwell, Jesus our Immanuel.” 

But every now and then it might occur to us that this whole notion of the incarnation of the triune God into a first century Jewish craftsman is actual quite a thing to believe. 

God became a human?  Really? God walked on this planet and had chapped lips and sore feet, bad breath and a tension headache?  God had siblings to get along with, and chores to do, and had to make a living?  God hung out with friends and made a few enemies and had people who liked him and some who didn’t?  God was really one of us? 

Several years ago, Joan Osborne wrote a song titled exactly that—“One of us.”  It’s now the theme song for the TV show, “Joan of Arcadia,” (where a teenage girl keeps meeting God in the form of a different person) and the song asks a haunting question:

What if God was one of us

Just a slob like one of us

Just a stranger on the bus

Trying to make his way home?

Put in today’s terms, it does seem a bit hard to believe, doesn’t it?  In fact, no other religion dares assert such a thing. 

On occasion, a religion will assert that a human became a god, but the idea that the One True God became one human being?  Blasphemy most good people of various faiths would say.  Superstition and sentiment most secular people would say.  Legend or metaphor even some Christians would say. 

Before we write them off (and with them our own nagging doubts and earnest questions) let’s consider just a couple of philosophical issues that if nothing else pose some thorny problems.  Like,

• When God came to earth and was being breast-fed by Mary, who was keeping Mars from slamming into Earth? 
• When the incarnate God, Jesus, went out in the night to pray, who heard his prayers?  To whom was Jesus praying to?
• If God by definition is perfect and unchangeable and then takes on human flesh, doesn’t that mean that he became imperfect and changed?  Is God now less God because of becoming human? 

Now, before I cast you into a doubt-filled despair let me assure you that all people of strong faith have had to wrestle with the incarnation.  Some for philosophical reasons like the ones I just mentioned (and which I will address through out the next few weeks), but mostly for a more specific religious conviction: Gods are gods, humans are humans and never the two shall be confused, they say.

So while affirming that there is a “Supreme Being,” most of these folks insist that Jesus be considered a truly good and inspiring person, a moral teacher, a social prophet, even a religious revolutionary.  But not God. If there is a God, that God by definition is not a human.  God is what a human is not. End of story, they say.

But, what if?

That’s what Christmas is all about and Advent is the season of time where we focus in on the profundity of that reality. 

What if God did become a human being, as the Bible says happened? 

What if God was one of us? 

So what?  What should we believe?  What should we do?  How should we live?  That is exactly where we will pick up tomorrow.