Lent Sunday 2--Incarnation

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.


There came a man who was sent from God; his name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light so that through him all men might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.


He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God--children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God


The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.



--John 1:1-14



This is my God; the one I strive to know.

He leaves his vast dimensions and enters the lowly flesh of a human. He distills the oceans of His being into a concentrated drop of humanity carried about inside a woman, a two-year-old, a twelve year-old boy, a man of thirty years, a martyr at thirty-three.....and back again....losing nothing.


God as a human being, God as the ultimate communication of truth, God as the life-giving essence of mankind, God as the maker and the made, God as known and unknown, received by some, rejected by others; the concepts flash through my heart in a searing moment of longing and peace as I search for the God of the Universe and the finite person of Jesus living and breathing on a spinning blue rock called Earth.

Flesh and Spirit become one, much like the description given to Adam and Eve about their children. And we, those who have received him, he makes into God's children--God's Spirit bound to our human matter and molecules; remade by His will and recreation.