Okay, so what happens when you think about God?  Aldous Huxley has a character in one of his novels Those Barren Leaves named Miss Thriplow.  She is a somewhat promiscuous woman who is easily bored when not having an affair.  Whether it is the pangs of guilt that start stinging or the boredom that becomes impossible, she decides that she needs to reform and get more “serious and spiritual”.

 

As Huxley describes it, “She got into bed, and lying on her back, with all her muscles relaxed, she began to think about God.  God is a spirit she said to herself.  She tried to picture something huge and empty but alive.  A huge flat expanse of sand (for example) and over it a huge blank dome of sky, and above the sand everything should be tremulous and shimmering with heat -- emptiness that was yet alive.  A spirit, an all-pervading spirit.  God is a spirit.” 

 

Three camels appeared on the horizon of the sandy plain and went lolloping along in an absurd, ungainly fashion from left-to-right.  Miss Thriplow made an effort and dismissed them.  “God is a spirit,” she said aloud.  But of all animals, camels are really almost the queerest when one thinks of their frightfully elongated faces, with their protruding underlips like the last Hapsburg kings of Spain.  No, no, God is a spirit, all-pervading, everywhere.  All the universes are made one in him.”

 

Certainly this search for the ineffable, the invisible, and the all-powerful can easily blow our minds if we wander too far into the mystery of it.  I read recently where scientists are trying to isolate a spirituality gene as a way of identifying why it is that humankind seems to be forever yearning to connect with what Paul Tillich called “The Ground of All Being”.  It’s what a few centuries ago Pascal called the “God-shaped vacuum in every person”.

 

I have to admit that from my ministerial perch it is very encouraging to read the polls and hear the chatter about how people are getting so much more serious about their spiritual journeys.  My goodness, it has become a spiritual growth industry.  I mean I see the most unlikely people wearing ornamental crosses while others are ornamented with religious tattoos in the most unlikely places.

 

If God is a spirit, then good old American ingenuity is taking advantage of that lack of definition to turn a profit.  And, of course, that is no truer than at Christmas.  The spirit of Christmas has gotten very fuzzy hasn’t it.  It has become a time to trot out the feel-good themes of love, and hope, and peace, and joy but we are not really good at the connections.  Frankly we have got to give God more definition than that or like Miss Thriplow, we too will be thinking about camels when we are trying to think about God.

 

For all I know you were thinking about camels when our scripture lesson from the Gospel of John was being read.  This is a familiar Advent scripture and we have come to love its rhythm and its flow.  Its poetic references take us back to the beginning of time and before time -- that eternal place inhabited only by God.  Then with an economy of words it fast-forwards us into history as we know it making the Word become flesh.

 

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  We have been programmed to hear those words and think immediately of Jesus, the incarnation, God becoming a human being. Here the writer of the Gospel of John takes ancient philosophical categories for deity, Logos, and Word, and tries to bring them home to the person on the street.

 

When you think of God, what do you think of?  And don’t tell me that you think of getting more spiritual.  Yes, God is a spirit and we worship God in spirit and in truth but we need more than that.  That is why we need Christmas.  “The Word became flesh.”  What was once so abstract as an all-powerful, creative force, that set the universe in motion has entered the world of observation and limitation.

 

That’s the good news!  The Word became flesh.  The realm of the spirit can now be understood in human terms.  But because we are human and because our understanding takes a while to catch up, we go to extremes.  Also for us at Christmas God didn’t just become human; God became a baby.  And that lays us open to the kind of sentimentality that not only reduces God to a baby but Jesus to an ornament and a good luck charm.

 

Last week when we read that awful story about Herod and the slaughter of the children, we met a Jesus that was considered so dangerous that those in power wanted him removed at any cost.  However, few of us recognize that Jesus in our Christmas celebrations.  For us he is less dangerous and more domesticated.

 

In her book, Believing in Jesus Christ, Westminster member and Western Seminary faculty Dean, Dr. Leanne VanDyk, offers an illustration of an admittedly extreme form of such domestication when she writes how, “You can order a Visa card from the Internet with a picture of Jesus on it -- a Jesus Visa.  The web site pitches this credit card with the line ‘Show your love for the Most High.’  The idea is, apparently, that the more you use your credit card, the more you can show the world your love for Jesus.”

 

Of course that’s only the beginning; you can load a Jesus screen saver onto your computer.  You can buy Jesus playing cards, Jesus bumper stickers, Jesus bookmarks, key chains, lapel pins, and earrings.  Putting the best face on it apart from the obvious commercialism, having these trinkets somehow means that Jesus is involved in every part of your life.

 

I guess it is just part of the human condition to try to bring everything down to our size, but at Christmas we run the risk of getting so wrapped up in the sentimental that we forget how that cradle of innocence was transformed into a cross of violence.  I realize that is a lot to swallow but if we don’t, we run the risk of reducing Jesus into obscurity and irrelevance.  It is just one of those tensions that we’ve got to hold on to if we are to develop a faith that can cope with a real world.

 

In the center of London lies Trafalgar Square.  Right across from St. Martin’s in the Fields and bordered by the National Gallery it commemorates the Battle of Trafalgar, one of the great naval battles in history, which was fought in the Mediterranean off the coast of North Africa in 1805.  It pitted the combined French and Spanish fleet of Napoleon against the British fleet under the command of a man who was already a great British war hero, Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson.

 

The British emerged victorious in that battle, and it is credited with giving the British control of the seas.  But Lord Nelson was killed in the battle and his body was subsequently returned to England and buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral.  In honor of the great man, a towering monolith was erected in the center of Trafalgar Square, and at the very top of the towering column was placed a statue of Lord Nelson.

 

But there was a problem.  The whole thing was so high that Lord Nelson was virtually invisible from ground level.  Eventually they did the only thing that they could do.  In 1948, an exact replica of the statue at the top was erected at eye level where it could be clearly seen.

 

So when you think of God, what do you think of?  A spirit?  Perhaps complete with camels when you lose your concentration.  Or as a baby?  Innocent in that manger but also inaccessible for the demands of a real world.

 

The metaphor of the Lord Nelson statue means that God has come among us in just the right size, not so far removed that we cannot see or touch or relate to him nor so miniaturized that he becomes for us only an object or a trinket or a memory.  “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  Or as in Hebrews, “He was in all points tempted as we are yet without sin.”

 

There is certainly nothing wrong with nativity scenes and babies and mangers because we have to start somewhere.  But while Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus, may it also be for us the celebration of a faith that matures -- a faith that is not reduced to sentimentality but one that embraces the real brokenness of life knowing that in this Christ who lived and died and rose again our brokenness is made whole.

 

May it be with that kind of faith that we approach the table this morning.  Truly, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  And because he did we have come to know Emmanuel, God with us, in a way that shows us.

 

Amen.