Incarnation

Gospel reading: Luke 13:22-30 (Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Two hours ago I was sitting with my wife in the Double Wells Assembly of God church in Sulphur Springs, Arkansas. It's only about an hour from Christ Episcopal Church in downtown Little Rock, but in every way other than the geographical it's about as far away as you can get.

The church building is several miles from town, near the cemetery. An oil painting of a river, probably painted by a well meaning member of the congregation, hangs behind the baptistry. We were there for Aunt Florence's funeral.

I've heard stories of the gospel sings and dinner on the grounds that Aunt Florence would organize to raise money for the cemetery each year, and stories of the way church services at Double Wells always included her invitation to anyone in the congregation who might like to come on up and sing in the choir.

At the funeral her son made his way to the piano, dressed in his best dark suit. He told us he didn't quite know what song his mother would have called her favorite, but he opened the shape note hymnal with a creak of its spine, and said he thought this one would be appropriate.

He found a singable key, and then started blocking out the chords, adding only a few unpretentious flourishes that his mother taught him in their living room, no doubt. His voice was strong and clear and mediocre as he sang, "I've got a mansion just over the hilltop in that bright land where we'll never grow old..."

And as he sang, I stopped feeling out of place if only for a moment. Up to that point I felt like my tie was too neat, my shoes were too shiny; I felt like, well, an Episcopalian from Little Rock. But there was something in the honest longing in that old gospel song and the honest longing in the voice that was singing it distracted me from all our irreconcilable differences. And we were just people gathered in the name of Christ, and he was in our midst. Incarnate again.

That's not supposed to happen. Our theology is different. Our worship is different. Our language is different. Our architecture is different. Our images of heaven are probably different, but when we let our guards down we recognize something like a hope for a "bright land where we'll never grow old" in ourselves. If our hope isn't quite the same shape, it comes from the same place.

Kathleen Norris considers the Incarnation through Mary's exchange with the angel Gabriel. And her question is one Christians have struggled with for 2000 years: "How can this be?" I suppose I was asking this very question when I sat in that little pentecostal church, realizing that when Jesus said he would be among us when two or three or gathered, he didn't mean two or three people like me. Realizing, perhaps, that incarnation still happens in ways that we think cannot be.

I think I caught a glimpse of Incarnation today. It felt a little like this: "...Even in terrible circumstances and calamities, in matters of life and death, if I sense that I am in the shadow of God, I find light, so much light that my vision improves dramatically. I know that holiness is near...coming from Galilee as it were, from a place of little hope, it reveals the ordinary circumstances of my life to be full of mystery, and gospel, which means 'good news.'" (from Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris)