3. We're In This Together...

Then there was the wet cement.

Let me explain.

There was a church, somewhere in Africa, and they wanted the floor red.  Carpet was out of the question so they laid the concrete, waited for it to dry, and then painted it red.  Effect achieved!

Or so they thought.

They put out the chairs, and people shuffled in and shuffled out and danced and swept, and it wasn't many months before the most-traversed areas began to show a disappointing thinness of paint as the preacher's pacing and the chair-scraping and the inspired dancing in the Spirit wore away that thin coat of paint.  They repainted it, but the benefits were short-lived again.  Shuffle, dance, pace, scrape and the  dull concrete colour showed through.

This wouldn't do, and so they cast around for solutions.  Painting and repainting would cost a fortune and be a bit like painting the Forth Bridge (although I suspect that's a phrase that's not quite as common currency on another continent).

The Forth Bridge, yesterday.

Someone bright came up with the answer.  More concrete was mixed, and it was proposed to lay a fresh thin layer - an inch or so - on the existing floor.  But this time, instead of daubing on the red paint afterwards, a bright spark poured gallons of the stuff into the cement mixer.  The result was a deep red gloop which they then poured out over the scraped and shuffled old floor.  It dried and hardened, and when it was set, they were back at that state of a beautiful red floor.

But with a difference.

This time it couldn't be scraped off.  The concrete wasn't wearing red paint like a thin coat.  The concrete was infused with red, and when it was scraped or shuffled, danced or paced on, the red stayed, because the concrete was red through and through.  And through.  And through some more.

And this is my third Christmas sermon, because this is exactly what God did, exactly what Jesus was.  God wasn't wearing human flesh like a coat that he could take off at will, hang up when it got boring or tedious.  Jesus was human.  He was God too, still, granted, but he was human.  Not moonlighting, not pretending, not mocking us by imagining he could call his dad anytime.  He was in it with us.

And he still is.

That concrete was red and the red was concrete.  Not cosmetic, but integral.

Jesus took human nature; was and is human; inextricably linked.  Our humanness has been sanctified and blessed and illuminated by Jesus pouring himself into it.  And it in turn has affected Jesus.  God may well be omniscient and know everything from the outside, but maybe becoming human gave him a fresh insight.  (I hope this isn't heresy!)  Psalm 139 tells us God knows about being human, knitting us together and knowing our words before we speak.  The nativity tells us God becomes human, and now knows our human frailties and fragilities, fears and festivities from the inside out.

Jesus wept and hungered and was footsore and weary and thirsty.  Jesus got tired and pestered.  Jesus probably had bunions and twinges and headaches and splinters.  Jesus got pushed out of a woman's womb, was breast-fed, griped and pooped and cried.  Jesus was rejected and misunderstood.

The rubbish bits of childhood.

Make no mistake.  God becomes human.  Human nature is set alight by God, and he's not pretending, patronising or just passing through.  He chooses to live like common people and he puts on one side the possibility of calling his dad so he can stop it all.

My pain: he understands it.

Your frustrations: he feels them.

The common futility of being mortal and human, hemmed in by things beyond our control: he lived it and he lives it still. 

With us.  

For us.

You can't separate that red paint from the concrete now.  The floor is still red and it'll stay that way.  Christmas merges God and human nature in an irreversible act of revolution.  The Bible says Jesus was pleased to be found in human form; that he emptied himself of all manner of privilege to do it.  It can't be unmixed now.

How does that make you feel?  You have a God who knows from inside.  You have a friend who has limped and struggled and lived through growing pains.  When he see him again, he will still be human as well as God.  Still have those scars that say, "Suffering?  Got the t-shirt."

The tinsel and fake snow may be cosmetic.  The goodwill may wear very thin indeed.  The God-becoming-human is not just for Christmas.  It's for life.  Human life.  That mess, that mirth, that misery. Christmas is the day when God says (in the cries of a newborn baby) "we're in this together now…"