The Lowly Made Lovely

The Soul was created to feel its worth.

The trouble with stories is that, when they are retold with regularity, they can lose their power.

This is because it takes a great deal of cognitive effort to keep things fresh and novel in our brains. We so easily, and unconsciously, sort stories into neat categories because it’s an efficient way to make it through this crazy world in which we are barraged with new cognitive and sensory data every single second of the day. Part of why we keep rituals, like Advent, is to renew our minds to the wonder of our faith every year. And this is the Catch-22 of it – because we keep this ritual every year, our minds are often not renewed, but rather entrenched more deeply into the previously worn grooves made by the story as it first came to us.

I suspect this is why we aren’t utterly flabbergasted when we read these words in Galatians 4:4:

“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman…”

As I’ve contemplated God’s work in the Incarnation of Christ, I’ve found myself circling this sentence again and again. Perhaps because I’ve conceived, carried, and birthed three humans into the world, and I’m coming to the age where my physical ability to perform that kind of miracle is dwindling rapidly, I can’t seem to get over the fact that Christ was conceived, developed as a fragile embryo inside the secret oceans of Mary’s body, then was thrust out of her through violent contractions and rivers of blood and water, only to be held, nursed, taught, and nourished by her breasts, her hands, her face, her voice, and her life force.

No wonder Mary, the first Christian theologian, burst into preaching these words when she got an inkling of the invitation God was extending to her, and to us all:

And Mary said,

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

For he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

For the Mighty One has done great things for me,

And holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;

He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones;

And lifted up the lowly;

He has filled the hungry with good things,

And sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel,

In remembrance of his mercy,

According to the promise he made to our ancestors,

To Abraham and to his descendants forever.” – Luke 1:46-55

She understood, almost immediately, what other theologians have grappled with (and often denied) ever since -- that God is truly, and in every sense, with us and for us. She was willing to let go of every controlling concept or image of God that had worn grooves into her previously established cognitive understanding of who and what God is, so that she could be enlightened by the startling truth being revealed to her.

Friends, that is a choice we can all make.

The speculative attributes of God – the ones which keep God above and at a distance from us – like immutability (God does not change) and impassibility (God does not experience pain or pleasure from the actions of another being), were cast into the background as this concrete experience of God’s faithfulness and love created new ways of seeing, knowing, and relating to God. Her experience with God was revealing to her what is real.

Mary wasn’t concerned with the ancient philosophers’, Plato and Aristotle, beliefs about Divinity, which is where so much of our speculative theologies are rooted. She was a woman who was growing the Divine within her own body and who was charged with raising him and protecting him in a world that wanted to kill him from the beginning.

Her praise erupted from a deep well of astonishing experience, not from head knowledge of what God should be like.

The Incarnation of Christ isn’t about a baby, a manger, animals and shepherds, or stars in the sky. Those are all parts of the story, but the theme of the story is what we must hear afresh, with renewed imaginations. Biblical scholar Catherine Mowry Lacugna states it well when she describes the Trinity, as revealed in Christ, as being primarily about:

“God’s life with us and our life with each other. It is the life of communion and indwelling, God in us and we in God, all of us in each other. This is the perichoresis, the mutual interdependence that Jesus speaks of in John 17:20-21.”

The doctrine of perichoresis is what I’m meditating on this Advent season because it’s the miraculous theme of the Greatest Story Every Told. There was a plan, from before this thing we call time began, to include us as God’s beloved people, in the Divine Dance of love (Ephesians 1:3-14). God has revealed Godself to us in the Incarnation as overflowing love, Divine abundance, spilling out to create history and then then enter into it for the purpose of drawing us into Love forever.

Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash

Yes, Jesus came preaching repentance of sins. Yes, his death on the cross was going to be a dark and crucial part of the story. Yes, we are a dying people in need of rescue and resurrection. Yes, we’ve all fallen short of the glory of God, and of what we were meant for in this world. Yes, friends, we don’t have to have anyone underscore this for us because we know it in every fiber of our beings: we are lowly.

All those things are true, but they’re not the truest things about us or God.

The Incarnation of Christ, and all that it means about God’s being-as-love and our place as God’s beloved and invited people, is the truest thing about us and God. Mary summed it up beautifully in her Magnificat:

My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant…for the Mighty One has done great things for me and holy is his name.

Consider afresh the powerful lyrics in the cherished Christmas song, O Holy Night:

“Long lay the world in sin and error pining,

‘Til he appears and the soul felt its worth…”

The truest thing about God and us is that God lifts up the lowly, nourishes the hungry, adopts the orphan, and goes back to find the lost.

Because God loves us, we lowly are made lovely.

The greatest malady this world suffers is our inability to comprehend the worth of the human soul. This is why we hate, hurt, reject, and ignore. It’s the source of our violence, our shame, and our shadowed evils. It’s why we deny God and seek our own self-interest. We’ve lost the wonder of a God who is so steadfast in love toward us that God comes to us, in us, and through us to heal us all and restore us to our rightful places in the Divine Dance of love.

Today, in the holiness and beauty of Advent, I invite you to pray with me that God renew our minds to the stunning implications of the worth of our souls and what God’s plan for communing and indwelling means for us all.

Who could you be if your life was firmly rooted in the soil of this kind of fertile love? Who could we be, all of us together, if we flowed in the freedom that comes from the Incarnation; that is, being fully seen, fully known, and comprehensively loved?

“Intimacy and accessibility of Almighty God is the essence of Jesus’ ‘Good News.’ God is not anti-human, not angry, sullen, and withdrawn. God draws near, very near; God is with us.” – Robert Hamerton-Kelly