It is Good to Be Human

Intro

It was the summer of 2012. I went to bed that night just as I did any other day. Had you asked me at 8pm I would have told you that everything was OK and nothing was out of the ordinary. That night I learned I was not OK, and things were not the way they were supposed to be.

I woke up that night somewhere around 1am and I couldn’t breathe. My heart felt like It had stopped beating. The room around me was spinning, every nerve in my body felt like I was on fire. I did my best to get out of bed and as best as I could I made my way to my bathroom where I collapsed, unable to catch my breath or control my muscles.

In that moment, I thought I was dying. I had never felt anything close to the level of pain and disorientation I was feeling in that moment. Minutes passed. I don’t know if it was 15 or an hour. Soon, everything returned to normal. It was as if nothing happened, other than that I was completely exhausted. Unsure what to do, I went back to bed.

The next day at work was like any other. I dismissed what happened to me as a fluke because as far as I could tell there was nothing I could point to that felt off. I went to work. I went home. I ate dinner. I went to bed.

And it happened again.

For the next several months I found myself in an uncontrollable pattern of waking up in the middle of the night to find myself out of breath, feeling on fire, room spinning. Eventually I made my way to a physician who had me wearing different monitors and doing stress tests to rule out heart problems or anything else. And after a few weeks of those tests, my physician concluded: you’re having panic attacks.

Now in sharing my experience with something like anxiety I want to be very clear that my experience is not the same as your experience. My path toward greater health will not be your path. However, having over a decade to reflect on that season of my life, let me share with you one thing I’ve learned.

See, this was an intense season of my life. My vocation was a software developer; I had a growing desire to be in ministry. I was working two jobs, I was beginning seminary, and yes I still thought I had a future in kickboxing. I was frustrated because I couldn’t find a way to make all these things come together, I wanted to be more than who I was. I was deeply fearful about the future and the path I was on. That was normal for me. And my body was trying to send me a message: This is not normal, and enough is enough.

My friends and my physician did their best to help me. But what I think I most needed to hear was what no one was able to tell me:

“Ben,” I wish someone said, “You are human.”

Now, I don’t mean that in merely a self-care kind of way. No, I needed someone to tell me in a deeply theological and Christ-honoring way, “Ben, you are human, and that is good. It is good that you are you and not somebody else. It is good that you can’t be everything to everyone, you can rest. God delights in who you are, not in who you think you need to be.” I don’t know if I would’ve listened, but that’s what I needed.

There are all sorts of ways we try to suppress or exceed being human, aren’t there. For some, like me, it’s exceeding physical limitations or trying to control what cannot be controlled. Maybe for some of you it is being burdened by comparison; the desire to be anyone else but who you are right now in this moment. Maybe its a frustration with your labors, not seeing their purpose and just feeling meaningless.

At best, we tend to think of being human as a hindrance, an obstacle, a challenge to overcome. “You’re only human,” we say dismissively. As if to be human means being nothing more than a bag of bones that is inclined to make mistakes. But Christ’s incarnation says something very different to us.

His willingness to take on human nature not just for 33 years of life but for all of eternity tells us that being human is good. His incarnation is God’s yes to being human. And I think if we could start to grasp God’s affirmation of the goodness of being human, rather than trying to suppress or exceed being human, man. We’d be so free to delight in ourselves and others, and to experience the grace God has for us.

Luke 2, a very human passage, shows us how it is good to be human in at least three ways. First, it is good that you are ordinary. Second, it is good that you are a worker. Third, it is good that you are limited.

Let’s be encouraged together.

It is Good that You Are Ordinary

Consider Joseph with me for a moment. Look at the first few verses here.

Luke places these events in the days of the great Caesar Augustus, who ruled the Roman Empire from 27 BC to AD 14. Caesar had extraordinary power to make things happen; if he wanted a census, the tens of millions of Roman citizens obeyed without a second thought. This history, by the way, is not exactly the stuff of legend. Just as you might remember where you were on the day JFK was shot, the Challenger exploded, or the towers fell, Luke’s audience would have known exactly when this was. Christianity is not the stuff of legends, it is situated in real history.

Caesar’s extraordinary power is merely the backdrop for the main act. No sooner is Caesar’s great power mentioned than it is neutralized by another figure; Joseph, the humble craftsmen from Galilee. Joseph, as was necessary of his family line, went with Mary to register in the town of Bethlehem.

Now, please pay close attention to what is happening here. If you’ve ever seen a Charlie Brown’s Christmas, listened to the Radio after Thanksgiving, or seen a children’s Christmas play, its likely you’re tempted to sentimentalize this passage. I’m a big fan of all those things, OK? By the way, speaking of Christmas pageants, Supposedly, there is a video of me somewhere as a small child dressed up as a sheep for the Christmas play. But rather than playing my part, I guess I just laid down and fell asleep right there on the stage. Cute, right?

What happens to Joseph and Mary is not cute. It is brutal. The birth of Jesus is harsh. There’s no room. Joseph is poor. He doesn’t have the means to spring for the suite instead. They’re in a town that is not their home. Jesus is born into the bin that animals eat out of. In Matthew’s gospel we’re told they’re soon going to flee to Egypt to escape genocide. This is absolutely brutal.

All of this is a part of what is called Jesus’ humiliation. Let me be clear, when we describe his humiliation, we do not mean that Jesus is in any way embarrassed by us. The author of Hebrews tell us that he is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters; since we are flesh and blood he likewise partook of the same things. Nothing about you embarrasses Jesus.

In his humiliation, we are describing how Jesus willingly made himself low, becoming human like us in every way but without sin.

The Westminster Larger Catechism, an old document which we believe faithfully summarizes the Scriptures, puts it this way:

The Westminster Larger Catechism (Question 46)

What was the estate of Christ’ s humiliation?

The estate of Christ’ s humiliation was that low condition, wherein he for our sakes, emptying himself of his glory, took upon him the form of a servant, in his conception and birth, life, death, and after his death, until his resurrection. (Phil. 2:6–8, Luke 1:31, 2 Cor. 8:9, Acts 2:24)

The Westminster Larger Catechism (Question 47)

How did Christ humble himself in his conception and birth?

Christ humbled himself in his conception and birth, in that, being from all eternity the Son of God, in the bosom of the Father, he was pleased in the fulness of time to become the son of man, made of a woman of low estate, and to be born of her; with divers circumstances of more than ordinary abasement.

In his humiliation, Jesus was not born to Caesar. He wasn’t born to the religious elite, he wasn’t born to wealthy business owners. He was born to Joseph, the craftsman, and Mary. And you know what that made him?

An ordinary human. His socio-economic status was ordinary. His appearance was ordinary. His family was ordinary. His vocation was ordinary. His capacity was ordinary.

It is good that you are ordinary. It was good that Joseph was Joseph and not Caesar. It is good that you are you and not somebody else.

It is good that you are ordinary. Joseph only needed to be Joseph. Mary only needed to be Mary. In the world’s eyes, what matters is our wealth and influence and power but in God’s eyes, what matters is that you are you and he loves you.

It is good that you are ordinary. And if you have been gifted with extraordinary talents or resources? Then you are freed not to be consumed or crushed by these things, but to embrace them honestly as gifts from God to be received with gratitude and humility.

You don’t need to be exceptional or spectacular. You just need to be you. Jesus shows us - being ordinary is good.

It is Good That You Are a Worker

You know who else was ordinary? Shepherds. In popular discourse, shepherds were metaphors for the function of priests and kings. But nobody liked literal shepherds. Aristotle said shepherds were the laziest of all people. Some Jewish groups considered shepherds as dishonest and unclean according to the law.

But in God’s plan it is shepherds, not kings or priests, who will get to be the mosh pit for the angel’s chorus.

It is to shepherds who are granted the honor of being the first to come and worship the Messiah. With dirt in their fingernails they came. With hair matted down from oil and sweat, with callouses on their hands from their rod they sat at the first table of the Lord where the Christ child was laid in the place where animals fed.

It was these shepherds, these workers, who went out as the first New Testament evangelists. And all who heard from them were amazed. Not because they were impressive speakers, but because everyone could see they had been changed by the good news they proclaimed.

These workers foreshadowed the life and and ministry of Jesus. Like his father Joseph, Jesus was a tekton, a greek word often translated as carpenter but really just meaning builder or craftsman. To be a tekton was to be a worker of various materials such as stone, or wood. It was to work odd jobs, not unlike day laborers, for whatever manual labor you might find in your surrounding region.

For nearly thirty years, Jesus learned from his papa what it meant to be a tekton, working side by side, likely with other laborers to construct buildings and other projects of all kinds. Then, when the time came for his public ministry to begin, Jesus went from town to town speaking of stones, foundations, rocks, walls, towers, millstones. He spoke of payments, debts, wages, hiring and firing, relationships between managers and their staff.

Jesus’ experience as a worker was the canvas on which he painted the message of the Kingdom of God.

Like the shepherds were before him, Jesus in the fullness of his humanity was a worker.

Which means - that’s right - it is good that you are a worker. To be human is to be a worker, just as Adam was in the garden. And yes, work is cursed along with the rest of life by sin; but to be a human worker is good.

Notice I didn’t say that all work is equally good; unethical work is still wrong. But to be a worker is an essential part of being human, and thus it is good. It is how we steward our God-given authority to cultivate and labor within his creation.

There is a story from the early church historian Hegesippus from sometime around AD 170. Two Christian men were summoned to appear before the Roman emperor Domitian, who had heard a claim that the seed of David was going to conquer Rome.

These two men were in the line of David, and thus were brought forward to speak on these matters. The men reported that the Kingdom of God was not of this world. The only thing they had to show for this Kingdom was their outstretched hands, filthy and calloused from manual labor.

Domitian, seeing not the hands of soldiers but of peasants, dismissed these men as being too insignificant to notice. But within a few centuries, Rome would be turned upside down. Not by soldiers or revolution, but by workers, who faithfully embodied the Kingdom of God in compelling ways that were irresistible.

Our vocations are often a battleground for our humanity. On the one hand, it can be a place where we try to exceed our limitations; we work too long while ignoring our families. We seek wealth and power that do not belong to us. On the other, we might suppress our humanity; diminishing the value of our work or our purpose in the world.

Often, I think this is a result of having separated what we do with our hands from what we believe in our hearts. We separate Monday through Saturday from Sunday, thinking that what happens out there needs to be checked at the door so we can be undistracted in here.

The witness of the shepherds tells us that our lives are to be an integrated whole. Just as Jesus’ work informed how he taught the Kingdom of God, our work is to inform how we live in the Kingdom of God.

So bring the equivalent of your calloused hands to the table. Bring your petitions for your work in the home, in the workplace, in the field, bring those into the sanctuary.

Express your aches about unemployment, or an inability to work, or to work the way you want. Share the joys and sorrows of your vocation in community group.

Labor in your vocations ethically. Create cultures where your employees delight in their labors.

Discover the goodness of being human through work, just as these shepherds represent, just as Jesus did in his life and ministry.

It is Good that You Are Limited

Here lies Jesus. Helpless, naked, dependent. The powerful, eternal Son of God, now somehow limited; weak; defenseless. Please slow down and sit with this reality this morning. Be pushed to the uncomfortable edges of the fullness of Jesus’ humanity. That is where you will find his yes to who we are, including our limitations.

Let me just say a quick note for those of you who are still exploring Christianity this morning. There are many reasons why you might not confess the faith, there are many different paths toward becoming a person of faith. However, for some people, the concept of miracles and divine intervention are a real stumbling block. Let me try to simplify this for you.

There are really only two miracles you need to consider. The first is Jesus being born; God becoming man. The second is his death for the sins of the world. I think, if one of those two are understood, the second will follow, as will the rest of the gospel story. So if that’s you this morning, I’ll try to be very specific: I want you to wrestle with how Luke situates the incarnation in real human history. WIth definitive dates, real people. There’s nothing else like it. What if its true?

In the incarnation we discover not only that God exists and acts in the world. We discover that our God is willing to become near, so near that he’ll become just like us. In his yes to humanity, we find liberating grace for what can frustrate us most about being human: our limits.

In his book you’re only human, theologian Kelly Kapic says it this way:

The doctrine that the Word became flesh means that God himself affirms our flesh as good, and that affirmation liberates us from apologizing for our creaturely limitations. If we believe that Jesus, who was free from all sin, was fully human, then this means that he considered creaturely restrictions to be part of his good creation and not evil at all. It means that we must not apologize for what the Son of God freely embraces.

To say that our limitations are good almost feels offensive, doesn’t it. Everything and every one around us seems to say the opposite. You can be more than who you are. Consume more. Strive for more. You can do more. You must do more. Don’t let your body be a prison for what you were meant to be.

But in his incarnation Jesus says, “You don’t need to be more, you just need to be you, limited and as finite as you are.” Jesus lived a life that modeled limitation; even with his divine nature he was not a machine. He didn’t set up shop on a street corner and just heal every single person who came by. Jesus rested. He enjoyed the sabbath. He ate, he drank, he feasted. He often prioritized relationships over productivity.

In all these ways and more, Jesus shows us that God delights in our human limitations; that to be limited is to be lovely and lovable.

Your limitations are good. Your limits are not a mistake. Your limits are delighted in. Your limits are not sinful. Your limits are embraced by your Savior.

Do you see how freeing that is? Doesn’t that give your soul rest? I’m still an anxious person but this is good news for me. Listen, you can say no to endless striving or comparison. You can embrace balance. You don’t need to fill your calendar. You can say yes to rest, relationship, and other creaturely delights. You can have grace for yourself and for others, not in a condescending way, but in patience and kindness.

Why? Because you are a limited, finite human. And that is good.

At his birth, Jesus begins a pattern of embracing limitation that will continue through his life, his death, and even into his resurrection. Jesus would always go lower, he would keep coming closer, in order to come more intimately into fellowship with us. His way was always down: in birth, in poverty, in baptism and temptation, in betrayal and discouragement and suffering. In death, and burial. Closer and closer he came, embracing our ordinariness, our labors, our limitations. All so we would know his love for us.

Then, being raised for our forgiveness, he took all those things with him into heaven. Right now there is a middle-eastern man from a town called Nazareth with the DNA of a woman named Mary sitting at the right hand of God. He was born in a manger. He’s skilled at rock and stone. His name is Jesus.

That’s Christmas. That’s love. That’s hope. That’s joy. Can you believe it?

Let’s pray.