God is Not a Tourist
Notes
Transcript
Handout
As a means of introducing the Christmas Series, we will be looking at the reality that God has come near. In fact, the word Advent, means the arrival. That God in the person of Christ as come to us, come into our world, entered into our lives.
And He has not come as a visitor or as a guest. He didn’t wait to be invited or waited for us to clean up our mess. He showed up because He knew the darkness could be oppressive. And He came to bring light. Christ came to lift the darkness, to free us from whatever keeps us down.
Christmas, or the Arrival, is our recognition that God has entered our world. So we will look at how it is that God has come into our world and why it matters. Immediately it matters because by Christ we can see. Christ shines in the darkness.
But we have to revisit this reality because God can be easy to miss. Look at part of our passage this morning
The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.
Christ came to the people that should have recognized Him and they didn’t. So it is easy to miss His arrival. And we can probably empathize. How many of you feel a bracing as the Christmas season begins. There is just so much! so many parties and gifts and events. Its a ton of fun but often we are just running from one event to another.
We will never be able to see Christ at that pace. Whether Advent or otherwise.
That is because we often act as tourists
That is because we often act as tourists
Let me explain. I have brought some mugs with me this morning. These represent my travels, my experience as a tourist. Explain some of the mugs.
If we are travelling, I will always be on the lookout for a mug. So much so that others bring me mugs from their travels. Here is the thing about tourism. No matter how much you see an area as a tourist you never see it the same way as if you live there. Because you are not there to root down and create relationships, you are there to create experiences. And that doesn’t seem like a difference but it is. A tourist is interested in seeing and collecting as much as possible, in order to wring the most out of an area.
It is easy to jump from gift shop to gift shop as a means to mark that you have “been there.” I have done parts of the freedom trail more times than I can think of and the amount of times I have been in Paul Revere’s house gift shop or The Old state house gift shop.
It is easy to approach life from a tourist perspective. To hop from thing to thing, event to event, experience to experience without ever slowing down. Look at your calendars for a moment, reflect on your week. What did you do because “it was on your calendar” and what did you attend because your kids had to be at that event or practice or game?
This kind of tourist leaping from thing to thing gets dangerous for our souls. You may be able to manage a calendar but how are managing your soul? Tourists collect experiences above relationships. They see things partially because they don’t live in that place. The tourist, according to a certain philosopeher (Zygmunt Bauman), then remains as “physically close but spiritually remote.”
(The philosopher Martin Buber says) There are only two kinds of relationships we can have. The first is what he calls an I/Thou relationship. This is when you are connected to another person or to God. The other kind of relationship he calls an I/it relationship. This is a transactional version of life where everything becomes about what someone or something else can do for you. It is the life of the tourist.
The problem comes in when we treat all of our relationships as if they were with things. This is what a tourist does. A tourist gets to choose what is experienced and what is skipped over. A tourist chooses the best experiences and leaves a lot of other things behind
When we hop from event to event, like the tourist, we miss out on so much. We see the gift shop version of the experience, get the trinket, but don’t really see the place. And if we aren’t careful we can do this with God. We blaze right by Him, getting the event or the service but forget to engage with the God of the universe who has come close.
God refuses to treat us like tourists. If we zip and zap right by Him, He will speak to us in advent language. The language of a God who has come close. God relates to the world, not as One visiting but as who who resides here.
Thank God Christ is no tourist. We will because of the incarnation redefine how we see life.
God is not a Tourist.
God is not a Tourist.
His Advent shows us that God has come to dwell with people and invites people to dwell with Him. To abide with, to hear Him. To live from Him as the center point of our lives. We recognize not only that God comes close in Jesus but that there has never been a moment where God was not present. Jesus becomes the revelation of how God dwells with His people but we have to recognize, as John wants us to do in the first chapter of his Gospel, that God is not entering a strange world, He is entering the world He has Himself made.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.
The beginning of this Gospel is a reminder of Creation. John wants us to think of where life is and where life comes from
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
We hear the familiar echoes of creation in our passage this morning. That John wants us to think of Creation, of the forms and the founder of life itself. And that from that place, the Word already existed.
God is already present and rooted into all of Creation. He is rooted because He Himself is the Creator.
God is a Being, He is Being itself and expresses movement and wills creation. But we are told that God doesn’t just will creation, He also participates within it.
God Lives in Your Neighborhood
God Lives in Your Neighborhood
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
This passage is incredible. We can’t easily pass by it without understanding it.
What it means is the Word became flesh. Christ let go of His own glory, and became human
who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.
But Christ did not just enter into our world for a moment like a tourist. The Scripture states that he “dwelt among us” the word “dwelt” means that he shelters with us. The audience would have understood this idea of taking shelter.
See in the Old Testament, the people of God, the Israelites, set up a shelter for God. They called it a tabernacle.
God is not limited by anything, including the ability to participate fully in creation. God is not just over it, in Christ He comes under it. This passage, that the Word became flesh is the reminder that God has become “historical and particular” (SN bear://x-callback-url/open-note?id=BAF438DC-1445-410F-AEB9-0D8857833272)
The incarnation in this way, continues what has already existed. It stabilizies the already existing of the word. This is the work of someone who shelters with us, who participates in His creation. He stabilizies where He shelters.
The incarnation is not just God becoming flesh. It is transformative, changing what it touches. Divinity transforms what is contrary to its nature, flesh, darkness, and death. Gods divine work enters into each in the incarnation, as a transforming power. (SN: bear://x-callback-url/open-note?id=188A5EF5-F3DF-49AE-A547-A2AAA8E09BAE)
What does this mean? God is at work in every end and every trinket in your life. God is at work in the light of your life, but because He has become human, because he has entered into and lives in your neighborhood, He is at work in your darkness.
Look at what happens a little further into the first chapter of John. Jesus begins his ministry and calls His first disciples. One of them, Philip finds Nathaniel and tells him that he has found Jesus the messiah.
Phillip basically tells Nathaniel that they have found the Messiah
The Word
The Light
the God who shelters with them.
That they have found the One they have been looking for, the One even the prophets thousands of years earlier have been talking about.
Nathaniel asks him: oh yeah? Where’s he from?
Phillip answers: He is the son of Joseph from Nazareth.
And Nathaniel (scoffs) and asks him a question,
Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
Nazareth was a small village, a bit of a backwater town, out of the way of Jerusalem or other large cities. It was rural and unremarkable. It did not have special pedigree or historical value.
Nathanael sees nothing special about Nazareth. No one comes to Nazareth as a tourist
And Nathaniel is thinking like a tourist. There’s not even a good restaurant in Nazareth!
But as it turns out the village is shown to be remarkable because the incarnation.
The incarnation, Christ as God who has become flesh, redefines everything we know in creation. God reshapes our understanding through Him moving near. Christ becomes our history. He enters into the difficulties and the small towns of our own lives, brining new meaning of our lives by coming near.
There are all areas of our lives like Nazareth. Areas that we don’t give much thought to, or areas that we would never give much thought to. Or areas that we ourselves think,
“can anything good come out of this?”
The tourist scoffs and moves on. But misses God who lives in Nazareth
And Christs answer, because He shelters with His people, to see say that absolutely, good can come from the places we would rather forget or skip over.
See we forget that Advent is no season for tourists. Because Advent, in the moment of Christs appearing, still looks into the dark places, the Nazareths of our lives. Advent is not about what we skip over, its is about recreating all the darkness through the light of Christ.
This season all the things that have come from darkness, all the things that have been discarded. Even if you feel stuck in darkness, even if you feel discarded,
In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Christ does not come for the trinkets and experience and then leave. He has set down roots, he has come to live with shelter with us. In our Nazareths, in our darkness. But He comes to redefine and bring light.
There is nothing so small that Christ cannot change, nothing so dark that Christ cannot shine light upon. The incarnation changes everything, Christs invitation is to allow Him to transform you this season. We love being tourists. But mostly because we are too afraid to stop at the Nazareths.
Advent is an incredible time to seek the God who seeks us. Find the God this season who shelters with you.
Cavanaugh, William. 2011. Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church. Eerdmans.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1993. Postmodern Ethics. 1st ed. Wiley -Blackwell.
Balthasar, Hans Urs von. 1994. A Theology of History. Communio Books. Ignatius Press.
