Watching for the Incarnate God - John 1:1-18

On the Saturday before Christmas, I joined my friend David and spent the day traipsing through the woods and fields of Southwest Little Rock. We were one team among several, all of us participating in the annual Christmas Bird Count. Our job was to tally every bird we saw or heard in our corner of Little Rock, collecting data that would eventually go to the National Audubon Society.

Looking for birds can take you to some unexpected places. Birders are known to frequent city dumps and sewer treatment centers, abandoned lots and scrubby forests. Birds are everywhere, but many make their homes on the margins, the edges of cities and manicured landscapes. We found sixty-six species that day. A number far more than one might expect in a city. Most of the birds were hidden from plain sight, and we would have missed them if we hadn’t walked slowly, and listened carefully, all while looking for the hidden life around us.

Wandering through the woods on makeshift trails and water treatment service roads brought us into contact with other hidden parts of our city. In the trees along Fouche Creek, we found tarps and carts hidden among the brush. Not a hundred yards from a golf course, there was a small village of tents, an assemblage of parts and pieces that formed a fragile shelter. I’d have never known so many were sleeping in these woods of creek flood plains and roadside edges, hidden from sight, if I hadn’t been assigned to birdwatch this particular patch.

God came to pitch a tent. That’s the truth we hear in our Gospel this Sunday. In case you missed it, the phrase comes when John says that “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” Eskenosen is the word in Greek that is translated “lived among us.” More literally, it means “tented.” “The Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us,” as David Bentley Hart translates it.

Eugene Peterson, in his wonderful rendering in The Message, says, “God took on flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.” I’ve always liked that rendering. But reading our scriptures for this Sunday, with my recent experience with tents hidden in the woods, this verse took on a new meaning for me. If God is one who moves into the neighborhood, then we could easily imagine coming by after the moving trucks have gone with a fresh plate of cookies to welcome this new neighbor. But our Gospel offers us a different picture. We are told that though Christ was the source of all existence, the world did not know him when he came, and not only that, his own people did not accept him. It seems that when the Word of God comes to pitch his tent among us, it is not on the open lawn of a nice neighborhood or on the lawn of a church (we wouldn’t allow such a thing), but in a back alley or in an overgrown lot, here among us, but hidden.

The hiddenness of God is a common theme in scripture and theology alike. God’s hiddenness is understood to be a part of both God’s power and God’s humility. Rather than overwhelming us with glory, the burning radiance that would leave us blinded, God hides from easy sight. And even when God becomes present in the radical act of incarnation, it is in a hidden form, not readily seen.

The birth of Jesus we celebrate this season, went largely unnoticed by the important people of his age. And even as he began to gain a following, Jesus remained a perplexing quandary. His identity was never a blazing truth, but only a gentle light like foxfire in the dark woods, easy to miss unless we go slowly. To see this light, we can’t rush by, following the smooth grooves worn by our busy lives. Instead, we have to move slowly and pay attention, stepping beyond the familiar paths of our normal routes. It is then that we will witness this humble God who has come among us, hidden in plain sight.

Many years ago, I attended a lecture by the artist Alfredo Jaar. Jaar is well known for grand installations, sometimes utilizing whole buildings or city squares. In 1999, he was invited to Montreal and given free rein to use the famous copula of the Marche Bonsecours building there. Jaar spent weeks walking around Montreal, uncertain of what he would create. Then he noticed a little door off an alley. As he investigated, he discovered that it was the door to a shelter for Montreal’s unhoused people. He came to find that Montreal had a large population of people without permanent shelter, but they were invisible, not seen in day-to-day life. So Jaar installed a large light installation in the Marche Bonsecours building and connected it to buttons at the entrances of the city’s shelters. As people entered the shelters at night, they were invited to press the button and let the city of Montreal know they were there. For a moment, a light would flash in the darkness, making visible what had so long been hidden.

Birders and artists are both people who pay attention and wander off the usual paths. Christians, too, can be added to that list. Our call is to look for the hidden God, to recognize the secret Christ who is there in front of us, but visible only when we attune our vision to his face. It is a practice that requires patience and slow going. “Wait,” is the common call of scripture. It is the common call of birders, too. Wait, listen, look, because if you don’t, you’ll miss the hidden beauty right in front of you. Sometimes the most beautiful and strikingly colorful birds, birds like a male Painted Bunting, can be hidden despite their radiance, and so it is with the glory of Christ. If we want to see Christ among us, then we need to move with a posture of careful attention; we need to spend a lot of time in quiet, straining for the small rustle that will tune us into the hidden one before us.

And like birders, we have to go to the margins, because God likes to show up in surprising places. Recently, a meme was posted on our local birding group. It showed the levels of excitement birders feel in different settings. A city park was pretty good. A National Wildlife Refuge, even better. A sewer treatment plant? That was getting really exciting. A city dump? It was off the charts. Birders don’t choose where we go. We just follow the interesting birds to where they show up. and the don’t always show up where we’d predict. In the same way, if we want to see the divine Word, the Logos and Light at the heart of the world, then we have to go to the edges where Christ pitches his tent.

From the beginning of the Gospels to their end, Christ is found among the poor and the outcast. He is never in palaces until he is condemned to death, and he seems ambivalent about temples, too. Instead, Jesus went to the wilderness, the homes of everyday people, and out to those who had been excluded from the society of the clean and put together.  He’s clear that if we want to find him, that is where we too should go.

Christ is still here, in the continued life of his resurrection, somewhere beneath the thin tent of flesh. We can find him, writes the theologian David Bentley Hart, “in the faces of those around us, and most especially in the faces of those who are poor, are oppressed, are strangers, are imprisoned, are suffering.” To see him there, we have to go looking, out into the world. His tent is not likely to be seen on a nice lot in a comfortable neighborhood. Better to go to the back alley or the woods protected by a flood plain. There we will find his face, beautiful and present, and we will wonder how we missed it all along.