The Incarnation is not a Costume

• Preacher: Tim Jenkins

• Passage: Philippians 2:1-11

I am, fun fact, the only member of the preaching staff that CAN preach in costume. Everyone else has to dress like a priest or a deacon every Sunday; they don’t get a choice. So, this morning, they are wearing albs and I am Spider-Man.

This is, maybe, not how you typically picture Spider-man, so I’ll give a quick explanation of the outfit. This summer, my kids saw for the very first time the 2018 Marvel superhero film Into the Spiderverse. They LOVED it, and that moment solidified for my boys that they would be Spider-Man for Halloween. The movie is about how there are all of these different Spider-Men… Spider-Mans… Spiders-Man?... anyway, each universe has its own unique Spider-Man. My whole family is Spider-Man this year, and when they asked me which Spider-Man I was going to be, I told them Peter B. Parker. Because, this is, of course, the Spider-Man that goes through some hard times and puts on a bunch of weight and is introduced in the movie as chubby Spider-Man in sweatpants. I felt like that was a Spider-Man I could really pull off.

This is my first time preaching in costume, I will admit, though, of course, not my first time being in costume on Halloween. I had my mom go dig through photos to find some pictures I could show you of costumes throughout the years.

There’s little Tim as Superman. You can see I was a Ninja Turtle one year. There’s me with Waldo as something like the Cat in the Hat. And then, believe it or not, that’s me as a werewolf. There are so many others, which we didn’t find in time, but this is a pretty good sample set.

So, what does any of this have to do with the Bible? We’ll, let’s turn our attention to our epistle reading today and see if we can find out.

Paul is writing to the church in Philippi. Philippi was located in northern Greece. It’s ruins now, but back then it was a major city. It had a Christian community, possibly started by Paul himself, and it seems like there was discord in the community there. This is why Paul is exhorting them to unity in the beginning of chapter 2 here.

Now, what I want us to focus on this morning is the hymn that Paul has included here, verses 5 through 11, if you look in your bulletin.

5	Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

6		who, though he was in the form of God,
			did not regard equality with God
			as something to be exploited,
7		but emptied himself,
			taking the form of a slave,
			being born in human likeness.
		And being found in human form,
8			he humbled himself
			and became obedient to the point of death—
			even death on a cross.
9		Therefore God also highly exalted him
			and gave him the name
			that is above every name,
10		so that at the name of Jesus
			every knee should bend,
			in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11		and every tongue should confess
			that Jesus Christ is Lord,
			to the glory of God the Father.

Paul’s hymn here is like a rehearsal of the Christ story. Verse 6 talks about his pre-existence, his time before being on earth, verses 7 and 8 talk about his existence, his being here on earth, and verses 9 through 11 talk about his post-existence, his glorification by God the Father after he was here on earth. This deals with an important theological idea, what we call the incarnation.

The incarnation is the idea that God himself came to earth. The word comes from Latin: caro means “flesh;” you add the prefix in- and you get incarno. If you were reading your Latin translation of the Bible, called the Vulgate, and got to John 1:14, you would read: Et Verbum caro factum est: “And the Word became flesh.”

God was made man.

Now, let’s pause for a second, and talk about the thing our children’s sermon pointed out this morning. Andrew is right, in the Old Testament you see burnt sacrifices being offered to God. Burnt sacrifices were not unique to the Hebrews, on the contrary, it was a pretty typical form of worship in the ancient world. What is unique about about the Hebrew sacrificial system is the why of their doing it.

The Hebrews worshiped a just and holy God. And, being holy and just, God cannot be with sin and sin required punishment. The sacrificial system of the Old Testament was a mercy from God, because the death of the sacrifice reminded of the cost of sin and the blood cleansed away those sins. Of course, the problem is that no one stops sinning, so the need to offer a sacrifice is recurring.

The incarnation is a step toward fixing that problem.

One more stop, and then we’ll go back to our text. I want to talk about costumes again.

This is a play scarf. We have a bunch of these at our house. They are toys for the kids. They’re great toys, because they can become anything your imagination allows. The green scarf can become a patch of grass, the blue scarf a pool of water. This red one has been a campfire before. But I tell you what, more than anything else, these things become capes.

My kids love to pretend to be superheroes. Each of my kids, at some point while they were little, put on a cape, and I picked them up and flew them around the room while singing the Superman theme song. Many times. Also, each of my children had a heart-breaking moment while they were little where they became frustrated and disappointed when they put on a cape and tried to fly by themselves, only to discover that a costume doesn’t make you a real superhero. I remember Gracie saying to me most recently, “It’s not working.”

Let me put it another way. One of the fun things about being a kid on Halloween is, of course, number 1 with a bullet, you are just inundated with candy. To an obscene degree. But, another fun part, especially when you are itty-bitty, is that you can put on a costume of whatever you want, and everyone for a day will pretend like you’re really that thing. Ring the doorbell, “Oh my goodness, Spider-Man is here,” collect your candy. Good times. We’ve all collectively decided for the day to make imagination reality.

But we’re just pretending. I’m not really Spider-Man. Not even chubby sweatpants Spider-Man. It’s just a costume. And a costume is a lie.

Friends, the incarnation is not a costume.

Jesus is not God with a human suit on. For Jesus’ death to save all of humanity, God must become human, not just in form but in reality. The all-powerful, all-knowing, infinite and holy God of the universe comes in the flesh, making himself subject to all the powers of this world, religious leaders and Roman governors included, in order to die on a cross for all. And in doing so, there becomes no place in the universe, no created being, beyond the reach of the redeeming act of the servant Christ.

The incarnation is the moment where creation experiences the full extent of Christ’s love, and we, his bride, learn that his love is not just the flowery language of love letters but is real in truth.

Friends, the incarnation is not a costume.

I find myself thinking about this line from the hymn When I Survey the Wondrous Cross. Isaac Watts writes in the last verse, it’s the very end of the song, “love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”

Let us respond in kind with our soul, our life, our all.

Amen.