Advent & Men, Part 1: “From His Fullness We Have All Received”

December 3, 2023 – First Sunday of Advent

John 1:1-18

Pastor Mike

Part 1

 “No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is in the bosom of the Father, who has made him known” (1:18).

 Jesus was a Son. Jesus had a Father. Being human, Jesus could be seen. Being God, the Father could not be seen. But the Father loved Jesus so much, and Jesus was so full of his Father’s love, that by looking at Jesus, listening to Jesus, drawing close to Jesus, people could know the Father. The love between Father and Son was so transparent and perfect that it didn’t really make sense to think of Jesus only as a human. God was fully and perfectly present in him. When the Son, spoke, he used his Father’s words. When he healed, he drew upon his Father’s power. When he loved us and suffered for us, it was because the Father wanted to save us.

Every Christmas, we celebrate that God came to us in the Son. We don’t have to scratch our heads, wondering what the Father is like, or what he ultimately wants for us, or whether he, in the end, will be good and true to us. The Father’s eternal light and love that are right there in that little baby boy, born of Mary in Bethlehem’s manger.

Advent is a holy time when we get spiritually ready for Christmas. The word advent comes from the Latin adventus, which means “arrival.” During the four weeks of the Advent season, we ask both personally and collectively how, this year, we are being called to prepare for the arrival of Jesus in our own lives. What is it that  the Son want to make known about the Father?

Part 2

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us…” (1:14).

I’m using all this Father-and-Son language – the he’s and him’s –intentionally. It’s pitch-perfect Trinitarian lingo, and obviously, as our Gospel passage shows, it’s biblical. Even so, Father and Son have not been my go-to metaphors for speaking about God and Jesus and their relationship.

As we moved toward becoming a Reconciling Congregation earlier this year, a church that affirms the inherent worth and beauty of queer people, I tried to stay away from the overtly masculine language for God. Which was good and helpful for a time, because we were working to acknowledge that God contains and transcends all masculine and feminine aspects of life. God contains and creates the gender spectrum, and in God’s image all people have all been made. We wanted to affirm that. We did, and we do, affirm that.

And, as we continue to make space around the table for all of us, we do not get rid of our differences, we don’t all become the same, but our community becomes more complete through our diversity. I am a son, a brother, a husband, a father. I want to know what Jesus can show me about those identities; the world and the Church have tried to show me a lot about manhood, and most of it has left me feeling confused, damaged, and adrift.

This Advent, we are going to pay attention to the Son of God’s arrival in the lives of men, men from the Bible like Herod, Zechariah, Joseph, and Simeon. We are going to observe how those men were disrupted and changed by the incarnation. As we journey with them, we will ask the Spirit to make our own hearts ready to receive Jesus.

We’re not starting with any single character today but with the question each of the characters lived: What is the good news of Christmas for men, boys, and those who love them? Just because we’ll be speaking about these men, our conversation continues to unfold within our celebration of the fullness of sexuality, gender expression, and experiences as a congregation. So: what is the good news for us?

You may be surprised that we need to ask. After all, we sing it with such effortless passion every December 24th: “Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing.” But you have to understand that, for most people, inside that lyric a great hope and a great fear vie for supremacy.

The great hope is that, when the Father – when a man – uses his body to communicate his word, the result will be intimacy, love.

The great wound is that, so often, the body of the father, the bodies of men, have lost the word of love by the time they make contact with us – have distorted the word into a message of anger, disappointment, domination, or silence

***

Part 3

“He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him” (1:11).

The rules of the world have been written by men for the political and economic benefit of men, most of those men are wounded and left unsatisfied by who they have had to become in order to get admitted to the world of men. Most men live with some degree of personal anguish that is tied directly to their transition from boyhood to manhood. As they grow up, boys are taught that they must be tough – tough on themselves, tough on others. They are taught that being tough requires disconnecting from their emotional lives, limiting how dependent they are on others, and proving themselves worthy of respect through what they can achieve. To become tough, they must become less than whole.

Christian thinkers have long maintained that, because God is good, God can only create what is good. God doesn’t create sin. But because something created has already been changed in its journey from nothing to something, it can change in the opposite direction. Forgetting our original goodness, we can slip back toward nothingness.

When we say that we’re sinners, we’re not saying that we’re full of something called sin, that we’re all grotesque monsters underneath our skin. No, we’re saying instead that we are empty, that we are disappearing, that we are no longer whole. In a journey toward manhood, boys banish their tenderness to their depths, and then put up a sign: Do Not Enter. The writer bell hooks says this: “Somehow the test of manhood…was the willingness to accept this loss, to not speak it even in private grief.”[1] In other words, we become men when we silently accept lost love and connection.

We might wonder: Is it really that bad?

Yes. At an abstract level, the story is told by our national and state statistics of male domestic violence, homicide, suicide by firearm, drug overdose, incarceration, alcoholism, heart disease, and depression. But most of us don’t need the statistics. We’ve experienced the brokenness from within. If any of you have ever lived in a household where life was ordered around accommodating a man, you know it. If any of you have ever loved a man, and the only way to be close to him was to endure verbal or physical assault, you know it. If you have ever made the perilous journey through boyhood, you know it. I made that journey, and I became less than whole. Asked to grow up and exercise my authority so that I could take advantage of my male privileges, I could only draw from an emptiness. Like so many men, even as I tried to do better than what was done to me, I could only pass along the curse.

I feel like it’s important to pause here and caution us against conjuring a caricature of a “dominating man” in our heads. Men can dominate through the “hot” violence of teasing, sarcasm, rage, or violence. But we can also dominate through the “cold” violence of emotional withdrawal, silence, or outright absence.

The novelist Willa Cather has a book called The Professor’s House, in which the main character is a gentle, cultivated man named Professor St. Peter. The Professor has a tiny attic study on top of his house to which he has retreated for years in order to write an eight-volume masterwork of American history. He also has a wife and two daughters, but once he is seated at his desk up in his attic, he does everything in his power to not be distracted by them. As Cather writes, “On that perilous journey down through the human house he might lose his mood, his enthusiasm, even his temper.”[2]

I had to chuckle when I read that. Boy, that’s me. I’ll stay up here, thank you very much.  I’m leaving a legacy, doing my “real” work – and, hey, it’s not just for me, it’s the work I do as  a provider. I can’t get entangled in the day-to-day stuff right now. It’d make me impatient and frustrated. Let me be a little stingy, it’s better for us all.

Sometimes, as men, we pull back from our families (or our emotional lives or our communities) simply because they are taxing – I’m trying hard not to say annoying – in what they demand of us. We live in a society that doesn’t bat an eye at that cold version of masculine domination, the privilege of pulling away. But we will never be whole so long as we hold ourselves apart, so long as we view the “human house” as a threat.

To all of us, Jesus is a brother in this hell. He came to the world he loved, and most of the people he encountered chose not to receive him. In Christ, a little child is rejected. In that little child, we see our stories and our pain already being gently held in the love and salvation of God. For though his earthly reception was fraught with struggle, Jesus was never rejected by his Father in Heaven. That unobstructed Father-love kept him whole, and he wants to give his wholeness to all of us who trust in him.

Jesus wants to restore male love to our hearts and to our world.

Part 4

“But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (1:12-13).

There is a way to be a boy, to be a man, that emerges out of fullness. It’s not a way that we create or achieve or earn. It is a way that we can only receive. Only by believing in the one true Son of God can any of us receive the power to become a child again – a child of God.

Our true power as men is to become children of the Father. We aren’t given the power to dominate. We aren’t given the power to force accommodation. We aren’t given the power even to be fathers, but to be children, who through our love of God, make the love of the Heavenly Father known. Ours is the authority to return, reclaim, remember, reconnect, and show the world what God’s love looks and sounds and feels like.

The poet John O’Donahue once wrote: “We have fallen out of belonging.” We think, as men, that it is wrong to stumble and fall; we think this while hiding from ourselves and from others the truth that we have already fallen.

The question before us is not whether we will fall, but in what direction. Just yesterday after reading a pile of books before naptime, Loren leaned back on me and said, “I can nap on your body.” We will either continue to fall into oblivion, or we will so deeply rest in Jesus that we will become children again, children who, in Christ, fall back onto the Father’s chest.

***

Part 5

“From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (1:16).

Let us begin today, for today is the day of salvation.

Let us begin here, at this Table where the Son has promised to meet us.

Let us begin together, men, boys, and all who love us.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

[1] bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 15.

[2] Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (London: Virago Press, 1981), 16.