Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
Original Manuscript:
In the current volume of Iron Man, Tony Stark is up against a potential cosmic threat. With the stakes so high, Stark gathers a ragtag group of heroes only a few people have heard of and launches off into space where he becomes separated from the team and marooned on an isolated planet.
While there, he is visited by the Living Tribunal, a three-headed cosmic entity in Marvel often thought to represent at least some aspect of God. The Living Tribunal says “The Universe is on the verge of catastrophic imbalance. Only you can restore this balance.” The Tribunal then tells Stark he must go with him to the location he and his team had been trying to get to in the first place.
Tony takes this as a sign that his friends can’t stop the bad guy and he must do it alone. The Living Tribunal responds, “You gravely misunderstand my words, but you still must leave now.”
The sad thing is that most of us end up in Tony’s shoes at one point or another in our lives and gravely misunderstand what God has tried to tell us. In many ways, we have done that with our celebration of the Birth of God into this world. At best, we turn this into a birthday celebration for little baby Jesus. At worst, we’ve let the rest of the world steal this Feast Day from us until it looks like something else entirely which has little to do with God.
For this reason, our Gospel today is so important because it tells us what this day is truly about.
“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”
Jesus is more than just a baby boy born into this world. Jesus is much more than just the Messiah. Jesus is even more than just the Son of God.
Jesus is the Word, the Word of God, which is God Himself, as the Gospel according to John reminds us at the very beginning.
God became incarnate. He literally became flesh to be with us as one of us. God even died for us to save us all.
Christmas isn’t about gifts. It isn’t even about throwing a birthday part for our Lord. Incarnation is what the Nativity is all about. It’s about the depths of God’s love that He was willing to join us here in the mud and the filth, the hunger and the thirst, the disease and famine.
Yet even in that time, as the Gospel according to John tells us, we did not know Him. We yelled at Him. We spat on Him. We put Him to death. All because we could not keep our eyes and ears open. All because we wouldn’t take the time to prepare.
It’s time for us to stop gravely misunderstanding God and listen. The message of love we receive from the Incarnation doesn’t just cut to the heart of the Season of Nativity, it covers our whole Faith as well. If we can take the moment to see what Jesus did for us, and if we can try to show and share that love, then maybe we can begin to understand and hopefully help others listen as well.