While we seek to escape our humanity, to abandon embodiment, to leave this world behind, the Creator *becomes* human—is made flesh and bones—and joins us as one of us in our broken world.
While we seek to escape our physical limitations, avoid suffering, and "shuffle off this mortal coil," God limits himself, takes on every human suffering, and embraces the world as it *is* in order to transfigure all things by incarnate wisdom and sacrifice.
While we seek to escape the alluring lights of Times Square and the dust and disease of Port-au-Prince, while we avoid the prisons, the hospice wards, and asylums, even as we despise our race, and with the demons accuse mankind of every villainy, God sides with humanity against all its accusers and despisers in Jesus Christ.
While we want to walk away from the confused and downtrodden, the different and the indifferent, even as we envy and hate the rich and (despite all of our talk) shun or keep at arms length the desperate needy, while we revolve those whose politics are different than ours, God walks right into the company of all women and men and loves them without qualification or distinction.
Trump supporters. Hillary voters. Rapists. ISIS fighters. Corporate Polluters. Abortionists. Bankers. Immigrants. Hunters. Black Lives Matter Activists. Antifa. The tiki torch crowd. Pick your enemy. God has reconciled all persons to himself.
While we love ideal human beings, whatever that ideal is for each of us, God loves real human beings as they are before any human loved him.
When you come to a patient, enduring peace with your embodied limitations, when you embrace humanity in all its sometimes perverse but always wondrous diversity, when you revere and love the creation, not longing for a disembodied existence (there is no resurrection without a body), or seeking the equivalent of some galaxy far, far away, you have begun to plant your feet firmly in the soil of redemption and reconciliation.
This is what it means to *begin* to speak the Gospel that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. If you want to speak the Gospel in America today, you could begin in no better way than this.
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A meditation on Bonhoeffer's Ethics.
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