Text:  Hebrews 10:5-10                                                                                                     W Christmas Day

"A Body You Prepared for Me"

In the name of our Newborn King, dear friends in Christ:  on this holy morning we rejoice with the angels in both the miracle and the mystery of what we call the incarnation; that is when God the Son who, up until the moment of his conception in a virgin’s womb had been purely an infinite spiritual being, entered his Creation and became flesh – a man, in a real, physical, human body, made of the same material as yours or mine.  It’s an astonishing step for God to make:  he who transcends Creation and is in no way subject to the laws of motion, time, and space that govern reality as we know it enters the physical order and makes himself part of it.  If we were looking for an analogy to help us understand the concept, it would be like one of us painting a landscape scene with some people walking around in it, and then painting yourself into the picture, and then, somehow, entering the painting yourself so that you actually became the portrait you made of yourself. Multiply the problems you’d run into making that leap several billion fold, and you’ll begin to approach the height of the hurdles we’d have to cross to fully comprehend the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

 Fortunately for us, we do not have to understand it to believe it.  We know that with God all things are possible, and that his Word is sure.  So, because Scripture reveals this truth to us, we can say with utmost confidence that the little infant who grew in Mary’s womb, and who was laid on the hay in a manger is the infinite, almighty Creator and Lord of all.  And by God’s grace, the reason we’re here this morning is that we do believe this.  What not might be so readily apparent is why this is such an important part of our faith.

In the history of mankind’s attempt to understand God and matters of faith there has always been a tendency to want to over-spiritualize things; that is, to stress the supremacy of the ideal, intangible, spiritual realm over and against – or perhaps even to the exclusion of – the created physical realm. The basic concept is that the spiritual is good; the physical is by its very nature bad or inferior.  God operates up here in the good and spiritual; we operate down here in the bad and physical.  This notion has been around for a long time and is still very popular today.  It shows up in everything from most Eastern religions, to New Age kind of stuff, to so-called Christian Science, and it even makes inroads into our own thinking from time to time.  Usually, those who think in these terms believe that true nature of man is spiritual, and that the path to God and salvation lies in casting off or denying this bad physical order that were trapped in, and seeking to find entry into the entirely spiritual realm, or the light, or sphere or pure thought, or whatever it is they call it.

But no, against all such notions, we understand that God created everything, both the spiritual and the physical.  And he created everything good.  He created the universe the way it is for us to live in soul and body – that’s what we are.  And he prepared these bodies we have for us to live in his creation … to see, feel, taste, smell, touch, hear, and experience the full range of sensations he designed the universe to provide us.  It’s not that the physical is inherently bad, or that we have to jettison it to seek God.  Exactly the opposite is true.  God comes to seek us through the physical.  That’s part of why the incarnation of Christ is so important because we see God reaching down and entering into creation precisely to restore it to the way he designed it to be.

And again, he designed it perfectly and with great care.  Recall back in Genesis and the six days of creation, how first he called things into existence, and then, by the power of his Word he ordered all things to be exactly as he wanted them.  Then he calls forth the plants, birds, and animals, setting the stage, furnishing the house as it were, for the capstone of his creation: human beings made in his own image. And here, when everything else is in place, he stoops down to prepare a body.  Where all other things are simply spoken into existence, the Lord uses the “hands on” treatment for the body of man.  He touches the soil.  He lovingly and very personally shapes it, and only when it is prepared the way he wants it does he add from his own breath the spiritual element that makes man a living being.  So the man straddles both spheres of reality – he’s designed to be a synthesis of the two, and in him the two, the physical and the spiritual belong together.  And we know that the great care that the Lord went through in preparing that body for the first man also went into preparing the body you have now.  Scripture tells us that the Lord knows us personally and knits these bodies together for us in the womb and gives to each an eternal soul. Small wonder the Scripture says that we are all fearfully and wonderfully made.

             Of course we understand that we no longer enjoy the perfection of the original creation. When our first parents chose to rebel against God, separating themselves from him spiritually – and so becoming spiritually dead, one of the penalties was that they would have to die physically as well.  And just as spiritual death is the unnatural separation of the human soul from life and union with God, physical death is the unnatural separation of the body and soul – the pulling apart of two things that were designed to be together.

To fix creation, to restore us to the way things are supposed to be, God had to overcome and mend both of these unnatural separations.  He had to reunite himself spiritually with rebellious man, and he had to unite man’s condemned-to-be-divided body and soul. And to do it, first he had to deal with the rebellion that separated them all in the first place – and that’s what the incarnation is all about.  God enters our existence of human body and soul to suffer the consequences of our sin, to pay the price of our redemption, and so to bring us back to him – and really, to bring us back to ourselves.

So, again, already in Genesis he promises our first parents a Savior – and not just any Savior, but specifically one who will be the Seed of the woman—that is, someone who is born with a human body made of real flesh and blood. And then all throughout the unfolding plan of salvation in the Old Testament, we see the promise being extended from generation to generation quite literally through human bodies that God prepared for especially for that purpose.  Abraham is the classic example:  he and his wife Sarah couldn’t have children, yet God gives the promise to him and his descendants.  When the time comes that Abraham gives up entirely on the idea of having a child of his own, he decides that God must want him to adopt someone – to get a child, as it were, by some legal technicality.  The Lord intervenes and stops him.  “No Abraham, I will give you descendants through your own body.”  And in his good time, the Lord did just that; miraculously rejuvenating both Abraham and Sarah’s bodies so that they could have a child that would continue the line that descended through Isaac, Jacob, Judah, down to David and the line of the kings, all the way down to Joseph and Mary who, as we heard, were of the house and line of David.  The point is this:  when God sent his Son into the world, he didn’t suddenly whip up a body out of thin air and send him floating down from heaven; no, he had been preparing a genuine, earthly, part-of-this-fallen-creation body for him in one unbroken line going back to the first body he made.

            And this body, as we heard in the Epistle lesson, was prepared for one purpose:  to do God’s will.  The Son of God was sent into our flesh to do what none of us could do since the fall: perfectly live the life of love according to the command and original design of God.  That’s what we heard in the second reading this morning, “When Christ came into the world, he said, ‘You didn’t really want sacrifices, but you prepared a body for me.  Well, here I am.  I’ve come to do your will.’”  It’s vital that we understand this.  The Old Testament is full of animal sacrifices.  It was a big part of the way people worshipped – as indeed God had told them to; but God never wanted the sacrifices.  What he wanted was for his people to keep his commands.  The sacrifices were designed to be the remedy when they didn’t keep his commands.  The law demanded death for anyone who broke the it.  God, in his mercy, allowed the people to substitute animals in their place.  He gave the people the sacrifices as a means of escape and at the same time to impress upon them what the penalty of their sin demanded.  He wanted them to see the terrible cost of their disobedience.

And all these centuries of destructive, ugly, bloody, slaughter were pointing ahead to what his Son would do when he came into the world.  After living the life of perfect obedience, the body he prepared was ready to be the perfect sacrifice – the only one that really could atone for the sins of people precisely because it was the only body that was truly human.  And at the same time, this body could atone for the sins of all people, because it was also the body of the infinite, almighty God.  This body was prepared to be the perfect sacrifice for our sin once and for all.

And that’s what Jesus told his disciples on the night that he was betrayed: “Take this and eat it.  This is my body given for you.”  God had prepared the body of Christ as a sacrifice of atonement – and then he provided a means to communicate his body to people to make them partakers – to ensure them that they are included under the protection – of his sacrifice.  In a short time we will again be given this body prepared for us.  And again, it’s not necessary that we understand how he does it; all that’s necessary is that we believe him when he tells us it is so. By eating his body given under the bread, he ensures us in a way we can grasp both spiritually and physically that his sacrifice atones for our sins.  We even see this in the Christmas story:  when the Good Shepherd who will lay down his life for the sheep is born in Bethlehem (which means, “the house of bread”), his little body is laid, of all places, in a feed trough for sheep. 

            There you see the body God prepared for you, that he crucified for you, and that he will offer to you from this altar.  And by communing here with that body, you will be united with God and all of his people in the Holy Christian Church – which Scripture also just happens to call, “the body of Christ”.  This Holy Christian Church is the body God prepared for you to bring you to the faith, to nurture and to keep you in it your whole life, and through which he equips you to be the hands of Christ that act, the feet of Christ that go, and the mouth of Christ that speaks in the world – doing what the body of Christ came to do:  the will of God.  And living in this holy faith in the body of Christ until the end keeps you in his promise so that just as his body was raised from the dead, the physical body God prepared for you will also be raised.  Like his, it will be raised glorious, immortal, and imperishable.

            So, what I’m driving at on this morning that we celebrate the physical incarnation of our Lord, is that every major article of the Christian faith can be summed up with this one sentence: A body you prepared for me. In it we find a summary of Creation, the fall, the promise of the Savior, the history of God’s people and their way of worship, the birth of Christ, sacrifice of Christ, his resurrection, the Church, the Sacraments, our deaths, our resurrections … they are all about the bodies God has prepared for us.

            And he’s prepared these bodies to give us life, body and soul together united with him, in time and eternity.  That’s what “the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay” is all about.  And that’s what we celebrate this morning – as indeed we should, giving all praise, glory, and thanks to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!