The Unexpected Jesus: Week 1 // The Incarnation

The most sacred and holy moments of a life are often our most human moments

Hi friends,

Real talk? I have been a bit nervous to start this series with you all because I know how fraught it can be to talk about Jesus, especially in a personal way. It’s a complicated topic for many of the reasons I shared last week.

Reading through your comments on that introduction post and a few of the emails that came in afterwards, I was reminded of these beautiful lines from poet Drew Jackson’s poem Sōtēr:¹

...I swore 
to myself I wouldn’t
believe the hype 
again. But here I am.
Wanting to believe it. 
Wanting to hope.

Or perhaps we found ourselves more in the words of Anne Lamott: “It is just mortifying to be a Christian, except for the Jesus part.”² Regardless, it seems many of us are wanting to believe, wanting to hope, even wanting to be reminded of something or called towards someone. Many of us expressed that Jesus is the only thing keeping us around this Christianity thing most days and honestly? Same.

So I’m embarking with a bit of old-fashioned fear-and-trembling. I really hope I don’t get in the way of that hope or yearning for you. It’s sobering to be invited to your own experiences here. Take what works for you, chuck the rest, selah.

Housekeeping

Every week of the series, I’ll include a scripture reading at the beginning, followed by a long-form essay on an aspect or story of Jesus’ that took me by surprise and changed me.

These weekly essays are pretty personal to me: in the end, I’m writing just a few of the stories of Jesus that changed me, beckoned me, reset something broken in me. Your own stories will be different, I imagine, and even the way you or certain theologians receive/interpret these particular stories may differ. Today is more of a concept than a story but that warning stands.

I’ve long believed that sharing our stories matter, not because they are prescriptive (God save us from that evangelical impulse to make a rule out of our own experiences) but precisely because they are so very particular. Much like the Incarnation itself, our encounters with the Spirit are scandalously particular³. And this is just one of my particular scandals, one of my ‘and-then-everything-changed’ moments in my understanding of God.

I often like to use translations or paraphrases of the Bible that aren’t as familiar to some of us because it forces us to slow down and actually listen, instead of assuming we know what’s coming next in the text. I think that’s particularly helpful for anyone who logged too much time in Bible memorization bootcamp. So today, I’m using the First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament.⁴

There is an audio version on The Secret Field Notes Podcast, too. Here’s the link to listen to that and here’s an article explaining how to add this Secret Field Notes Podcast feed to your podcast app, too so that you have it in your preferred app as soon as it’s published.

All right, let’s get to it, shall we?