This-Worldly God

Erik preached on the incarnation for our Christmas service. Here is the introduction from his homily:

Did you know you have 206 bones in your body, each of which has an outer density of about 2 grams per cubic centimeter and an inner density of about .5? That is because they need to be light and strong on a planet like earth, which has a mass of just under 6 septillion kilograms and a diameter of 12 million, 742 thousand meters, and thus a force of gravity of 9.8 meters/second. You have about 650 muscles, which allows you to move that 25lb skeleton and a hundred or so pounds of flesh on a planet where gravity is 9.8m/s. 30-50 pounds of that flesh is fat, and you have as many as 4 million sweat glands, all of which helps you to regulate your temperature on a planet that is 93 million miles from a red dwarf star, giving it an average temperature of about 60 degrees Fahrenheit with a typical range in either direction of about 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Your lungs have 300 million alveoli in them, little air sacks that allow oxygen to pass into the blood stream but filter out nitrogen, allowing you to breathe in an atmosphere that is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% argon. We could keep going, but you get the point: the human body is fitted for life on the planet earth. Adapted, you might say. Evolved, most likely. But for Christians, no matter what other verbs you use, the most important is “created.” The human body is created for life on earth.

On the first Christmas, 2,028 years ago—give or take—Jesus of Nazareth was born with one of these bodies. It was in its infant form: 64 extra bones, because they hadn’t had time to fuse together yet; muscles too weak to stand against earth’s gravity; too little fat to keep himself warm so far from the sun. But still, Jesus Christ arrived in the manger with one of these bodies created for life on earth. God arrived with a body created for life on earth.