Irresistible Invitation by Maxie Dunham - Day 8

Irresistible Invitation: Responding to the Extravagant Heart of God

Day 8: The Hint Half Guessed

No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known." John 1:18

On this day Dunnam begins with the great poet T.S. Eliot. Eliot you will remember won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. His most famous and dramatic poem is entitled "The Waste Land" in it Eliot writes a commentary on modern civilization, the triumph of materialism and a generation that has lost its soul.

Imagine the surprise of many when Eliot finds his soul and converts to Christianity. In 1927 Eliot was baptized and confirmed and spent the rest of his life as a high church Anglican, attending morning mass most every day. It is not that God overwhelmed him, Eliot claimed, never did God give clear and unmistakable signs of His presence, it was more "hints and guesses." As Eliot writes in the poem "The Dry Salvages"

Hints followed by guesses and the rest
Is prayer, observation, discipline, thought and action
The hint half guessed, the gift half opened is
Incarnation.

I rather imagine every preacher who ever lived wishes they had penned and preached those very words. The one most salient quality of our Christian faith, that most distinctive conviction, God has become flesh, the divine became human and came to live with us! And yet we experience it only as hints and guesses!

The Gospel of John speaks it most eloquently, "and the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth." (John 1:14) We speak our understanding of the Incarnation every Sunday in the words of the Nicene Creed:

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ
The only Son of God
Eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, light form light
True God from true God,
Begotten not made
Of one being with the Father
Through him all things were made
For us and for our salvation
He came down from heaven was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary...

Dunnam asks the question of all time, what does it all mean? Surely the Incarnation is more than just a mere hint of something. The very flesh and blood of our Lord and Savior is more than just a half opened gift! How do we understand this most remarkable truth of our Christian faith?

It is through the language of poetry that we access our understanding of the Incarnation. Listen to the words or John's Gospel.

"I am the good shepherd." (10:11)
"I am the light of the world." (9:5)
“I am the way the truth and the life." (14:6)
"I am the gate." (10:7)
"I am the bread of life." (6:35)

Or the words of Peter, "Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God's sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built in to a spiritual house..." (1 Peter 2:4-5) Or the words Luke uses to speak of the Messiah Christ, " By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace." (Luke 1:78-79)

Poetry, image, metaphor and parable, these are the ways in which we experience and speak of our understanding of the living God, the incarnate one. These are the tools we have with which to meditate on, to reflect upon, the hint half guessed. That's our experience of the Incarnation, not God's. God is presenting Gods' self to us as clearly as possible; it is we who do the guessing.

Guessing at the meaning of this child, of this man, of this life and this death. Guessing at the hints wrapped up in all of these ancient stories we revisit year by year!

"Incarnation, God coming to us in Jesus," says Dunnam, " it's a mystery, a 'hint half guessed,' by most of us, the gift half understood." But even if we can only half receive and only partially understand this gift is real and valid and powerful and it offers more meaning than any other promise, any other fulfillment in our lives.

The Heart of the Matter;

- Has God ever revealed himself to you through hints or guesses? How has your understanding been shaped by such revelation?
- What is your favorite verse of scripture? How does it speak to you with poetry and images?
- How does Jesus' Incarnation offer hope and meaning for your life?

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