Mary Emily Briehl Duba
Morning Prayer
Valparaiso University
8 December 2010
A Reading from the Gospel of Luke, the Second Chapter.
In those days a degree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.
This was the first registration and was taken while Qui.rin’i.us was governor of Syria.
All went to their own towns to be registered.
Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David.
He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child.
While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child.
And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night.
Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified!
But the angel said to them,
“Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.
This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,
“Glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”
The Word of God for the people of God.

It was February of my senior year in college.
I was studying and working abroad in northern Thailand, but my heart was not present.
Back on campus, my dearest friendship was falling apart.
We had had a terrible falling out, just before I left, and now—in my absence—things were getting worse.
Each Monday, my day off, I would travel into the city to use the internet.
I would read what my friend had sent during the week—read it with anger and suspicion, ready to be hurt by whatever it said, and I would reply, sending the same sting straight back across the Pacific Ocean.
I said things in those emails,
I simply could not have said in person.
Had I been looking into her eyes, standing in her presence,
I could not have said such hurtful things.
But in the disembodiment of email, and in the physical distance that lay between us,
I felt protected.
I felt as though I were playing a character, that, somehow we were writing a novel together, or a screenplay, and that this hateful dialogue would not be later held against me.
That, somehow, it would not cause real harm.
It did.

Sin prays on disembodiment.
Sin says,
Why come face to face?
Why be that vulnerable to one another?
This September saw a landmark in the war in Afghanistan.
It marked the most significant use yet, of Drones.
Drones are unmanned planes, remotely controlled from military bases, like the one in Creech Nevada.
These drones collect live video footage and send it back to the control station, where the pilot—from the safety of his or her office— can drop missiles without ever being in physical danger.
It is disembodied warfare.
Why come face to face?
Why be that vulnerable to one another?
* * *
In response to the horrific violence of World War II,
Albert Camus wrote,
“Hope only remains in the most difficult task of all: to reconsider everything from the ground up,
so as to shape a living society inside a dying society.”
A secular French philosopher,
Camus nonetheless articulates for me the meaning of the incarnation:
Jesus is God reconsidering everything from the ground up.
Seeing our world of violence,
God reconsidered the whole creation.

Choosing not to act with wrath or terror,
God imagined a way of making peace with humankind.
God entered the dying world from the ground up as the new Adam—a being of the earth— the firstborn of a new creation.
God entered human life, to bring us the embodied presence of the reign of peace.
The Incarnation—God dwelling among us in Jesus—is God’s supreme and subversive act of peacemaking.
Into a world that looks to military might to secure the peace and save the people, into a region of the Middle East occupied by the Roman army,
God entered human life as a dependent, vulnerable infant.
This confounded the ancient expectation that God would send a warrior-king, and that Israel’s salvation would take the form of military victory over its enemies.
God subverted the occupying powers with the weakness of a baby.
In Jesus,
God says:
I come to you face to face
I desire to be vulnerable with you.
In response repentant and joyful response to this God,
Christians embody the ancient practice of peacemaking and nonviolence.
We do not do it well.
But don’t we hunger for it?
For communities where peacemaking is a way of life?

This Advent the Season in which we celebrate the Incarnate God,
I invite you to share a practice of peacemaking with me.
It is a simple practice, a prayer to say before leaving the house each morning, perhaps, or before responding to an email, or anytime sin whispers in your ear:
Why come face to face?
Why be vulnerable to one another?
The prayer is this:
God of Peace, disarm my heart.
Disarm my heart.
It is the prayer I prayed last winter, five years after I last spoke with my friend, when I received word that she had given birth to her first child.
It is the prayer I prayed, as I knit a sweater for that little one, that soft and vulnerable body, to welcome him into this world.
And this fall,
I received a thank you note in the mail.
It read:
“I love putting Peter in your sweater when we walk in the chilly evenings—I feel like I’m wrapping him up in a warm, safe hug.”
God the Incarnate, knows that Peace comes in bodies.
In bodies, brought face to face, in bodies vulnerable to one another.
And so, for the gift of the Incarnation, the gift of Peace made possible in the messiness of embodied life, we say:
Thanks be to God!