Incarnation, the way of Jesus

In my last post, I talked about God’s words through Jeremiah, encouraging the exiled Israelites to seek the welfare of their cities. The challenge with ‘seeking the welfare of our cities’ is that often, the places we live in are big.

In this post, I’ll explore the ideas of ‘incarnation’ and ‘parish’, which help us determine specifically whose welfare we should seek.

I live in Nelson, so God is calling me to seek the welfare of Nelson. But there are 53,000 people that live here.  That’s a lot of people with a lot of diverse needs. That’s overwhelming. Where do I start?

A helpful way to help us clarify this is the idea of the parish. This is a term Anglican folks are familiar with. The Oxford Dictionary defines a parish as “a small administrative district typically having its own church and a priest or pastor.” A parish has boundaries; it has limits. In the old days, a minister would attempt to limit his (yes, back then, it was exclusively ‘his’) focus to the people and places within his parish. 

It’s not possible to get to know all the people in your city. It’s not possible to share your faith with all the people in your city. But it is possible to get to know the people in your own neighbourhood, in your own street. Maybe those are the people God is calling us to share life with. Thinking like this helps save us from being overwhelmed and helps focus us on the people that we are literally surrounded by.

The message translation of John 1:14 says,
“The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood.”

If we want to follow the example of Jesus in our own neighbourhoods, there is a lot we can learn from that sentence. When Jesus leaves heaven and comes to earth, he goes from being above us to being among us. Alan Briggs, in his book ‘Staying is the New Going’, notes that John’s point here is that Jesus became ‘a local’. He writes:

“Incarnational ministry moves us from above our places (where we have no meaningful connection) to among the people, within the community. Living incarnationally requires us not just to physically stay, but to remain patiently, locally, and personally engaged in the spaces and lives around us.”

Wow.

Incarnation looks very different to mobility. Our mobility leads us to head across town to find the best coffee, the best schools, our favourite parks, and the churches that suit us best. But all that mobility means so often, we do not engage with our local people and places. It also often means we don’t know or care about the things our neighbours care about.

Incarnation is a real challenge to the way we usually do things.

Do you find the ideas of ‘parish’ and ‘incarnation’ helpful?

Do you find them challenging?