So God becomes a foreigner, a stranger and sojourner, by coming in the flesh; but in so doing, he receives Abraham’s promise of a home for his seed forever, even though he then (like Jacob, Joseph, and David before him) leaves the land – the whole earth – that is his inheritance, until the appointed time.
The upshot is that when God becomes Man, He makes earth His home in a profound way, so that being in heaven with the Father is no longer being truly, fully, and finally At Home. How remarkable is that? Jesus Christ himself is no longer wholly native to heaven: the only true homecoming for him is for heaven – the dwelling place of God – to be with man forever.
Christ, during all the in-between, already-and-not-yet time between redemption accomplished and redemption consummated, shares our longing for the city with foundations, the kingdom that cannot be shaken, that will be established in the new heavens and earth.
There’s comfort in that for those of us who feel homeless: Christ has made our earth his home, which means wherever we are, we are home – not just in the sense that we belong where we are, but that we are Home, Christ’s Home, building and glorifying a dwelling place for the age to come, whether we live out our years in the same place we were born or an ocean away. We die and go into the far country, but our hope is that we will return with a Kingdom.
Unless you have a classical choir background (or are or have ever been a Lutheran), there’s a good chance you’ve missed out on one of the lovelier Christmas songs in Western hymnody.
Like dozens of other German chorales, this one owes its title and most popular translation to Catherine Winkworth, whose three collections of German hymn translations in the middle of the 19th century brought a treasury of Christian verse to the English-speaking world (“Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates,” “Now Thank We All Our God,” and “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” are among them). It’s Winkworth’s translation of Paul Gerhardt‘s “Fröhlich soll mein Herze springen“: “All My Heart This Night Rejoices.” (For my Presbyterian friends, it’s #217 in the Trinity Hymnal.)
In the first place, the tune to which it’s usually sung in English (written for another Gerhardt hymn, “Warum sollt’ ich mich denn grämen?”) is a beauty, stately and sweet at once, in the best German tradition. But in Winkworth’s fine translation, Gerhardt’s personal and pastoral engagement with the miracle of the Incarnation takes center stage.
The first verse strikes a note of personal joy in response to the Christmas proclamation; in the stanzas that follow, the meaning of “Christ is born” is unpacked in striking ways:
Forth today the Conqu’ror goeth,
Who the foe, sin and woe, death and hell, o’erthroweth.
God is man, man to deliver;
His dear Son now is one with our blood forever.
No “little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes,” this – Christ’s incarnation is an Advent, the arrival of the rightful king to execute vengeance on the enemies of his people. It is the invasion of a Conqueror (the German refers to him as “God’s Hero”). “God is man, man to deliver”: is there a better summary of Christmas? And the remarkable truth of Christ’s ascension and session are woven in as well. Christ remains “one with our blood forever,” so that on the highest throne sits a man, one of our own.
Christ’s victory and solidarity with us have massive implications for our relationship with God:
Shall we still dread God’s displeasure,
Who, to save, freely gave his most cherished Treasure?
To redeem us, he hath given
His own Son from the throne of his might in heaven.
Here is one place where it’s hard for the translation to convey the starkness of the German original. That first line reads more literally in German, “Shall God now be able to hate us?”
It seems rhetorical, but perhaps Gerhardt really did think in such terms. He was an orphan by age 15, lived through the Thirty Years’ War (during which his hometown was completely destroyed), and endured the loss of four of his five children as well as his wife. What could all of this be but a sign of God’s displeasure, opposition, even hatred? He found the answer in the Gospels’ testimony to the Incarnation: how can God hate us, if He has given what He loves beyond anything else, sent His own Son out from His presence to conquer sin and death?
The one verse that seems to verge on saccharine testifies to this:
Hark! a voice from yonder manger,
Soft and sweet, doth entreat: “Flee from woe and danger.
“Brethren, from all ills that grieve you,
You are freed; all you need I will surely give you.”
Yet the saying is harder than it sounds at first. The voice from the manger is the testimony of the Incarnation itself; it means that with us, as one of us, is the One for whom, to whom, we are set free from all our ills, all that grieves us. It sounds lovely, but it carries with it a demand. “Let go,” says Christ, “of your griefs; all you need I will give you, and that means you may not need your parents, or your hometown, or your wife or your children or your health. You must believe that the loss of these things does not compare to the grief of being a sinner under God’s curse; you must entrust all your griefs to me, in the hope that I will set them right.”
The rest of the hymn is a call to do just that, to entrust all grief to the one who came to bear our sorrows. I can’t do justice to all its riches here, but I commend it to your meditation this Advent season. Rejoicing in Christmas isn’t about the sweet parts of the season; it is about seeing God’s Self-commitment to doing what it takes to undo every horror of a dark world, to render us men and women “meet for glory.”
We’ve somehow stumbled most of the way through 2013 and into Advent. The Christmas tree is up and lit; we’re thinking about all the gift shopping we haven’t done and holiday plans we haven’t made, and it’s weird to think of this coming Christmas as likely the last we’ll spend in the U.S. for some years. Of course, it’ll more certainly be a big first too, our first Christmas with a little boy to open up (and chew on) his presents on the big day.
That first-and-last-at-the-same-time strangeness sums up a lot of what it is to be a missionary, at least before you move to the field.
What are the most basic questions you ask to get to know somebody? The obvious: Where are you from? What do you do? Well – we live between Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. With my mom. But we’ve put over 7,000 miles on our car in the last three months, traveling to 12 states, attending worship services at 12 different churches. In that time, two and a half weeks in a row under the same roof is our record. Where do we live? And what do we do? Well, we’re missionaries to Berlin, but we haven’t gotten there yet, which means our job is telling people what we’re going to do in the hope that they’ll want to help us do it. What we do is answer the question what do you do?
You’d think that culture shock is something that happens when you move to another country, or even when you move back from one. But we became foreigners the second we were approved as missionaries (again, in both of our cases). We don’t do a job that “contributes to society” (at least not to America’s); we don’t really live anywhere we stay. We live on the hospitality of those who belong in the places where we stay.
Think of these things when you meditate on Advent and Christmas this year. What the Bible teaches amounts to this: that God Himself, infinitely intimately acquainted with every corner of creation, became a foreigner. He entered a household and a nation and a species by nature estranged from Him. The great words of Mary, the words that perhaps define faith as beautifully as the Bible does it – “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word” – are in context an invitation, an extension of hospitality.
I think we are learning something of what it is to look for people to receive you. Lord willing, what we learn in this way will make us people who receive, and whose hospitality testifies to our certainty that the God Who became a foreigner loves foreigners.
Welcome to our new site! This will be a space for us to share our reflections and experiences as we prepare to return to Berlin long-term. We’re looking forward to sharing the journey with you!
The Grabers to Germany 