The Danger of Being Materialists

(Orthodoxy ought to
Bless our modern plumbing:
Swift and St. Augustine
Lived in centuries
When a stench of sewage
Ever in the nostrils
Made a strong debating
Point for Manichees).

W.H. Auden, from "Geography of a House,"

The really remarkable thing about this poem is that it really is all about excrement.  Several stanzas, deeply reflecting on humanity and our waste.  Frankly, I'm more than a little glad he wrote it.  To defend the goodness of materiality is easy until we deal with the frank protests of pungent odors and unsightly matter.  After all, isn't this the scandal of the Incarnation?

Immanuel

The Bible offers so many lenses through which we view our brokenness and God's recreation in Jesus: we are guilty, God makes innocent; we are ashamed, God honors; we are enslaved, God frees.

Christmas invites us to put on yet another lens by which to marvel. Part of what it means to be human is to yearn for a connection with God. We feel lonely, isolated, despairing that we dwell in an empty cosmos or worse - an angry one whose Creator frowns on us.

Into this solitude a baby is announced: "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel (which means, God with us)".

In the incarnation God casts his lot with humanity. The "where are you?" of alienation at the fall becomes the "God with us" of solidarity in Immanuel's birth.