I have a confession to make this morning.

I’ve had a secret, ulterior motive all through the advent season. And today, it all comes out in the open.

We’ve been looking at incarnation, the way that God has always been close to us, the way Christmas is the ultimate example of God coming near and becoming like us…because God loves us.

It’s a life changing truth. Jesus’ birth shows us that God isn’t far away. It shows us how much, to what degree, God loves us. The incarnation shows us so much about God.

But now we get closer to the secret motive: what does incarnation mean for us and how we live?

I think it means everything.

God’s solution to the separation we’ve made between ourselves and God is incarnation. If God’s love leads to incarnation…if Christmas is the celebration of Jesus, coming weak and frail into our world with love and on a mission…well, I think that has a lot to say about how we are to live if we follow Jesus.

Two weeks ago, we looked at the prayer Jesus prayed the night before he was crucified. He prayed for his disciples to stay IN the world, and also to follow his example. Jesus prayed for us to love others, and help others come into perfect unity, too.

He prayed for us to join his mission. He prayed for us to join what he is doing in the world, to put hands and feet to Jesus in the world we live in. He prayed for us to incarnate God’s love and God’s message and God’s mission into our lives and the lives of people around us.

People who follow Jesus are to live incarnationally.

We don’t love people from far away, but we live in the same world they do. We build bridges and make connections with others, and we do it in a risky, frail, wholehearted way, just like Jesus entering our world as a peasant baby with a death sentence from King Herod. It’s a crazy way to go about it.

And frankly, I just think this is cool!

We’ve missed it too often as a church. We’ve thought following Jesus is about being safe, or being separate. We’ve thought following Jesus is just about getting ourselves and a few others like us into heaven someday. We’ve sometimes thought it’s about building a nice institution where we can be with nice people once a week.

And while all of that has some benefit, it misses the mark. It misses being like Jesus. It misses significance and radical meaning for our lives.

It’s made many think the message of Jesus Christ is boring, or simple, or irrelevant, or simply a little part we can fit into our lives.

But it’s so much more than that!

Today, we get to the end of this series on incarnation, and we realize that incarnation isn’t just a wonderful word that describes God, it’s a powerful word to describe how we are to live.

We’re called to a risky way of life! An incarnational way of life! A life that is on God’s mission, living his love, crossing boundaries and joining other people’s worlds.

Paul calls us ambassadors when he describes the same idea. But it really is the same idea! Jesus came to make things right between us and God, to reconcile us to God. Then, he gave us the same task-to bring that message of reconciliation with others!

We are ambassadors of Christ. Let me read again what Jo read for us earlier. [READ 2 Cor. 5: 16-21]

Help me out.

If we play word association with ambassador, what comes to mind? [ASK]

Who gets to be an ambassador of the United States? How does that work? [ASK]

It seems ambassadors are in one of two major camps: the kind that get their post as some kind of perk, a reward for political contributions or being friends of the president, and the kind that work their way through the foreign service department and actually have the training and experience to do the job well.

Dori Meinert, a reporter writing in 2001 about the new ambassador to Yemen, said this:

“While political appointees typically get glamorous embassy assignments in places like London and Paris, career foreign service officers … are usually sent to the world's most sensitive and troubled spots.” 

The places in the world that demand the best work from an ambassador need an ambassador who knows how to do the job.

What skills do you think a good ambassador needs? [ASK]

(represent own country well, build bridges, good relationships, learn culture of other country, etc.)

Ambassadors can never forget their mission or their message.

They are in a particular country to represent the United States, and communicate the United States’ wishes and policies. Even when uncomfortable, they must never change the message.

They must always know the culture and language and customs of the country they are in, however; otherwise, they won’t be able to communicate. There are two dangers, on opposite sides: one, to become too much like the host country, so that they neglect their mission. Or two, to be so much an American that they can’t be understood or heard in that culture.

The word Paul uses for ambassador had similar meaning in the world of the Roman Empire that he lived in.

It was the person who had authority of the emperor or the senate, and was the link between a local province and Rome.

When Paul calls himself an ambassador of Christ, he’s saying he’s Christ’s representative, the link between other people and Jesus.

We’re called to this same task, to be ambassadors, to be the link between others and Jesus.

Who are we ambassadors to?

Some think of it this way: we are representatives of heaven, here on earth, sent by Jesus to be his ambassador and bring his message.

I think that has some truth to it. It helps us remember that we really do belong to God, and need to make decisions in a way that recognizes not everything lasts forever. Some things that seem really important on earth won’t last forever, and aren’t the things that are important to God. Being heaven’s ambassadors on earth is a helpful picture.

I’ve been really drawn, however, to the image of how we are ambassadors to other cultures. We’re part of Christ’s church on earth, and there are many, many people who haven’t chosen to follow Jesus with their lives.

The world is becoming more and more multi-cultural. For one thing, with communication and travel what it is today, we are much more aware of many different parts of the world, and how differently they live and speak and act. We need people who can cross those cultural differences as ambassadors for Christ.

And even here in the United States, here in Oregon, even here in Newberg, the people who don’t follow Jesus are not all the same. There are many different “cultures” of people outside the church, not just one type.

There are people who’ve never been in a church or part of a family that knows anything about the story of Jesus. There are people who know it all, and actively reject it. There are rich, poor, agnostic, atheistic, Buddhist, materialistic “mini-cultures” all around us, and each will need an ambassador.

Each will need someone whose mission and message are from Jesus, but who understand and know and respect the cultural values and language of each of these groups.

How exciting is that? Some of you are the perfect candidates for being a first class ambassador to some mini-culture group around us!

Your knowledge of computers or knitting or tandem biking or rock climbing or Seinfeld trivia is a bridge. It’s a connection point. It’s an avenue to people outside the family of God that others don’t have.

It makes you equipped and qualified to communicate God’s message to a culture that doesn’t understand why Jesus came or what God is like.

I can’t speak to everyone. I’m the perfect ambassador for people who are white, male, suburban, West Coast American, people who love Macintosh and Lord of the Rings and fly-fishing, and are baseball-playing computer geeks.

That, my friends, is a small group of people!

But as you and I both get to know Jesus and his love for us more deeply and intimately, we then figure out naturally how to translate that– how to live it out among the people who speak our language, who live in our mini-culture. As we learn from Jesus and from each other, as we take on our mission as ambassadors, the world becomes better able to understand and experience the power of God.

How great for us!

We get to be ambassadors! We have purpose, a mission, a reason for our existence. We don’t have to throw out our interests and our special uniqueness to become some kind of generic church person. We can incarnate ourselves into unique mini-cultures with the message of Jesus!

Following Jesus doesn’t mean separating from the day to day world we live in; it means living in that day to day world, but serving Jesus, not that world. We don’t escape it, we engage it!

We have the same risks as ambassadors, the same opposing risks that need to be faced.

We can’t “go native.” Becoming too identified with the culture we belong to is a real danger. We can take on the values and goals and interests of the mini-cultures we live in, and forget that we serve Jesus. And the same danger exists on the other side. We can become too identified with church, too caught up in some separate, alternative “Christian” culture that we can’t relate or connect with the people who need Jesus.

Here’s someone who’s fighting the danger to be separate. This woman teaches in an inner city school in Atlanta, and goes to a larger church in the same area. Listen for how she’s training herself to notice the people she teaches:

One thing I appreciate about my job is that, every single day, I feel like I put on new eyes and new ears. Again and again, I get confronted with situations that remind me that even though I live in the neighborhood, the world that exists when I close the front door of my house is so far removed from the world that exists behind the front doors of many of my students. I was especially aware of this right before we left for Christmas break. One of my favorite students began acting out and getting into fights: behavior that was completely uncharacteristic for her. I know her well enough to know some of her story - there is not a home or holiday to look forward to. The reality for a lot of my students is that two weeks of holiday are two weeks of hell. This is a difficult concept to grasp.

Even though my church is in the neighborhood, it does not pull from the apartment complexes that surround it. Middle class families drive from the suburbs to attend services. A few months ago, the church was vandalized a few times, and I pulled up some statistics about the neighborhoods directly surrounding the church from the police department and mailed them to the minister. Household below the poverty level: 23%. High School Education Level: 32.7%. Percentage of household headed by a female only: 35.8%. He wrote back. “I am shocked. I had no idea.”

I have been changed by living, each day, in a room with my students. I have listened to their stories and am beginning to come to terms with their reality. I have been angered, and frustrated, and broken, and hushed. Two weeks ago, a fifteen year old student was shot by another student after a basketball game. He was left with a bullet lodged in his spine, likely paralyzed. I have not written since then, because I feel like anything I can write will be trifling. Meaningless. How can I write about Christmas and New Years, anniversaries and family and the funny things my children say? What is there to do besides break and hope that, somehow, Grace will find a way in through the cracks?

We need to put ourselves in ambassador training.

Against the danger of getting too caught up in the mini-cultures we live in, we need to spend time learning to know the wishes of the one we represent, Jesus.

We need to spend time with him, knowing him, not just about him. We need to put effort into understanding why people have put distance between ourselves and God, and how Jesus heals and reconciles that distance.

And, we need to be freed up, released, even challenged to understand and relate to the mini-cultures around us that are outside of the body of Christ. Real ambassadors take time to study and understand the language and the values of the cultures they go to; we need to understand the world around us, so that we can communicate in understandable ways what it is that God is doing in the world.

Fight the dangers!

Become real ambassadors, not figurehead diplomats in the cushy post! We can make a difference in our world.