“What if God was one of us?” That’s the name of a top ten song from the 1990s. Eric Bazilian wrote it. Joan Osborne recorded it. Maybe you heard it.

It asks the kind of spiritual questions you don’t expect from rock’n’roll. Like –

·            If God had a name, what would it be, and would you say it to his face?

·            If you could ask God one question, what would it be?

·            (Or) If God had a face, what would it look like?

·            And would you even want to see God’s face, if seeing meant you had to believe?

It’s a good song. The old American Bandstand TV show might give it 97 points, because “the lyrics are good and it’s easy to dance to.”

The only reason it doesn’t rate a perfect 100 for me, anyway, is that it’s too rich in the “what ifs” department. God is kept out of the world and off in heaven, passive and invisible, the subject of speculation, not real encounters. Soon, the song sounds as hypothetical and pointless as asking how many angels fit on the head of a pin. The singer seems almost bored.

“Yeah,” it says, “God is great.” And, yeah, “God is good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.” So maybe God exists. But God isn’t invoked or involved. 

The gulf between earth and heaven is huge – and unchallenged – until the refrain. Then suddenly, Bazilian and Osborne draw God out of heaven and into the world.

“What if God was one of us?” they ask again. “Just a slob like one of us?” (I wince at the idea of God as a slob, and I bet you do too, but it makes the point.) Or a little more gently: what if God is “just a stranger on the bus trying to make his way home?”

Yeah, yeah. Yeah-yeah-yeah. That changes everything. God’s not lost in the ether, after all.

Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest and author in Georgia, was once invited to preach at a church in neighboring Alabama. She arrived early and looked around the old sanctuary. It was awash in multi-colored light from Tiffany-style stained-glass windows and polished wood. Near the pulpit a gigantic mural of Jesus hung on the wall. It showed him rising from the grave on Easter morning. (See An Altar in the World, 2009, pages 35-37.)

Barbara Brown Taylor put her sermon notes on the pulpit. She adjusted the microphone height. And she walked over to the mural to gaze at it up close.

Two things stood out: First, how little clothing our Savior was wearing – his skin was quite exposed (especially for an Episcopal church!). Second, he had no body hair! On his head, yeah. But his armpits were smooth as those of a six-year old child!

The effect, Ms. Taylor says, was to make Jesus look quite “ethereal” and holy. But he also looked … odd. Unreal. Not quite human.

Taylor is embarrassed by her own observation, but I’m glad she noticed. She got me wondering if the artist was trying to “pretty Jesus up.” We all have body parts we are less proud of. Maybe the artist thought he was doing Jesus a favor, making him less hairy on his arms, legs and chest – less of “a slob like one of us.”

If that was the goal – and I’m speculating here – it fails the Christmas test, which declares that God was born in 100% honest-to-goodness, real human flesh. The Jesus we worship was not mostly similar to us, but identical, yet without giving up his godliness. He wore real human skin – hairy arms and all.

The truth is, in many homes, even tonight, God seems distant and remote, disembodied and abstract. People don’t know, or can’t accept, that God took the risk of being born … gaining inside knowledge about the workings of our lives … suffering, aching, hungering … pining for love … being rejected … dying painfully … then rising to new life.

For such people, the Messiah – whether lying in a manger or stepping from the grave – is a two-dimensional figure, a pseudo-reality, except as a mural on a wall, without loose hairs, rough edges, blemishes or scars they can relate to.

There are two dangers to that kind of Jesus:

As long as God is divorced from the human, God can be expected to act, unencumbered by human constraints. A remote, impersonal God will do everything NOW, right this moment … and those who believe in that God will be disillusioned and disappointed when God is slow to stop sickness, war and injustice. Or when they pray for a parking place near the mall door and it doesn’t materialize.

A God who looks human but doesn’t vanquish enemies at a moment’s notice comes across as inconsequential at best, and nonexistent at worst. A disembodied God is no God at all … just an abstract notion around which we can pose silly questions.

That’s one problem. The other danger is that a God without flesh keeps us from seeing the good in clay-footed people around us. (And that’s everyone.)

If Jesus is smooth and hairless and wart-free, he’s got nothing in common with the woman in the back of the bus, hunched over and tired after a long day. Nothing in common, either, with the man who can’t afford health care, or with children who play near buried bombs in a war zone or who duck bullets on our city streets. If God has no face, we’ll never see her in a soup kitchen line. And with no personal name, we can call everyone else as many names as we want, without hurting God’s feelings.

As long as Jesus doesn’t wear skin like ours, we’ll never see him in any of the neighbors around us.

Luke’s reply, however, to that plasticized, idealized, airbrushed version of our Redeeming Lord, is to tell about a woman giving birth to a child in a barn, wrapping him in scraps of crude cloth, placing him on a prickly bed of hay in a cattle trough … then having angels and shepherds declare, ”That’s what God looks like.”

The Gospel of John is even more overt. It says, “the Word became flesh.” Nothing ethereal about it. John introduces us to God in Jesus Christ by taking us right down to bare skin.

In fact, when John says, “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” he literally says (in Greek) that “the Word … pitched its tent among us.” God makes a home with us, John insists, not out of polished marble or thick concrete, but permeable human hide, as flimsy as the walls of a tent.

Christmas drops the “what if” abstraction and turns the question mark into an exclamation point. God was one of us, it declares. God is one of us! Born in human flesh.

“Unto you this night a Savior is born who is Christ the Lord.” In the city of David and here in this room … on city buses and Greyhounds, wherever the unfortunate and downtrodden are “trying to make their way home,” Christ is born.

That’s good news. It gives us patience to wait, not expecting God to do it all at once. The coming of heaven to earth happens at a human pace, not in a flash. 

And it’s good news because it helps us see the face of Christ in every other face … share bread with the hungry … accompany strangers toward home … and accept our own “hairy” imperfections without further embarrassment. Our outer appearance no longer distances or isolates us from God. Instead, the warts and flaws (even the regrets) we wear make us more like Christ. More real. More human.

Just as he now is more like us.

That is good too, because you and I are the only Christ some folks will ever meet. The only way some folks will ever see Christ’s earthly, human flesh is by seeing our flesh and how we choose to live in it. Whether or not we see Christ in them (which is another matter), they will see Christ in us. And they’ll judge accordingly, whether or not “God is good and God is great,” and whether or not God lives in the world – or whether it’s just a lot of “yeah-yeah-yeah,” yada-yada-yada feel-good-do-nothing chatter.

The Apostle Paul told Titus that “the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all.” Then he added that, because the grace of God has appeared, you and I get to start over fresh with Christ – “renounc[ing] impiety and worldly passions, and liv[ing] lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly …”

So I repeat: You and I are the only Bible some people will ever read. And the language they’ll read it in will be our “body language.” They will judge the truth of God’s Word-made-flesh by how we live in our own skin … and how we let them live in their skin – be it small or extra large, pale or dark, muscular or flabby, goosebumped or glistening, hairy as an ape or smooth as a baby’s bottom.

You know the story, don’t you, of the child on a stormy night, crying out from her bedroom, “Mommy, I’m scared”? The parent replied, “It’s okay, I’m here in the next room.”

“I’m still scared,” the child cried again.

“Don’t worry, honey, God is right there with you.”

“But Mommy,” came the plaintive wail, “I need God with skin on!”

Jesus is that God – with skin on. And because his skin does not have to be perfect, he is able to honor the imperfect bodies of others – lepers and beggars, prisoners and the hungry, Roman guards and trembling disciples …

He came to the world in a body identical to yours and mine. Then, in the fullness of time, through bread and wine, his body enters our bodies. Not only in the city of David, but at this table, “this night,” the Savior is born – for us … and in us.

This is the time of his appearing.

May we see him in the candlelit glow on each other’s faces … in the bread and wine that he serves us … and through the windows of a bus, making its way home.