The Incarnation: When God Mixes Media
Dan Wilt, M.Min.
What does it mean when the Invisible God uses the media of flesh, blood and stories to communicate His message of rescue to the world? Invisible realities mingle with visible realities in God’s Photoshop, and mysteries are both revealed and enhanced as real truths become real stories – in real time and space.
Why Does An Invisible God Use The Visible World?
Every creative person of faith should ask the question – why would God extend his artful reach into our story through Incarnation? Aren’t invisible realities enough for us – shouldn’t our spiritual antennae be enough to absorb all the words God speaks in the world?
It seems not. God creates planets, supernovas, and singing prophets to tell His story to humankind, and then engages in the ultimate act of mixed media – the Incarnation.
God came to us in Jesus, not because He had to, but because He chose to. The incarnation is an example of God, the great artist, “mixing media” – to bring the message of redemption to us in literal full, living color.
1. Mixed Media: The Incarnation means that God mixes both the invisible and the physical world to communicate.
We need creative expressions of invisible realities. The physical world is good, and has been crafted by the same God who made human beings to reflect His image. The physicality of the atom, the physicality of good food, and the physicality of warm fires and family feasts all are somehow mingled into this grand spirituality that is the Christian Faith.
A Lesson For Us: When we amplify themes in the physical world in our creativity, in taste, touch, sound and sight, we are in alignment with the very approach to truth-telling that God participates in. Creative leaders who “mix media” to tell the Kingdom Story, mingle the invisible with the visible. It is a high calling to use both media well.
2. Mixed Media: The Incarnation means that Storytelling can affect physical things.
Jesus became the quintessential “teller of stories” as the very embodiment of God. We who are creative leaders tell stories all of the time when we craft a presentation, choose a song, or piece together a film. New Testament scholar N.T. Wright suggests, for Jesus, the stories actually were the message – not just illustrations of something else. In other words, they didn’t just deliver some other theme – the parables, in their form and their content, actually impacted people just as a physical baseball impacts on on the head.
A Lesson For Us: Your creative storytelling is not simply a means to an end. Like Jesus, the story you tell is an actual “physical” thing, an incarnation of an idea, that can unlock a heart or a mind – or simply bonk someone on the head.
3. Mixed Media: The Incarnation means that creative expressions of faith can be tools God uses to rescue souls.
For my wife and I, our ultimate act of creativity is found in the eyes of our children. The fact that God worked with Mary to bring a child into the world, who was “with child by the Holy Spirit,” means that God understands the power of His creative expression to change the world.
A Lesson For Us: What are your “creative children?” Don’t see them simply as self-expressions that make you and a few others healthier people. See your next set of preparations for Advent or Christmas worship services as actual vehicles of transformation through which God can transform people’s lives. Don’t sell creativity short – in what it can start in you and in others with God’s divine touch infusing it with life.
Expect Great Things From Your Mixed Media.
The God of mixed media welcomes you to join Him in the task of transforming hearts and lives. Mingle the visible with the invisible as a skilled disciple and artist – and expect great results with God in the process.
3 Comments
It only goes to reason that if God used a donkey to talk to Saul who became Paul, he can use some of us as well. I would like to think I have as much use to God as the donkey. : )
Blessings
This is an astounding thought that you bring up, Dan, “the Invisible God uses the media of flesh, blood and stories to communicate His message”. Hearing that and reading the post here synthesized a number of thoughts for me.
Our “modern” and “post-modern” attempts always lead us to try to create and express by way of materials we can hold, transfix, and impress with the image we so desire. This has us using video, audio, 3d, theatre, icons, candles and all manner of “man-made” things. We seek to leave our message in the physical realm (even if electronic) of the things *we* create.
So it is with God. The media he chooses to emboss with his message is the flesh and bone of human lives. First with Jesus, then with us. He showed us the right way of living so that the Father could truly paint, write and speak His message through our lives. Jesus lived in the completely vulnerable way that allowed the Father’s voice to speak through him “I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me”. This is how we are to live, and how the flesh and bone of our lives becomes the canvas of God’s terrestrial painting.
God’s mixed media is the physical, breathing lives of flesh, bone and blood that walk upon the earth. Wow!
Beautiful response, Kim. The artist chooses his or her media, to both communicate and embody the message within.
This is the art of creation, and the fine art of new creation in which we are all participating by the Spirit of God.
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