...and moved into the neighborhood.
Incarnational. It's the idea that God didn't just teach us timeless spiritual truths (or leave them for us in some ancient book)...but that he instead came and took on human skin and flesh and lived among us in a particular time and place and culture. One of the strengths of the Christian gospel is its ability to be translated inot new and different cultures. Missiologists call this 'contextualization.' There is a danger in stripping the gospel of its context, of the time and place and culture within which it is expressed, especially within which it was expressed through Jesus, the incarnation of the Word and Desire of God.
Since the Christian gospel is incarnational, and if Jesus and his message were incarnated in the first-century Jewish culture of Palestine, then we can say that culture itself can be a vehicle for communicating the gospel, and that it's possible to re-contextualize the gospel to new cultures. What would the story of David look like if it were to happen today? Who represents the Philistines, and who the Israelites? Would it be an unknown young man from a persecuted tribe in west Africa, standing up to the general from one of the most brutal of clans? Would Samson be a jet-setting billionaire, 'slaying' corporations and businesses left and right...ultimately meeting his demise when a woman manages to steal every penny he had, leaving him destitute and homeless, only to be killed by the very people he tried so hard to seperate himself from? When we make it about objective principles and timeless truths, things like the parable of the good Samaritan become stories about helping people in need. We we understand contextualization, we realize these stories were actually about bigotry, racism, and our desire to justify the hate and fear within ourselves.
Throughout the Church's history, Christians have tried to keep the constants in front of them, declaring and reminding themselves and others of what God has done. I recently came across a contextualized version of one of those creeds from the Maasai people of east Africa. As one person commented on its words--it recognizes a need to not only 'Christianize Africa'...but also to 'Africanize Christianity':
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We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it. He created man and wanted man to be happy in the world. God loves the world and every nation and tribe on the earth. We have known this High God in the darkness, and now we know him in the light. God promised in the book of his word, the Bible, that he would save the world and all nations and tribes.
We believe that God made good his promise by sending his son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left his home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing that the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He was buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day, he rose from that grave. He ascended to the skies. He is the Lord.
We believe that all our sins are forgiven through him. All who have faith in him must be sorry for their sins, be baptized in the Holy Spirit of God, live the rules of love, and share the bread together in love, to announce the good news to others until Jesus comes again. We are waiting for him. He is alive. He lives. This we believe. Amen.