Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. In today's episode, we will be continuing our discussion of incarnation by looking at a second type of incarnation. In the last episode, we discussed what I call incarnation of proximity or proximate incarnation. Being physically near an individual can be important in various ways. It can help you to relate more to them.

It can help you to see the life that they live first hand. It might give you credibility if you live in the same community and it definitely gives you availability. When there is need, can respond with more speed from inside the community rather than try to figure out the logistics of getting resources, time and and self, imported into the community. While proximate incarnation is perhaps a more basic form than some of the others that we'll discuss, it's nevertheless a pretty important one. You generally don't help, at least not in a meaningful way, those with whom you're not in proximate community.

You may provide money from a distance but you don't build strong relationships without proximate community. In this episode, I wanna dig in a little deeper and get at a second level incarnation. Whereas two people can be in the same location and not feel at all connected, what I'm going to call social incarnation or positional incarnation provides usually immediate connection. Positional incarnation as I've termed it is one that places an individual on a similar social standing. For example, if I'm a wealthy American, the son of a powerful politician, and I move into a slum in India, I buy and tear down a few shanties and then build a nice house in their place, while I am now approximately incarnational and that I have chosen to move next door to the impoverished and ill, I'm still very far from them in terms of my position in society.

It's likely that I won't be able to relate to my neighbors in any meaningful way and it's likely that they'll look at me with suspicion. I may be able to help them financially and they might objectify me for what I can give them but there's no way that I will be able to struggle alongside of them and gain their respect and trust. I think a good example for my own life comes from from our time in Romania. We had moved to Romania from The States and had started digging into the Roma community. We invited, we started to invite the Roma into our house to the dismay of many of our neighbors and we took our family to the Roma community which was a shock to many of the Roma.

But while we were approximately incarnational in some ways in our traveling abroad to be with Aroma and to help them in our willingness to bring them into our space or our willingness to get into their space, we were clearly not positionally incarnate. When they stepped foot into our house, was clear that we lived in two different worlds, though we lived in the same town. While we recognize this, the reality of it hit particularly clearly one day when my wife was talking with a 15 year old mother to be about weddings. When my wife showed this girl our wedding photos, the Roma girl said with enamored eyes, it's like a fairy tale. That was funny and sad to us at the same time.

Now from our perspective, our wedding was pretty simple. We we had it in the winter to save on cost because, we were able to buy the winter decorations in the off season and and save a bunch of money. We hired a Mexican food restaurant attached to a gas station to cater our wedding both because it was the most authentic and the best Mexican food we could get and because it was pretty cheap. They weren't used to catering big events, I don't think. We had a friend DJ our wedding for practically nothing, pretty much like the cost of gas.

We got a photographer from our local college who was dirt cheap because she was trying to build her portfolio. I mean, we spent under $10,000 which is one third the cost of an average American wedding. And the only reason it was that much is because the one thing we didn't skimp on was making sure we invited everyone who we could possibly want to be there. We sent out, I think it was over four fifty invitations. So our wedding was a wedding of cutting corners and saving as much as we could, yet the Roma girl looked at our pictures and and heard about it and thought it was a fairy tale.

It was something that she just couldn't fathom for herself because it would it wasn't within the realm of possibilities. Very clearly, we were in proximity to the Roma but we weren't positionally like them. We had wealth and power that they didn't have. If we were in a bind, we had family to help us out. If we needed something, our lighter skin and American passports could get us with their dark skin and Roma heritage couldn't.

If we go back to our hypothetical individual who moves to India, even if he sold all of his possessions and moved into a shack in the slum, while he would be much closer positionally at that point, he would still have his family connections that gave him a fire escape out of his situation. So to a certain extent, we can't necessarily become perfectly incarnational in in a positional sense. However, there are things we can do to increase our positional incarnation and I think we see this type of thing a lot with Jesus. So we all know that Jesus was itinerant and had said that he didn't have a place to lay his head. He was sort of homeless.

At the same time, Jesus did have some significant influence, it seems, and significant contacts, and we see that he partied a lot and had quite a lot of discourses with some powerful people. And I'm not at all discounting Jesus' incarnation in this sense but I want to point out that there are some ways where He actually ends up going a lot further. There are a lot of places that we can see this type of thing. So whenever Jesus touches a leper, the diseased or gentile, Jesus is defiling himself according to his current customs. When he talks to a woman, especially a Samaritan woman, he takes on a certain stigma.

Kenneth Bailey in his book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes explains this very well in two particular stories. Those of Zacchaeus and the woman who pours perfume on Jesus' feet and uses her hair to wash them. Bailey unravels a number of shames that Jesus enters into in order to embrace Zacchaeus and to embrace the woman while simultaneously embarrassing his powerful hosts. Jesus frequently bears the shame, the sinful and oppressed feel constantly and he bears it for them. In this way, he enters into their world, dismissing any power and standing he does have and entering into the world of the oppressed and downtrodden.

While Jesus wasn't a woman, He wasn't a sinner, He wasn't defiled with leprosy and He wasn't a tax collector, He constantly put Himself in a position to be identified with that sort, risking a loss of power and a tarnishing of His image. Now I don't have any personal stories even remotely close to those of Jesus, but I'll put out the closest thing I can. Part of what we try to do with Aroma is to use our position to help them. We try to help them get jobs, fill out resumes, transport them places, etcetera. So we we definitely try to use our position to help.

But there are plenty of times when you can feel the animosity in the air when when you're going with Aroma. I remember one time there was a aroma beggar at the mall who asked us for diapers for his kid. Well, we didn't have a pack of diapers on us so, you know, we we tried we would have had to go into the store to buy them. We were pretty sure that, you know, he was just going to take them and sell them or something. He didn't didn't really need them.

But at the same time, you know, he might not have been. He he might have been telling the truth. From first hand experience, we knew that a bunch of Roma, a lot of the Roma that we visited were always asking for diapers. They were hard pressed for them. They were expensive, we knew.

And at worst, what was gonna happen? He tricks us into getting some diapers and he he sells them. Right? He gets money and somebody might get some discounted diapers in his community. Okay.

We had the money and we were in a position to buy some diapers so so we did. Well, when I was walking through the store with this Roma man, all eyes just turned on us. I knew what everyone was thinking. Oh, look at that naive American. He's so stupid.

He's getting taken advantage of. And that's a hard thing for me to take because I I have a pretty big issue with pride and I hate feeling inferior or having people think that I'm stupid. In that moment, I, in a very, very, very miniscule way took on the position of a Roma. And sin entered my heart. I wanted to distance myself from that man when we were walking.

I walked quickly because I wanted to hurry through the store and get this over with quickly because I was uncomfortable. This tiny diminishing of self was hard enough for me. I can't imagine doing what Jesus did and and reducing my positional, becoming positionally incarnate to the extent that He did. Positional incarnation then is a much more meaningful incarnation, though it is difficult to do without proximate incarnation first. And whether it's becoming poor to relate to the poor, moving to the inner city or slum, or simply identifying with those who are oppressed and taking their stigma on yourself and being willing to be identified with them.

Positional incarnation can be powerful. Whereas the the proximate incarnation of Jesus shows that God is with us, the positional incarnation of Jesus shows that God is for us. God is not just coming to hang out in his mansion that he built right next to our shacks. He has come to identify with us, to bear our burdens, our sins and our shame. He does not allow us to wallow in our shame and to be crushed under oppression, but He stands with us where we are as He did with Zacchaeus and the woman who anointed His feet.

That's all for now. So peace and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.