Estrangement and the God Who Moves In

God With Us: The Doctrine of the Incarnation

Week 1

John 1:14, Isaiah 64:1, Isaiah 2: 2-4

Nov. 30, 2025

Rev. David Collins

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So how was everyone’s Thanksgiving?

Raise your hand if you had turkey… pumpkin pie…

Raise your hand if you bit your tongue so hard when a MAGA family member started talking that you still can’t quite talk right?

Didn’t bite your tongue and ended up in a full-blown argument with someone who thinks ICE is just “doing what needs to be done”?

Anyone have to explain, again, that loving your neighbor is actually in the Bible?

Anyone get cornered by someone who thinks the Earth is six thousand years old but yet also somehow believes in crystals?

Anyone decide to start smoking again just for an excuse to go outside for a break?

Anyone here quietly wondering if you’re still welcome at Christmas?

Well, you’re in a safe place now.

Today we are talking about estrangement.

Estrangement

Estrangement is when things, especially relationships, that used to feel close, are now, well, strange.

It’s the way many felt of us felt at Thanksgiving, and the way we’re feeling about our country right now, when we can bring ourselves to pay attention and believe what we’re seeing, and not just attribute it all to AI.

But you know, that feeling of estrangement is actually a very important feeling in order to understand the Bible. It’s like a pre-requisite.

Because long before we get to Jesus… long before anyone is arguing theology or lighting Advent candles… Israel was a people shaped by exile and occupation. That’s the soil the whole story grows out of. They were pushed off their land and lived under someone else’s flag, an empire that didn’t share their values.

That life creates a certain kind of ache. A sense of being at home and not at home at the same time.

And for generations, that’s exactly where the people of God lived. Off balance and heartsick. Trying to remember who they were while someone more powerful kept telling them who they should be.

How We Read the Bible

Next year, we’re going to dig into how this is actually how the Hebrew Bible came to be… how so much of it was written or gathered or edited while the people were in exile. How the trauma of being uprooted shaped the way they told their stories. And honestly, I think that’s going to be really good for us… because most of us grew up reading these texts from a place of comfort, or at least stability. We read them like they were timeless spiritual lessons instead of the cries and memories of a people living under someone else’s boot.

And when you read from a position of privilege, you can miss the point without even knowing it. You can flatten everything into “sin and salvation” and forget that these are stories about people fighting to hold onto their identity and their God… while everything familiar is being torn away.

Take Adam and Eve. That story is right at the beginning, which makes sense for how the Bible is arranged, but it was not the first thing written. It wasn’t even close. And once you see it through the eyes of a people who had been taken from their home into Babylon, the story hits differently. It’s not just about our “primary spiritual condition of estrangement”. It’s about losing the place you belonged. It’s about remembering a garden you can’t get back to. It’s about waking up in a strange land and wondering if God is still with you there.

That thread of estrangement runs all the way through the Old Testament, and right into Advent, which we begin today.

Advent

Advent is a season in the church when we look forward to Jesus’ birth by hoping for his second coming. Which is a strange kind of overlap if you think about it. We’re waiting for a child who was already born, and at the same time we’re longing for a world that still hasn’t come into being. It’s like standing in two places at once. The ancient people of God waiting for a Messiah to arrive… and us waiting for that same Messiah to finish what he started. And in both cases, the waiting happens in a world that desperately needs to be fixed.

So it’s no surprise that the scriptures for Advent sound like people crying out for God to do exactly that… fix it. Not gently, either. They want God to come crashing in. They want the heavens ripped open. They want a world-shaking, empire-toppling arrival that leaves no room for doubt.

Listen to how Isaiah puts it near the end of his prophetic poem.

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
    so that the mountains would quake at your presence— (Isaiah 64:1)

That’s what my prayers sound like most of the time right now, because I have run out of patience with the world as it is, and I’ll bet you have too.

Closer to the beginning of his work, Isaiah puts it this and gives us a picture of what it would look like if God really did step in and put things right.

In days to come the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.

Many peoples shall come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths."

He shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more. (Isaiah 2:2-4)

Nations seek out wisdom instead of war. Weapons are repurposed into tools for growing life instead of taking it. A world so healed it doesn’t even remember how to fight anymore.

That is the kind of world people were aching for. It’s the kind of world we are are still aching for.

And Christmas is the story of what we got instead.

Christmas is the story of what we got instead

What we got instead is kind of like one of those presents that wasn’t on your list… the one you opened with a forced smile… but later you came to find out that it was exactly what you needed.

We didn’t get fire from heaven. We didn’t get the mountains trembling. We didn’t get a cosmic referee blowing the whistle and telling the nations to knock it off.

We got the incarnation.

Incarnation

Which simply means God became human. God put on flesh. God stepped into the world the exact same way the rest of us did… small… vulnerable… interruptible… interrupting nothing. God didn’t come crashing in from above. God slipped in beside us.

Instead of fixing everything, God took on our flesh and our life and stays with us in everything.

Because things come out of alignment, don’t they? That get strange. That’s just facts. Every family… every nation… every heart. And as nice as it would have been for Israel’s messianic hopes to come true back in first century Palestine… as amazing as it would have been for God to flip the table on Rome and set the whole world right in one decisive moment… it wouldn’t have lasted. And it wouldn’t have spread. Not the way they imagined it.

Who knows… maybe things would be even worse now?

Because the truth is, things always slip back into estrangement. That’s the human condition. We get distracted. We get afraid. We get tribal. And we turn inward. We forget how to live with each other. We forget how to stay close to God.

So instead of one big, spectacular intervention that would have stunned the world for about five minutes and then faded… God chose something slower… quieter… something embodied. God chose to enter into the very thing that keeps breaking… our shared human life… and stay there.

Not just for thirty-something years in ancient Palestine, but forever.

The incarnation is God saying, “If the world keeps slipping away from me, then I’m going to move so close that nothing can slip away without me coming along.”

God Moves In

The first chapter of the gospel of John is this beautiful poem that reframes the first chapter of Genesis. They both start out with those famous words, “In the beginning” but where Genesis spells out how and in what order God made all the things, John focuses in on why. That in the beginning was the Word, the perfect idea of what life in this new world should be like. And John says that God created everything through this big idea, this big purpose.

But then, down in verse 14, John writes that rather than this idea, this Word, staying ideal, up on some mountain that the nations should come to, that the Word took on flesh.

Eugene Peterson gives the best translation of John 1:14 in the Message. It says,

The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood. (John 1:14
)

And that is where estrangement gets turned on its head. Because estrangement always begins when someone pulls back. When someone withdraws. When someone stops knocking, stops calling, stops showing up. Distance grows in the silence.

But the incarnation is God doing the opposite of that. God doesn’t pull back. God moves in. God crosses the distance we created. God takes the first step… not by sending a message from far away, not by shouting instructions from the heavens… but by showing up next door. Close enough to borrow a cup of sugar. Close enough to hear the crying in our houses. Close enough that you can’t say, “God has no idea what this feels like,” because God now feels it from the inside.

Estrangement says, “You stay over there. I’ll stay over here.”


Incarnation says, “No… I’m coming over.”

Estrangement says, “We don’t know how to live together.”


Incarnation says, “Then I will live with you until you learn.”

Estrangement says, “We can’t find our way back to God.”


Incarnation says, “Then God will find His way to you.”

And when Peterson says God moved into the neighborhood, he isn’t picturing Park Ave.. He’s talking about our neighborhoods… the ones that drift toward estrangement every chance they get. The ones where we don’t know what to do with each other. The ones where our instinct for “fixing things” often looks a lot like creating an HOA with a rulebook thick enough to control every neighbor who annoys us.

That’s how we try to keep the peace: rules… enforcement… conformity… fines for having your trash can out too long.

But Jesus doesn’t do that. Jesus doesn’t fix the neighborhood by controlling it. He doesn’t come with a contract. He comes with his life, and presence. His way of being human. He moves close enough that people start to change, not because they’re forced to, but because they’ve been loved up close.

Because that’s how people actually change. Not by being lectured from a distance, but by being lived with. Not by being corrected into submission, but by being drawn into a better way. You unlearn estrangement because someone refuses to let you drift away. That’s Jesus. And the people around him start to catch it… almost by osmosis. His way of being human becomes a pattern they can follow.

Practicing Presence

And that brings us back to where we started this morning… those Thanksgiving tables, and the Christmas ones still ahead of us. It’s exhausting walking into a room where people repeat talking points that do real harm. Where “just sharing an opinion” actually means denying someone’s dignity. Where you start to sweat the moment a certain uncle clears his throat.

And here’s something else to keep in mind with all of that… a lot of the loudest voices feeding our divisions aren’t even coming from our own communities. This week we learned that many of the big, angry accounts pushing MAGA talking points online aren’t based here at all. They’re coming from overseas… stirred up by people who will never sit at our Christmas dinner but are more than happy to watch us fall apart at it.

So when someone repeats one of those lines… it helps to remember that it didn’t come from them originally. It came from far away. It was designed to divide. And progressives are susceptible too. Some opinions that scratch where we itch are easily weaponized to tear us apart. Like the one that says, “I’ll never forgive anyone who voted for him.”

But the incarnation shows us another way. Jesus told the truth and confronted the bad stuff, but he didn’t withdraw. He didn’t hide. He didn’t give up on relationships, even complicated ones. He stepped toward people, not because they were right, but because they were loved.

So maybe that’s the thread we can carry into this season. Not pretending estrangement isn’t real… not swallowing our convictions to keep the peace… but remembering that God’s answer to estrangement is presence. Not control. Not an HOA. Presence.

The kind of presence that simply says, “I’m here. I’m staying. And I’m committed to living a better way right in front of you.”

So pay attention to that feeling of estrangement. Recognize it for what it is. Let it help you read the Bible the way it was written… from the inside of a people who knew what it felt like to be pushed to the margins. Let it remind you that Jesus didn’t wait for the world to be whole before he showed up. He came right into the middle of the mess and he still does. And that means those moments when you feel the gap the most… might actually be the moments when you’re closest to seeing what the incarnation is all about.

And when you feel that estrangement rise in your own life… notice it. Don’t ignore it. Don’t shame yourself for it. And don’t automatically run from it either. And of course, if a situation isn’t safe, you step back. But when it is safe… see if you can lean in just a little instead of withdrawing. Take one small step toward presence instead of pulling back. That’s all. One step. Because every time you choose presence over retreat, you’re practicing the very thing Jesus practiced when he moved into our neighborhood. And over time, that practice can soften things you thought were set in stone.

This is the slow way Jesus heals the world. And keeps healing the world… because it will always keep needing to be healed. It started with God moving into the neighborhood two thousand years ago, but it didn’t stop there. It continues every time someone chooses presence over fear… every time someone stays at the table a little longer… every time someone risks being human with another human. That’s how the incarnation keeps working its way through the world… one small act of courage, one small act of love, one small step toward each other at a time.