The blog Experimental Theology is posting selections from the short chapters of William Stringfellow's short work A Private and Public Faith. The selection below describes far better than I ever could precisely how I understand the implications of the Incarnation.
This intimacy with the world as it is, this particular freedom, this awful innocence toward the world which a Christian is given, makes the Christian look like a sucker. The Christian looks like that to others because she is engaged in the wholesale expenditure of her life. The Christian looks like that because she is without caution or prudence in preserving her own life. She looks like that because she is not threatened by the power of death either over her own life or over the rest of the world. She looks like that because she is free to give her life--to die--imminently, today, for the sake of any one or anything at all, even for those or that which seems unworthy of her death, thereby celebrating the One who died for all though none be worthy, not even one.The Incarnation is real only when we live it out, being the Real Body of Christ in and for the world. Anything else is just jibber-jabber.
A Christian is not distinguished by his political views, or moral decisions, or habitual conduct, or personal piety, or, least of all, by his churchly activities. A Christian is distinguished by his radical esteem for the Incarnation--to use the traditional jargon--by his reverence for the life of God in the whole of Creation, even and, in a sense, especially, Creation in the travail of sin.
The characteristic place to find the Christian is among her enemies.
The first place to look for Christ is in Hell.
