John 1: 1-5

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

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Any campers in the room?

I’ve been a tent camper since I was a teenager when I started going to music festivals. Sleeping in tents near the stage was part of the experience.

Tents were a given as I discovered the joy of backpacking in college.

Judi and I and our kids have traveled across the country camping along the way. Tents have served as our hotel rooms from Erie, Pennsylvania to Mount Airy, North Carolina to Kissimmee, Florida to The edge of the Grand Canyon to the Black Hills of South Dakota, to the shores of Lake Michigan, to Hamilton, Canada and lots of places in between.

Never have I slept in a camper or an RV. It is always been a tent.

Pitching a tent is simple.

First, you find the flattest area you can. Second, you lay down that large brown tarp that stays in the back of your car (unless you’re backpacking, then you go tarpless.)

Next you lay out your tent, positioning the opening in the direction you desire. Then you stretch the corners of the tent and drive in the pegs. Now it is time to erect your temporary home. We have had several multi-room tents which are sometimes complicated to set up. For backpacking, I used a single person tent which was ready to use in seconds. Right now at home, in our tent box, we have two or three dome tents which set up nicely, without too much hassle. When your tent is standing, you can unzip the zipper, throw in your sleeping bag and your backpack. Ta-dah, an instantly temporary home.

One very cool thing about tent camping is that it provides different and unique stimuli for all your senses.

You experience smell in new ways when you hang out in tents.

The smell of skunks scampering around your tent in the middle of the night is a smell that is impossible to ignore. After all, it is simply a piece of cloth between you and that odious spray.

Waking up to the smell of bacon as it is being fried over an open fire is truly magnificent.

It seems as if you can smell the rain from inside a tent before it actually begins to fall.

When you camp on what used to be a hog farm, especially if the sun is hot and the breeze is blowing, you smell that from which you wish to escape but cannot.

You hear things that you don’t always hear when you are hanging out in tents.

Camping in a Safari campground in Canada allowed us to hear, throughout the night, and at what seemed to be mere feet from our tent, the roars of lions and the trumpeting of elephants.

When you camp at music festivals, you fall asleep to music wafting from a stage nearby and wake up to your next door tent neighbor strumming her guitar.

After smelling the rain before it falls, you hear it as it pings against the sides of your tent. On one level, it is soothing and peaceful, but if the intensity increases, the sound becomes louder and more ominous.

In the stillness of the woods, as you lie in your sleeping bag, you can hear the swooshing of a nearby creek, the sound of tree frogs and cicadas, the curious sound of something rummaging around your tent in the middle of the night. Is that a bear? Or is it just a cow because you have pitched your tent in a pasture.

The sights you see from the tent can be amazing.

From the dancing of the fire to the deer standing in the clearing, from the rainbow to the sunset, it is glorious.

The Grand Canyon, always phenomenal. looks grander from the tent flap. The view from the mountain top is framed beautifully through the tent door.

If the rain falls just so, you can begin to see water bead up on the inside of your tent. This is not a sign of good things to come.

Your sense of touch is heightened in the tent.

In the middle of the night, when a strange sound stirs you, your hand stretches toward that space by you sleeping bag where the flash light is alway present. You wrap you hand around the cylinder and turn on the light hoping to shoo away whatever is in the darkness.

When the rain is overwhelming, you can actually feel the dampness on the floor of the tent, and occasionally touch a puddle that is forming from the pounding rain. We once discovered three inches of dampness in our tent after a massive storm.

There is one sense left. Your taste is heightened when you camp.

There are hikers who can make incredible meals on a butane stove. I am not one of them. My usual supper while backpacking was Mac and cheese. And honestly, sometimes I was just too tired to stir in the powdered cheese.

The taste of peanuts and m&ms and raisins is transformative when you sit in a tent reading by flashlight.

Truth is. . .Tent camping is a great way to encounter creation, to witness life at work to see things differently.

Tent camping allows you to experience life differently, to stimulate the senses in new ways.

Tent camping allows you to see with a altered perspective.

Tent camping allows you to understand things from a different point of view.

Just a few minutes ago, Brooke and Carey read John 1:1-4. And as cool as those verses are, the real zinger comes in verse 14. As it is translated in the New Revised Standard Version, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

What is interesting to me is the meaning of the Greek verb that is translated “lived among us.” The literal meaning of the word σκηνοω, used only here in the New Testament, is “pitch a tent,” or “encamp.”

Now, why does one go tent camping? To experience life differently.

And Jesus pitched his tent among us.

Usually, when we speak of the incarnation of Jesus we speak in terms of what Jesus came to do for us. Which is all well and good.

But could it be that at least part of the reason for the incarnation is so that God, through entering humanity, might experience what it is to be human, with all its pitfalls and struggles. Could it be, that, in order to truly walk alongside us, to comfort us and guide us, that God chose to be like us, at least for a bit. Might it be possible, that for God, through Jesus, in order to show us how to live and love, chooses to join with us in overcoming the obstacles that separate us from love, from each other, from God.

Might the incarnation actually be kind of like camping out for the divine, discovering what it is like out there, in a world that is pretty messy.

Eugene Peterson once wrote about followers of Jesus, “Getting to know the neighborhood, the narture and conditions of the neighborhood, is fundamental to living to the glory of God.”

Is it possible that the incarnation is God’s way of getting to know our neighborhood?

Perhaps the incarnation is God getting up close and personal with God’s creation. To smell it. To hear it. To see it. To touch it. To taste it. All so that you and I might find hope and comfort and direction through Jesus, who has experienced life as we have.

For the word became flesh and lived among us.

Amen.