4 min 44 sec: app reading time
December 25, 2024
Merry Christmas from "Life Center" and myself to you and your family.
Today is a day of mixed emotions. While many people gather together to celebrate Christmas, many others spend their day alone.
In this "Chats," I want to encourage us collectively to move beyond a merely sentimental, cultural, and even religious understanding of Christmas as "the idolatry of the Nativity or baby Jesus" to a mature and communal appreciation of the message of the Incarnation of God in the human body.
I will not attempt to walk into the paradox of the Incarnation. Scholars, theologians, and Pastors to this date debate this issue from all sides of the possible rational options. I gave up on it 18+ years ago when I walked out of religion altogether. I am satisfied with the Incarnation being a mystery. I will not fully understand this side of eternity. My Bible says, "God became Immanuel," which means "God with us." (Matthew 1:23-TM) That's enough. The theories of the trinity are marginal to the central theme of God’s character, whose details are unknown to us.
Ellen G. White, prophetess of the early Adventist movement of 1844, said, "The incarnation of Christ is the mystery of all mysteries." I affirm the paradox and ambivalence of "Immanuel" as Divinity manifested in the human body 2,000 years ago.
I have affirmed for many years that salvation was granted to humanity before sin happened on planet Earth. (Ephesians 1:3-6-TM) Regardless of your apologetics of salvation, God's grace is eternal. Thus, grace is “salvation from Christian salvation” as a transactional formula. There is nothing you can do to inherit or acquire salvation except choose a relationship with God in your consciousness. No one can judge your connection with God. Only you and God know. Choice is the sacred chamber of your consciousness that not even God ever invades. He simply knocks at the door, and you make the choice. (Revelation 3:20-TM)
The purpose of Immanuel was to declare before the whole universe that it was good to be human. Humanity is God's treasured Creation by design and purpose.
Jesus identified his own mission with what he called the coming "reign of God" (Mark 1:14-15-TM). Or the physical manifestation of God's presence on this planet. It had been set since eternity before Jesus came as "Immanuel." The next time God shows up on planet Earth will be at the end of times in what Christians call the “Second Coming of Jesus.” When you actually catch sight of God’s interventions with humanity throughout human history you soon realize God has been “adventing” multiple times of which the birth of Jesus was one of them and the arrival at the end of the escathon will be a grand movement on the scope of God’s evolutionary journey throughout eternity.
We have often settled for the sweet arrival of a baby and concocted disconnected pieces of the Nativity puzzle to make sense of it as a fairy tale. It happened but the details of it are controversial as scholars can come up with opinions and views that are not factual.
All we know is that "Immanuel" was God pouring Divinity into a mystery called Jesus. Since Jesus was real, we can trust God's love in such a manifestation, and by faith, we catch glimpses of what it meant then and his message for us today.
Too much sentimentality, or juicing up of our emotions, can be a substitute for an actual relationship, as we also see in our human relationships. When we are so infatuated with the "sweetness" or "perfection" of another, we easily "fall" into idolatry of "love" or "fall" out of love at the first sign of humanity. Let’s not let that happen with the infinitely compelling humanity of Jesus! I don't follow Jesus as my religious idol. I affirm Jesus as the Divine manifestation that revealed I am saved as a human! God treasures humanity. That's why God chose to come as Immanuel!
The celebration of Christmas shouldn't be exclusively a sentimental waiting for a baby born 2,000 years ago.
It should be more like remembering God's deep involvement with humanity since Creation, after Adam and Eve's choice in the Garden of Eden, with us in our present condition now and throughout eternity.
Christmas is a glimpse of what has always been God's love for humans! I reject the notion of a God who shows up here and there for us to parade the broken pieces of a mirror in religious acts while missing the wholeness of God's presence in your face and mine now. We are as divine-human as Jesus was. Let's treasure such a gift this Christmas!
Creation groans in its birth pains, waiting for our participation with God in its renewal of what's divine within our consciousness and each human we meet. (Romans 8:20–23-TM).
We do God's Good News no favor when we make Jesus, Immanuel, the eternal God, into a perpetual baby, or a religious idol on a cross who asks little or no adult response from us.
We have a choice now, as much as Adam and Eve had in the Garden of Eden and Jesus had when he was in Palestine. Not even God will make a choice to save you, though salvation is eternal unless you "choose" a love relationship with God in your consciousness!
One even wonders what kind of mind would want to keep Jesus a baby or on a cross. Maybe the only one that is content with "baby or dead Christianity" as a religious construct.
Any spirituality or sense of wholeness within that makes too much of the baby Jesus is perhaps not yet ready for "prime-time" life or the evolution into wholeness God longs to inspire in our lives.
If we are to believe the biblical texts, God clearly wants friends and partners to be images of Divinity now. Just as you are now! (John 15:15-TM)
God, it seems to me, wants mature love and a thoughtful, free response from us. God loves us in partnership, with mutual give and take, and we naturally become mirrors of God now. Love transforms us from within!
God's love we long to experience now is available by a simple choice. The new birth is not about a baptism or a grand conversion experience. It's a quiet "yes" in the secret of your consciousness.
Your "yes" to God births not just a brand new child but grows an evolving adult into full maturity without you hassling doctrines or debating theological issues. (Galatians 5:22-23-TM)
The essence of Immanuel now, and apocalyptically projected into eternity is "Come, into my life forever." (Revelation 22:20-TM)
The understanding of God as "Immanuel" turns human history and all of God's "advents" into glorious manifestations of unlimited love, of which Christmas is just one glimpse.
Immanuel drives theological imagination into its most profound meaning: the whole sweep of Creation and history joined with God—and each of us, too.
This is what it means to be a member of the body of Christ as the maifestation of God among humans! (1 Corinthians 12:27) You belong to God as much as Jesus on this earth was God's beloved! Even though we are not the historical Jesus, or the Christ, we are affirmed, accepted, and loved as Jesus was.
Jesus set the pattern for us. He taught we could be partakers of divinity in our human condition. Jesus affirmed how God feels about humans. Once you catch this glimpse you gain all the wisdom that comes from experiencing Immanuel within now!
With you on your journey!
Pastor Harold
