4 min 44 sec: app reading time
December 22, 2024
CHRISTMAS BEYOND SENTIMENTALITY
Dear Friend:
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 theologicl 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 it this side of eternity. My Bible says, "God became Immanuel," which means "God with us." (Matthew 1:23-TM) That's enough. The trinity and the apologetics of salvation are marginal to the central theme, 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 am affirmed and rooted in faith with the paradox and ambivalence of "Immanuel" as Divinity manifested in human body 2,000 years ago.
The purpose of Immanuel was to declare before the whole universe that it is good to be human. Humanity is God's treasured and designed creation.
Jesus identified his own mission with what he called the coming of the "reign of God" (Mark 1:14-15-TM) or the physical manifestation of God's presence on this planet as it had been set since eternity before Jesus came as "Immanuel" and thorughout eternity!
Nothing was ever out of control, except out of sight to humanity. God's evolutionary journey throughout human history is beyond what we depict in our temporal experience.
The next time God shows up on planet Earth will be at the end of times. The grand Advent Christians call the "Second Coming of Jesus," is a future epiphany out of God's multiple evolutiomary advents throughout ancient history. I see God's "relational evolutionary wholeness" in my theology of God as the canvass on which cosmic interactions between God and creation take place from eternity to eternity.
We have often settled at this time of the year for the sweet arrival of a baby and concocted disconnected pieces of the Nativity puzzle to make sense of a paradox. It happened. Yet, the details of it are as controversial as scholars can come up with opinions and views to this date.
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, 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 then I am saved as a human even now! God's love is eternal, so is grace! God treasures humanity. That's why God chose to come as Immanuel!
Christmas 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 giving us a chance to parade the broken pieces of a mirror in religious acts while missing the wholeness of God's presence. You and I are the face of God now as Jesus was the face of God 2,000 years ago. 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. Relational participation and mutuality are essential to a healthy theology of God.
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 who is content with "baby or dead Christianity" is the one who idolizes a religious construct. God is relational and experiential beyond logic theological debates.
Any spirituality or sense of wholeness within consciousness 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 now.
If we are to affirm the biblical idea that 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 as I read the Biblical narrative, wants mature relationships and a thoughtful, free response from us. God loves us in partnership, with mutual give and take, as we are naturally transform from within and become mirrors of God now. Relational love transforms from within.
God's love we long to experience now is available by a simple choice. The new birth is not about the baptism or a grand conversion experience. It's a quiet "yes" in the secret space of your consciousness.
Your "yes" to God births not just a brand new child but grows an adult into full maturity without you hassling doctrines or debating theological issues. Within God's "cosmic divine-human" presence, evolves within your experience; the essence of Immanuel now, and apocalyptically projects it into eternity. "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 welcome theological imagination in 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! You belong to God as much as Jesus on this earth was God's beloved! Even though we are not the historical Jesus, we are affirmed, accepted, and loved as Jesus was. Jesus was the pattern of how God feels about each human being on planet Earth now.
Once you catch this glimpse you will gain all the wisdom that comes from experiencing Immanuel within now!
With you on your journey!
Pastor Harold
