The title of my sermon this Christmas Eve is taken from a meditation I read several weeks ago by Franciscan priest and spirituality author, Father Richard Rohr. He writes,
Christmas Eve is an invitation to fall in love with God so that what is impossible might come to pass in our broke, frightened, and confused lives and world. I know that tonight I am ready to fall in love with God again and embrace the Christ child…maybe you are too. And so we sing together this love song
My goal tonight is to invite you and myself to fall in love again with God and embrace the Christ child within you. We sing our Christmas carols, and they are really love songs. We ponder our primal connection with God by listening to an all too familiar story about the birth of Jesus. We find ourselves emotionally drawn into the familiar story that inspires and sets our imagination and hearts on fire. Or to put in terms that I like: It sets our inner child free to respond to a call of grace.
St. Francis of Assisi, one of my favorite Christian saints, originated the Nativity crèche with animals present. Francis believed that the birth of Jesus, God’s incarnation, was already salvation, breaking boundaries down between the divine child and creatures, human and animal creatures. Once the divine community of love—that we call God—took on human flesh, then not only humanity but all other life and creation in its entirety became even more precious to God because God became physical matter or embodied. God incorporated the embodied Christ from the moment of conception into God’s self.
We have been trained to think that the incarnation took place in the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem or the Mary’s pregnancy in Nazareth some 2000 years. But the incarnation is not separate from the process of creation, the big bang 15 billion years ago, and the salvation of all the universe in the distant future whenever that happens. For God, it is a singular event –outpouring of love and compassion to all.
The author to the Ephesians at the end of the first century CE describes how God designed a plan with Christ for the fullness of time to gather up all things in heaven and earth (Ephesians 1:9-10). From the beginning before time and space, which we call creation, God planned with Christ to bring a “fullness or completeness” to creation with Christ. I want you to ponder on this point; it was made a by 13th century Franciscan theologian John Dun Scotus, and I want you wrap your mind around this fact that he proposes: The first idea in the mind of God ever was to dream and think about Christ, and God has never stopped ever reflecting and loving the Christ and their love together has generated the Spirit—a threefold community of divine love for all time as we can imagine.
This divine community of love chose that the incarnation of Christ would start with creation of the universe, spinning off into galaxies of stars, our own sun and solar system, on earth with the first sign of light, water, plants, trees, air, and every kind of other life. God’s incarnation took place in the big bag explosion of creation and through the evolution of some 15 billion years in the proto-matter and energy of the emerging galaxies of stars before that the flowering of incarnation took place in the womb of Mary and the birth of a child in Bethlehem. One theologian calls this “ancestral grace.” Let me explain how this ancestral grace of creation ripens in a cold morning hours on the outskirts of Bethlehem.
I don’t know about you, but I am overwhelmed by the love I experience in the grace of God’s love life that from the first thought in the mind of God was Christ, creation, and us. Wow! In a wonderful book—The Body of Christ— environmental theologian Sallie McFague claims, ”salvation is the direction of all of creation, and creation is the very place of salvation.” When we stop dividing creation, incarnation, and salvation and understand them as one movement of divine grace and love originating from the first thought in the mind of God. In our Christmas hymns, we sing praise to Emmanuel, God with us. We celebrate creation, Christ’s incarnation, and salvation altogether. God with us has been always here in and with creation.
Emmanuel, God with us, is born of a young woman of 13 years or so. Emmanuel, God with us, is helpless, vulnerable, dependent upon Mary and Joseph for his survival. He feels the cold and the dampness of winter in a manger. The family has taken refuge in a primitive cave from the wintery night. We believe that God took physical flesh so that we humans could fall in love with God with a human face, body, and limbs. We have difficult as humans to fall in love with God as infinite energy or extravagant graciousness out there. But we fall in love with God now for us, loud cries, and tears of a baby. God is radically and inclusively available to us. There are no barriers or obstacles, God is vulnerably there as a helpless newborn.
The paradoxical mystery of the Incarnation becomes real in the Christmas story that we re-tell each year. What I mean by paradox is that we bring seemingly contradictory points of view to make sense of the mystery before us. For instance, the incarnation of God in human flesh is one of those paradoxical mysteries. UCC biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann, calls this paradoxical event, “the scandal of the particular.” As I mentioned, one such particular scandal is God’s taking flesh and living among us. The physical and the spiritual co-exist together in one body; or the eternal and infinite God are united in a human body.
As we try to unwrap the Christmas mystery, I want to throw into the mix an additional paradox. As God takes flesh in the womb of Mary and is born into the world, we encounter the mystery that the radical inclusive, unconditional love and grace of God takes shape in the world. Our infinite God becomes flesh in the fragile life and body of a child; his family and life are later threatened, and they flee from Bethlehem. The mystery is the scandal of radical infinite inclusive love—given to us as a gift—take on a particular physical reality. This is shocking to many non-Christians who want a superman Christ, not a vulnerable child.
To embrace this mystery challenges the way we see things. We are invited to view life differently. We have been taught God is out there or up there in heaven, distant from us. But actually, Emmanuel—God with us—points not out there but in our midst. God is available here tonight. And the mystery is that God has always been very near to us from the beginning.
Once we restore God’s incarnation to the center of our faith lives, we catch a glimpse that our views of God are too narrow. Our practice of Christian spirituality has a lot of walls that protect us from life around us and from God with us. Our lives have been too sheltered from love and life, connection to what ultimately matters. It has been covered over by our ego-centeredness. We have placed the birth and life of Jesus in a mission impossible perspective of God sending Jesus down to rescue us from ourselves. There is some truth to that, but there is another stronger point of view. The birth of Jesus, and his later life, is about celebrating and affirming the ancestral grace that started of all this. God’s love is so extravagant and abundant that it cannot be contained, but it flows into creation, incarnation, and salvation—fully being incorporated into the divine community of love. We carry that incarnation, that ancestral grace, in our bodies as well.
The birth of Christ is God’s communication and invitation to fall in love with Christ and the divine community of love. Christ is God’s wild love for us, or rather God’s radically inclusive love for all creation. God offers us an invitation to enter a loving relationship with Christ.
There is some startling consequences when we meditate on God’s incarnation—God’s birth unwrapped from mystery to break down all barriers and walls. All inclusive love originates from the divine community of radical inclusive love, and we are made a part of that community love.
The first consequence is God’s dissolving the boundaries of divine and human. God reveals God’s self, no longer in spoken word but revealed and embodied in flesh. God breathes air with a body, feels, experiences vulnerability and emotions, and all the experiences we share as human beings. God comes out as radical love, shattering all human boundaries and conceptual walls surrounding God. God becomes flesh because God wants us to know that God love us. It is also the fact that God wants to experience what we experience as creatures. God became flesh to allow creation—all life—to share in God’s eternal life. Early generations of Christians claimed that God became human to allow humans to become divine. This is the ancestral grace of creation ripening through history until a pregnancy of a young girl Miriam in Nazareth and the birth of a divine child in a stable in Bethlehem. God is with us and for us.
God’s radical inclusive love breaks down the walls between rich and poor, the powerful and the weak, insider and outsider. Humans exclusively divide the human world, peoples, and other life into categories: race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, classes, age, ability, religion, and so on. Our exclusions are the result of human sinfulness to separate ourselves from others by noting their differences from ourselves.
The human life of God” begins with images of homelessness and poverty. Two peasants are not in control of their lives, for they are subject to the administration of the Roman Empire. They are immigrants, undocumented traveling to make themselves legal statistics in the Roman Empire, but without any rights and privileges of citizenship. They are powerless, marginalized, and poor. They are in our midst as undocumented persons who carry the image of Christ.
God with us is birthed to dissolve exclusions, tear down walls, break down barriers and remove boundaries. Emmanuel was destined to become a rule-breaker and rebelliously tearing away obstacles. Jesus manifested God’s radical inclusive love in his lifetime, and I often why so many of us got it wrong by becoming exclusive and creating walls. Jesus came to include, never to exclude, for that is the very nature of God made incarnate to include us all.
What is so alarming about the nature of God’s as radical inclusive love is that its openness to include so much wider than any of us can imagine. Humans want to privilege itself with divisions, with categories, walls of prejudice and self-importance. We are not like that! We not related to…fill in the blank with whatever group of people make you feel uncomfortable—leather folk, homeless, the mentally ill, people from different cultures, religions, and races. We are better than them, were privileged, we are special, we are part of the in-group. Radical inclusivity means what it says. It is the intentional inclusion of all persons who have been marginalized and all those people who make us uncomfortable.
Yet there is more to this inclusivity. The incarnate Christ is born in a stable. Being born in the stable is not an exclusive group. Instead of saying humanity is superior to animals, the incarnate God blurs the edges once more with openness. But it is more radical when we realize that Christ was born in a stable with animals present. The divide we human make between us and animals dissolve in the incarnated Christ. Christ came to other life as well as for us humans. This time God says humans and other life are precious to God’s self because all creatures are loveable to God and have intrinsic value to God’s self. The consequences are staggering since the incarnate one says salvation is not just a human event as we were taught in our churches. Salvation is a cosmic event whereby all creatures, all creation, is included, not just exclusively humanity. Jesus would be later designated the Lamb of God; he died for all animals as well as human beings.
God’s arms are extended openly to all with compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and love. Our God is wide open with love, and this sends streaks of panick among religious conservatives with boundaries, walls surrounding God’s extravagant grace and exuberant welcome. They want to focus on sin and holiness to make distinctions and to set walls between us. But this is not way of God who includes. It is humans uncomfortable that everyone may be admitted to the table.
Jesus is the incarnation of God’s wild grace. And this means for us this Christmas the realization that to celebrate the birth of Christ includes a new vision of what is. It is a God-centered vision that all life is reverenced from the simplest to the highest. Incarnation is grace coming to a logical definition within history. We’re all saved by God’s compassionate love, without exception. Rohr writes,
Resurrection is incarnation coming to its logical conclusion. If God is already in everything, then everything is from glory and unto glory. We’re all saved by mercy, without exception. We’re all saved by grace, so there’s no point in distinguishing degrees of worthiness because God alone is “all good,” and everything else in creation participates in that one, universal goodness to varying degrees. There is no absolute dividing line between worthy and unworthy people in the eyes of God, because all our worthiness is merely participation in God’s.