Christmas 2

Christmas 2 No one has ever seen God.

St. Anselm had the insight that God is greater than that which we can conceive. It is a wonderful description of the ineffable mystery of the Divine. Unfortunately, St. Anselm then attempted to use the limited categories of human reason to set forth a logical proof for the existence of God.
God does not prove his own existence. God transcends all human created categories of existence and essence. God is "I AM". God is the infinite and eternal Presence from which humanity flees and against which humanity rebels.

God doesn’t prove his own existence but he does reach out to the human race. He chose one family, the family of Abraham, to work with over a period of time spanning two thousand years. He sent that family Moses, to reveal the Law. He sent the prophets to call them to repent and prepare. In the fulness of time, God sent His only Begotten co-eternal Son to be born into that family and to manifest the personal life giving love of the Divine Presence.

In Jesus Christ the plan, and pattern and purpose of our lives took human form. God determined it was not enough to send a Lawgiver and Prophets. God knew the visitation of angels was at best inadequate to accomplish his goal. God sent his Son, His only Son into the world to take human form and to be born into the family of Abraham to reveal God’s Presence.

The Divine Presence is unconditional love. There is no condemnation in Jesus Christ. People condemned him. People attempted to use him to satisfy the demands of self will. People eventually killed Jesus because he would not allow them to use him and he would not tell them what they wanted to hear.

Jesus exercised divine power from the place of infinite love and compassion. This was not what people expected of the Messiah. This was not what people expected of God. The beloved apostle John tells us that Jesus came to his own people and his own people rejected him. They, we as a species, reject Jesus because he does not fit into the rigid and inflexible categories of reason, will and emotion that we seek to impose on ourselves, each other, the world, and God.

As God refuses to prove His existence so He refuses to allow human beings to define His existence. The fulness of divine revelation is not in a prophet, priest or king. It is not in a book, a program or a religion. The fulness of divine revelation is in a person, a particular man who lived in a particular place at a particular time. That man is Jesus Christ.

In Jesus God manifests himself and makes himself known. If you want to know what God is like then study the life of Jesus Christ. There are four eyewitness accounts in the four gospels. There are multiple apostolic commentaries on the gospels in the New Testament writings.

The great revelation that Jesus brings to us from God is that God is for us. God is not against us. God is with us in Jesus Christ. God is not a vague concept or a philosophical construct. God is real. God is personal. God is love. God is Jesus Christ.

All of the stories about Jesus are recorded for a single purpose: that all people every where may have the opportunity to hear the Good News that God is with us, all of us, each of us, in Jesus Christ.

Jesus offers all people everywhere the gift of reunification with God. Jesus continues to be the divine Presence in four ways.

These four ways are the Bible, the Sacraments, the Church, and the Holy Spirit.
The Bible is the record of God reaching out to Abraham and his descendants to prepare them to receive the Messiah, the anointed Son of God. The Bible records with brutal honesty how so often so many people heard the message and rejected the message God proclaimed through Moses and the prophets.

As a book, the Bible offers multiple insights into the human condition. All of those insights are collected and presented by the action of the Holy Spirit to convict us of the reality of our condition. They are there to reveal to us the solution God offers.

The solution is Jesus Christ. After the resurrection and ascension, Jesus gave the world three means by which we can experience his real presence in the world. The Church, the One Holy and Apostolic Church is the body of Christ at work in the world.

Jesus calls every member of the church to be his personal representative in the world. Jesus calls us to focus our time and attention on three loves: love of God, love of others, love of our own soul.

Jesus empowers us to live from the place of love by the invitation to the total immersion of our souls in that love in two ways: the sacraments and the Holy Spirit.
In the blessed sacrament of the altar, Jesus infuses his own divine life into our souls. As we receive the bread and wine by grace through faith Jesus offers us a new way of living, a new way of being human.

The transforming power of that new way of living and that new way of being human is the indwelling personal presence of the third person of the Holy Trinity. We are each temples of the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who leads us, encourages us and comforts us as we learn that self will is not free will.

It is the Holy Spirit who helps us make the real choice to surrender self will to divine will and to discover the grace of free will. To be free is Christ is to be free from the pressures of the secular world to conform to its demands and deceits. It is the true freedom that brings joy and peace in whatever circumstances we may experience life.

The Holy Spirit sets us free from the tyranny of time. It is that tyranny that brings fear, anxiety, pride and despair to our souls. The Holy Spirit sets us free in the eternal now of the Divine Presence, the great "I am" made flesh, made personal in Jesus Christ.

No one has ever seen God in all of his fulness and glory except the co-eternal Beloved of God, Jesus Christ. As we unite ourselves to Christ in the waters of baptism and in the blessed sacrament of the altar, we begin to live in the Divine Presence. It is we, each of us, who become the proof of God’s reality as we grow in grace and form our lives to become a blessing to others.
Jesus has made God known in himself when he lived on this planet. Jesus continues to make God known in each of us as we hear the invitation to immerse our souls in the real presence of divine love and compassion.

No one has ever seen God. God can make himself known to people through you as you make a real choice to live the new life of grace through faith in the co-eternal Beloved of God, Jesus Christ.