Christmas I

Christmas I (John 1:1-18) “The Word became flesh.”

Jesus is God.

In Jesus, God unites His divinity with our humanity permanently and irrevocably.

Moses and the prophets observe the human condition and conclude that the great problem defining our species is separation. Through Adam and Eve humanity chose to separate from God. In that separation we also chose to perpetuate separation from God, from each other, from life itself.

Human nature is now defined by the corrupting power of Original Separation. In our personal individual lives we bring forth the pattern of separation in sin and death.  We are not only lost in sin we are willfully and spitefully lost.

The lost do not want to be found. The lost perpetuate separation through prideful distortion of virtue, Law, religion and science. God Himself invites us to test this assertion. Through the prophet Isaiah God declares: come, let us reason together.

In a world of abundance there is scarcity. How does that happen?

For a species created in the image and likeness of unconditional love there is fear. Where does that fear come from?

The moment you explain a rule to a child testing the limits of the rule becomes his chief priority. Why?

God reveals to us that He created the world and people respond with skepticism, cynicism and pride.

God invites us to assume the responsibility to care for each other and we demand the right to assert our individual will to power.

No law can correct this problem. No religion, spiritual exercise, philosophy or science can restore the Original Blessing our species rejected and continues to repudiate.

That is why God the Father sent God the Son in the power of God the Holy Spirit.

God the Son is the pattern of all things and all people. The Greek philosophers, mathematicians and scientists called that pattern the logos- the rational transcendent creative and eternal Word by which, through which and for which all things exist.

Through our choice to separate from God, we shattered that pattern in our souls.  Having broken the pattern we no longer have the desire or the resources to repair the pattern.

God the Father repairs the pattern for us by sending God the Son to become the second Adam. God the Holy Spirit invites us to allow the Son to reunite what we have separated.

In Jesus God reunites us to Himself not just as a legal fiction but in a real organic and substantial way.

Since the problem with being lost is that we don’t want to be found, we don’t want the pattern we broke to be repaired, God does it all for us.

Salvation is reunification with God in the incarnate Son of God. It is a gift. We can’t earn it. We don’t deserve it. It is the gift of God in Jesus restoring the original blessing in the original pattern of the co-eternal Logos- the Word of God who comes to us in Jesus Christ.

Salvation is not a matter of debits and credits. It is also not a human right we can demand and claim. It is a gift. The gift and the giver of the gift are one.

They are one in the same because the gift and the giver are infinite and eternal love. Salvation is the how God the Father finds the lost in Jesus and then restores the lost by the transforming Presence of the Holy Spirit.

The original pattern of humanity is the Logos, the Word. And the Word became flesh in Jesus Christ to restore to us that original pattern of universal unconditional love.