Skip to main content

Christmas 2013

Christmas marks and reminds us of a day a couple millennia ago when the Creator God was born as a helpless human baby. The Creator as creature.

He came as the object of promises made by that Creator God from hundreds and thousands of years before; the birth was the fulfillment of promises and mark the steadfast faithfulness of God. God had not forgotten His people, or the world.

Birthed to live a life as the Life we are made to live. Birthed to live as an example for us; a life of love and acknowledgement of God. Having lived that life, He is destined to die not simply to effect our salvation, but as the ultimate expression of love for you and me; as the ultimate expression of submission to God as an expression of love.

This child reminds us that the world is not foreign to us or to God, but a place to which He deigns to come because He has made it; because He loves it; because He loves you. Loves you and offers you Life with Him.

Two thousand years ago, the beginning of the culmination of God's reconciliation of the world to Himself.

Merry Christmas!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Freewheeling

Merton never disappoints. Here's an excerpt from "Love and Living," a collection of individual writings collected after his death in 1968: "Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling; to do this one must recognize what is one's own—be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid." This short passage is pregnant with meaning and spiritual insight (would we expect anything less?). Let's start with the last few words: "…make that offering valid." The offering of ourselves, of our lives is our calling. We offer ourselves to assist the re-creation of Creation; the reconciling of Man to God. The validity of our offering is measured in how closely we mirror the work of God; to what extent our motivations are based on knowing who we are rather than a slavish obedience to p...

Wineskins II

       In chapter 16 of Matthew, Peter ‘makes the great confession’ - Jesus he says is the Son of the Living God. At Covenant, when someone wants to become a member or to be baptized, we ask them who Jesus is and we expect this response. Peter is correct when he says this, but it is not clear that Peter (or the other disciples) understood the ramifications of his statement. Following Peter’s statement we find a series of incidents that make us wonder just how much Peters actually believed what he had said.      In the first instance, Jesus compares Peter to Satan. Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to Jerusalem and there he will die. Peter exclaims that he will not let that happen; Jesus will not be killed. Peter is expecting great things from Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God on behalf of Israel and he cannot fit Jesus dying into his hope for a greater Israel under this Messiah. This cannot happen, he reasons. Jesus’s response is a harsh re...

Wineskins

  Jesus comes from the Wilderness where the Spirit has driven him for testing, announcing the imminent coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. His message to the crowds calls them to repent because the “Kingdom is at hand.” The kingdom or the effective rule of God has come upon Israel and Israel’s expected response is to return to her God. A number of passages tell us the sorts of things God has against Israel or at least her leaders. They have the form of the People of God, but not the substance. He will call those opposed to him “white-washed tombs” to describe their religious and moral corruption. They look good but are dead. He calls these people to repentance, to return to “their first love,” to actually live as though they are the People of God. In another place, he will tell them that while they do well to tithe mint and cumin, they have missed the larger point of caring for people. In the judgment scene, he describes sending into a place of gnashing of teeth those who failed to gi...