We struggle to describe the mystery of Christmas. We say God came. What came? Who came? There is no adequate name for God, only hints of God’s Being, God’s Reality. We say Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace. All hint at something ineffable, beyond, infinite–that which we cannot grasp and know but have received intimations of, and a few times have even experienced directly.
This Beyond reality, whatever name and other descriptors we give it, is Love. We know it is Love because it wants to be close to us – to be deeply connected with all that has been created. The infinite galaxies, the endlessly fascinating space we call Earth, all the multiple expressions of Life, including what we call human life, was brought into being because that is what Love does.
It is the nature of Love to beget, to become, to bring together.
Several minutes ago (or in human time, about 2000 years) God said, “Love compels me to get closer. I must be amongst this life I’ve created and loved from the beginning. I must find a way to be even more deeply connected and let my people know me and enter more deeply into their true nature, which is deeper and deeper unity with one another. They are by nature ONE. I must let them know.”
The awesome claim of Christmas is that this ineffable Reality that brought it all into being wanted to be more deeply involved with the created, wanted to be with us, be one of us. “I will make a new covenant with my people. I will remove the heart of stone that shuns this closeness, and I will replace it with a heart of flesh which wants no separateness. I will come into their midst, assuming total vulnerability alongside them and will establish this new covenant of union. Together my people and I will live in this ecstatic union and draw all creation toward the joy of it.”
That’s the culmination of the work of the Babe in Bethlehem’s manger. Joyful union of all creation with the God of our beginning.
Source: Taken from a Sermon given by Gordon at The Church of the Saviour. Gordon, his wife Mary, and a few courageous others co-founded the church some 60 years ago as an expression of God’s radical reconciliatory Love…it was an inter-racial church made up of rich and poor located in a poor neighborhood of Washington, DC. I attended and worked with a few of the missions for many years during the 1990’s and hold this Church dear to my heart.
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