O Come, O Come, Emmanuel!!!

A thread runs throughout the entire history of creation revealing that the will of God is to be Emmanuel, God With Us. Unfortunately, too often the way we have told this story is with a narrative of God beginning with Plan A (a perfect creation) which then requires God to come up with a Plan B when humanity sins and somehow screws up that creation. In this Plan B, the Christ Event is perceived as a kind of bandaid solution to human sin, a way of forgiving it and appeasing an infinitely offended God. I have even heard a version of this story where the theologian imagining the situation had a kind of heavenly conference occur between the three members of the Trinity to decide who would "go to earth" to resolve the problem!

Fortunately, we have now come to understand our world in evolutionary terms, and this means that the Christ Event is not Plan B, the way God deals with the unexpected and imperfect that are the result of human sin. Instead, it is what God willed from the beginning, a kind of evolutionary moment where a new creation begins in Christ. Sin is real, of course, and the Christ Event deals with sin and the godless death associated with it, but even more fundamentally, the Christ Event is part of this creation's evolution toward fullness and a new heaven and new earth where God is all in all. When scholars read Genesis and the story of the Garden of Eden today, we tend to read it as an account of our future and what we have been made for; it is the story of this played off against the way and reasons we refuse that future every day, rather than being an account of some primordial past. In this reading, the story becomes one of walking with God in a unique intimacy (or choosing to reject such intimacy out of self-consciousness and a sense of self-centered unworthiness). It too is manifestly the story of God as Emmanuel, God With Us and represents the most original will of God to not remain alone but to create as the sovereign God in search of a counterpart.

In creation, God is revealed as Emmanuel the One who wills to be God with us and the history of humankind is about learning that this is the God we are called to allow to love us fully as Emmanuel. In Jesus' life, and death, God is definitively revealed as Emmanuel, God With Us, and thus demonstrates his choice to assume a personal place in our lives and in and with his creation. In Jesus' resurrection and ascension, God reveals himself as the One who makes space within his own life for embodied (not disembodied!) human existence. Heaven and earth have begun more and more to interpenetrate one another. When we attend to the prospect of a second coming, it is within the context of a new heaven and new earth where God is not separated from earthly reality, but instead,as noted earlier, has become all in all. (Can we even begin to imagine what this phrase means??!!) 

At every moment of this extended narrative, our attention is drawn to God's eternal will to reveal himself (to make himself known and real in space and time) as Emmanuel, the One who is with us in the unexpected and even the unacceptable place, the One who will allow nothing at all including sin and godless death to separate us from the Love-in-Act he is. We certainly see and celebrate all of these themes on today's Feast of Jesus' Nativity.  My sincerest prayer is that we can celebrate this God and (his) presence with us today and every day. I believe this is what it means to act, pray, and live in the name (the powerful self) of God. It is a name and power we must not forget, the name and power of redemption from bondage, of genuine Freedom and human wholeness, of promise and fulfillment for the whole of Creation --- the Name and power of Emmanuel, God With Us.