Some Big Wondering

I am glad that this is the time of year when we celebrate Advent and Christmas.  I am glad because the things that I have been reading lately have very much to do with Jesus coming to live on this human ground called earth.

Advent, I remember reading once, is: “when God announced the divine intention to act decisively in the incarnation of the Word, everything gets turned on its head.” 

In church language: God came to earth, in human form, to bring His original message of Peace and Goodwill into the chaos of the world.

And an ethic of change was about to be enacted upon God’s people.

And you are probably sitting there saying to yourself:  “Yes, I know this.”

So, I invite you to think back at what you heard, and learned, in Sunday School about Jesus.  

In my memory it was not all that clear that Jesus was not just a man; but in actually God.

And if your experience is like mine you didn’t hear, too much is at all, about the Gospel of John. 

Yes, I was told that the baby Jesus born in a manger was Emanuel — God with us right here on earth.

On Christmas morning we alway heard — and still hear —  the Prolog of John’s Gospel “ Word of God became flesh and live among us.”

However, the confusion came with the messages we heard the rest of the year.  When everything seems to be disconnected from the realm of God on earth.

We always prayed to God above.  Separate from our physical life — real physical life. 

Don’t you remember how we were taught to pray?  We folded our hands, bowed our heads and talked to God somewhere out in space.

“Our Father who art in heaven..thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

A God separate, distant, from life of every day. 

We heard about the Trinity — God as three beings — by memorizing the Apostle’s Creed.

Who truly grasped that concept?

             I mean really understood it?

How did the Three impact our daily lives?

    How were we actually connected to the Three?

          Where did we fit in the larger picture of God?

More tomorrow.