The two major holidays in the Christian calendar are Christmas and Easter. Of the two, it’s often said that Easter is the more important because it’s when Jesus died for our sins and was raised by the Father to new life.
Well and good, but I want to make a case this morning for Christmas, and I’m not talking about decorations and presents under the tree, as much as I really do enjoy all that. Theologically speaking, the story of Christmas is about the incarnation – the entry of the divine into the human world, the merging of spirit and flesh. We are created as both. Early Christians came from many cultural backgrounds, and for the first few centuries they sought to make sense of the story of Jesus. Some said Jesus was wholly divine, while others said no, Jesus was completely human. They eventually worked out that Jesus’s nature was both: fully divine and fully human. He was God with us: Emmanuel.
I want to suggest this morning that there is more to the biblical story of the Incarnation than just Jesus being both human and divine. I want to suggest to you that as God’s children, we too combine the human and the divine.
If that sounds heretical to you, remember that the Bible teaches from its very first chapter that we are created in the image of God. Each of us carries the image of the divine within us. Put another way, the image of God is the essence of who we are. I realize that that may be a strange or foreign thought. Many strains of Western theology have emphasized our sin almost to the exclusion of everything else, in some cases going so far as to say that we are born with nothing but sin, that we are “totally depraved” and without any good whatsoever.
The trouble is that you have to ignore a lot of actual babies to believe that. You have to think of God as less loving than we are. You have to forget or ignore a lot of Scripture in order to believe that, too.
Genesis 1:26 tells us that when God created the very first people, he said, “Let’s make them in our image, according to our likeness…” The core of who we truly are is the image of God. The image of God is our true nature.
The next time someone tries to make you feel worthless, remind yourself of Genesis 1:26. Remind yourself – and maybe that other someone – that you are both created in the image of God. Neither of you is worthless, though some people’s worth may be harder for us to see than others.
People usually come to be bullies because they feel worthless. They’re trying to make themselves feel worthy by making someone else feel and appear less than they are. The problem is, that strategy never actually works. Bullies keep bullying people because the bullying never fixes their basic problem. To paraphrase what they say in AA, bullies keep doing more and more of what never worked in the first place. The only way to create a sense of worth is to honor the image of God in each of us, starting with ourselves.
Here’s the good news of the gospel: You and I, and every person we meet, are all sacred. It’s not because we’ve been baptized or because we go to church. We are sacred because we have been born.
Some people like to argue over the early chapters in Genesis. Was the world created in seven days or thirteen-point-something billion years? Whichever side of that argument you take, when it comes to understanding Genesis, that entire argument completely misses the point. The message in Genesis is not about God’s timetable. The message there is that you and I were created to live in the Garden, in harmony with the God in whose image we were made. The Garden is our natural home. It is who we really are.
What does that mean for us?
- It means that the wisdom within us is deeper than our ignorance, deeper than any mistakes we’ve made along the way. We are not the sum of our mistakes.
- The fact that we were created for the Garden means that our passion for God is deeper than our apathy. We only have to awaken it.
- The fact that we were created for the Garden means that creativity is part of being both human and divine. Our creative spirit is deeper than any barrenness of spirit that may depress us.
Some people will say, “Ah, but Dave, you’re forgetting about sin.” And I have to answer, “No, I’m really not. I just don’t believe that my sin is greater than God’s love.”
Here’s the thing about sin. A lot of Christian theology defines sin as disobeying God – it’s breaking God’s law. To that way of thinking, God is primarily a judge who metes out punishment for breaking the rules. Compassion doesn’t enter into the picture; this viewpoint considers only the law. These folks see human beings essentially as foreigners who don’t belong in God’s kingdom; they can only “get in” if Jesus pays the fine for our sin. Until then, these folks say, in God’s eyes, we are our sin, more or less.
But there’s another way to look at sin. Imagine a botanist studying an unfamiliar plant she has just discovered. The plant obviously has a blight of some sort; a few of the leaves are wilted, and there are spots of fungus on the stem.
When the botanist draws a sketch of the plant as it really is, she’s not going to draw the blight as though it was part of the plant. She’s going to draw the plant without the blight, as best she can, based on the healthy parts of the leaves and stem. That’s the real plant, not the blight.
I think of that blight as a metaphor for sin. Sin is a blight on us. It’s not who or what we really are, but it distorts our ability to be who we were meant to be. It doesn’t disappear in the blink of an eye just because we went through some ritual at church. Sin is anything we do that isn’t our true self. We were created to love, so when we fail to love, we are less than we were created to be. We are weakened by the blight of sin. We were created to live in harmony with God, so when we fill our minds with things that distract us from God’s presence, we are diverted from being able to sense that Presence. We are less than we were created to be.
No matter what we do, we can’t change the fact that we were created in the image of God. We don’t lose that image. But in order to enter the kingdom of God that Jesus preached, we have to begin to recover from the blight. We have to embark on a journey of subtraction: praying and allowing God to take away all those things that obscure his image within us. Some have called it the journey back to the Garden, to the place where we can begin again to live in greater harmony with God.
This is not an easy journey. Anyone who tells you that they have an easy or quick remedy for the blight of sin is trying to get something from you. The blight of sin is a cancer that can grow to consume us. It needs to be removed. The surgery required is deep, and it’s ongoing. It’s not so superficial that it can be removed without struggle and suffering along the way.
But the presence of sin can never change the true image of God within us. Think what a difference that assumption could make if it was shared by everyone.
- The first European explorers looked at Native Americans and thought they saw only barbarians, totally lost in sin and completely without God. Think how different things might have been if they had looked and seen the image of God among the Mohawks, Creeks, and other tribes.
- Think how different American history would be if slave traders had had eyes to see the image of God in the people of Africa.
At Christmas time, we remember that Christ comes to reawaken us to our true nature. A ninth-century Irish theologian named John Scotus Eriugena taught that nature and grace both flow from God. He said that the gift of nature is the gift of being; the gift of grace is the gift of well-being (J. Philip Newell, Christ of the Celts, page 9). We need grace to be able to understand our true selves, the selves that God created in his own image. Grace enables us to strip away the false selves, the masks blighted by our sin. God’s healing grace transforms us and makes us alive to the wisdom we were born with.
There’s a powerful phrase from our reading in Philippians today: “the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.” As far as I can tell, that phrase “harvest of righteousness” occurs four times in the New Testament, three times from Paul and again from James (2 Cor 9:10; Gal 6:9; Philippians 1:11; James 3:18).
In order to have a harvest, you first have to have planted a seed. Then you have to nurture that seed, give it good soil and water and sunlight, and protect it from weeds that might choke it out while the seed is trying to grow.
God planted a seed in us when he created us in his image. Our job is to grow and nurture that seed within. We need to take in good things that help us grow. We need to keep away from the things that stunt or warp our growth. That’s an ongoing struggle as we go through life. If we ignore God’s seed in us, if we allow the weeds and blight to have their way, that seed will be harder and harder to see, and we’ll miss out on a full harvest.
Our job as a congregation is to help each other to grow. We do that in love, through our actions and our presence. But perhaps most of all, we nurture God’s image within when we pray, so while you’re at it, take a moment to pray now.
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