[Mcgregorpage] McGregorPage 589, Christmas 1, 12/30/07

[rmcgregoralbq at aol.com]

Christmas 1, December 30, 2007

Isaiah 63:7 9
Psalm 148
Hebrews 2:10 18
Matthew 2:13 23

God In Time

Something fundamental in the relationship between God and people changed when Jesus was born.  Isaiah extols God as the people's savior.  The Psalmist calls for a universal shout of joy at what God has done.  The Letter to the Hebrews explains the why and how of this new saving act.  Matthew tells us that God in coming to us walked the bitter path of the chosen people out of Egypt.

It wasn't that God just became the savior or that people suddenly needed saving.  These had always been true.  It was the relationship between the savior and the lost that changed.  The favored conception of salvation has always been God's descending from the heavens.  With the birth of Jesus, salvation emerges within us, comes into the world the way we come, flees from the threat of evil people, grows up within the context of family and community, wrestles with adversaries and dies in all the horror of human suffering.  Not exactly the salvation visualized by people who buy lottery tickets, a fortune dropping in one's lap.  Not exactly the salvation visualized by theists with a hierarchical understanding of community.
The new relationship is one of a fellow pilgrim, God as fellow pilgrim not "deus ex machina", God as cross-bearer rather than repairman, God as both priest and sacrifice.   The savior is among us and within us.  If anyone thinks we could have forced God out of the sky at the millennium by intensifying the desperation of people, that person has missed Christmas, two thousand of them.  God has come, and in coming has defined his coming within human history.  Rather than looking into the sky or looking for the end of history, look into the human community with the eye of the Wise Men who found a star not so much in the sky as resting above a stable.  Look at your community the way the shepherds looked at angel-defined Bethlehem.  Look at each other the way John the Baptist looked for "the one who is to come".   Look at yourself the way Jesus looked at himself.  If the eyes of faith are for seeing Christ in others, then these eyes are also for seeing Christ in one's self.   What better place for God to lift us than from within us.  Isaiah saw the savior within the history of Israel, "It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; he lifted them up and carried them all the days of old."  (Isaiah 63:9)  The birth of Jesus calls us to see the savior within the present, transforming the future, within an individual just as Jesus was individual, within the human community just as Jesus embraced and reconstituted the human community.

The incarnation doesn't set the "end time" aside.  The incarnation is about time.  Visions of the role of God as savior in the "end time" sustain the messenger in time, and the Gospel in time, just in time to proclaim:  "Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death."  (Hebrews 2:14-15)  The birth of Jesus means that salvation is always in time and that now is always the right time.  God's love is for salvation in time, not salvation too late. 


May these thoughts strengthen you. 
 
An Open Letter to Fellow Pastors 
>From Roland McGregor, United Methodist Pastor 
(an e-mail service) 
 
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