What an amazing God. Like the Israelites were taught to say, to ask, "Who is like our God?" None. None are like Him. Even though any other god is simply made up, even in the imagination of their creators, even in their imagination, they don't look anything like the real One. Sometimes, these gods are nothing more than weak and even sinful. Usually, they are grand and glorious, strong and victorious, but our God defies imagination. This grand and glorious God, who is strong and victorious, doesn't want to be known that way. It is true that He is, but that's not His concern. He wants to be known as wanting to be close to His people. Isn't that amazing?
Before too much time passes, I have to say something about the Gospel processional. What a marvelous way it demonstrates exactly God's desire to be close. We just kept singing Alleluias. It wasn't just traveling music, it was real celebration, real rejoicing, as we sang His praise, as He came among us, so we could hear the very word that we know He has spoken, to hear the Gospel lesson from the 1st chapter of John. The word rang out from the middle of us.
We heard Him speak about Himself: He was from the very beginning. Nothing was made that He didn't make. This same God, so powerful, with so much to His name, stands in the middle of us, speaking with the very words He had given the apostle John to write.
When He does that, though, He sets Himself to be hurt, but before we get to that, let's look to see how His desire to be close to His people totally fits His character. We already know He wants us to speak to Him. He even wants us to call Him Father, but this Christmas morning, let's look at the ways that He actually gets close. Let's run through history, and see how it is the story of Him wanting to be with people. It won't be a history with dates and places or hardly even any personal names. In fact, we'll hear only three, but in this history run-through we'll see how God wants to be close to us and what He needs to do so He can have it.
We can start with Adam and Eve, the first two names we encounter. Genesis tells us they heard the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. This indicates that this had been a regular occurrence. He was walking. How God walks, I don't know, but He will do it, He wanted to do it, He wanted to be among them, because He loves these creatures of His. These were the peak of His creation. After He created everything else, then it was time to make human beings. Now, He would have something to love. So, He communes with the creatures He has made in His own image. He walks in the cool of the day. That particular day, which Moses was describing, was not so good, but the times before, He enjoyed, yes, actually enjoyed being with His human creatures.
The problem was, somehow, Adam wasn't content with it. He wanted to be more like God. He wanted to become divine. He grabbed at God's deity for Himself. He wanted to deify humanity. This was not to happen. Adam leaped, grabbing and snatching, like trying to jump and grab a piece of fruit that it is out of reach, and then fell. He tried to leap into heaven, but he fell into hell. It was not given to humans to become God.
Even so, we have been doing it ever since. Like Adam's descendants that we are, we still want to be God. This is sin. As Adam's descendants, we will not tolerate God Himself telling us what we can and can't do. Smugly, we think we know better. "I can't help it; God will just have to tolerate what I do." It's the same thing as saying, "God, mind your own business. I don't want you butting into mine. I know you are a forgiving and tolerant God, so you will just have to let me be me, and not tell me what is expected of me. Treat me with respect, like an equal, because that is what I want to be."
Adam fell and we know it, but that doesn't stop us from still trying to do what he had tried to do. We still jump and grab at being God every time we sin, and still come up empty handed. We will never improve our humanity no matter how many times we try to assert ourselves. We only make it worse.
Still wanting what is not theirs to have, Adam and Eve, and all their descendants will at least try to get back to what they once had, to have the communion with Him, to know first hand and personally the love He has for them. But even this is now beyond their reach. The only way humanity could be restored back to the way it was before sin, the only way we could know this love again, is to submit to God's plan.
That plan would involve drawing close to His creatures again, this time in a way that was different from how it used to be. But in order for humanity to be what it was supposed to be this was the only way. Man had wanted to deify humanity. That didn't work. To get close again, God would have to humanize divinity. That's what Christmas is about. God becoming man. Man can't become God, but God can become man.
Little time passed before the plan was announced. It was expressed in terms of a promise. He let Adam and Eve know He would become a man. He spoke of the promise that was more than just a promise. He spoke it into being and treated it as though it had already been done. Adam and Eve believed His word. Now He would approach His human creatures, on the terms of that promised plan. Their sin would no longer separate Him from them, because they would be given access to Him through the work He was to do.
But the days of walking in the garden were gone. The closeness they knew before sin was not going to be, until the world would be returned to its state before sin.
Time moves on. After a while He started to unfold His plan of what He was going to do, of what He treated already as good as done. It would start with calling His own people, not just anyone, but a special group. From them, would come the man who would be Him, the man we know as Jesus. But at that point, He had not yet come. At this point in history, it was time for His people to learn what it will mean when He does come.
By bits and pieces He demonstrates it, even as He gives Himself opportunity to be with His people. He couldn't just sit there among them, in His unmasked glory, power, and holiness; it would destroy them, but He makes arrangements so He can put Himself in their midst anyway. He places Himself on the atonement cover of the ark of the Covenant, smack dab between the statues of the angels which adorned the cover. That ark, the box where God said He could be found, was stored in a tent, the Tabernacle. He called it the tent of meeting.
But it was still apparent the days of freely communing with Him was over. The days in the garden of Eden were a thing of the past. He was among His people, but He had to mask His presence because His holiness destroyed anything that wasn't holy.
Even when His plan is fulfilled, His holiness would still be nothing to be trifled with. Just as He approached the sinful Adam and Eve on the terms of the plan, He approached His specially called people on the same terms. Only through His Son would we know Him, would we be able to commune with Him.
Finally, the time came for Him to fulfill what He had said He would do, to actually come Himself, to actually become a human being, to come as Jesus. But His plan didn't seem quite foolproof. When He became a human being, people could reject Him. He would be weak. The holiness that His people knew when He was to be found in the tabernacle, when He was located between the cherubim, wasn't going to be so obvious. In fact, it would seem far from Him when He was a human.
We can see this in the details of the Christmas story. He is laid in an animal's feeding trough. His parents were not given a room. Shepherds, the lowest class of people, a step above the way we unfortunately are inclined to regard the homeless, were the ones who came to see Him. God looks weak. He is weak. He relies on His mother to give Him her breastmilk. Wonder of wonders, God is latched to the breast of a human woman, dependent on her to sustain His life. This is what it means to humanize divinity. This child is God, but He is very much a human.
Yet, look at what this plan accomplishes. God is among His people now. He is Immanuel-God with us-in a way He had never been able to be since the fall into sin. He walks among them literally. He speaks to them with His own mouth. He touches them with His own hands. He looks at them with His own eyes.
But it is too much for many of the people who God had specially called to be His own. They can't handle a God that is so weak. They want the powerful God, the glorious and majestic God. They want the One who is always victorious, but this child and then man seems to be almost mockery.
He is too easy to discount, too easy to write off. He even lets them do it. How disappointing, to finally be with His people and then to be treated this way. To be the One they had been waiting for, the light they needed, and they turn away, but this was to be expected.
Before we judge them, we better realize we descendants of Adam aren't much different from them. We don't want to be mocked. To approach the holy, Almighty God through something that appears so flimsy, so weak, seems to be a joke. We would rather bypass the Son, and go straight to the Father. The Father, who so badly wants to be with His people, can only be approached through the Son, can only approach us through His Son, but we are impatient. We recognize that we are still not treated as equals, and resent it.
Except for His grace, we would continue to do the same as they had done, reject Him out of hand, but because of His grace, He has shown us this is the only way. We believe this is so. We have the faith, which He has given us first in our baptism, that says, "Because of Jesus, I now have access to the Father. Because of our baptism, we have been given Jesus, so we have the protection we need, so we can approach the Father. We can say, I can now know God's love for me, whether I feel it or not. I have been covered with Jesus' righteousness so that I am now seen as Adam had been before the fall. I am now seen as sinless. Because of Jesus, I am now seen as the human I was meant to be. Because of Jesus, my humanity is not deified, but I am as close to being back to the way it was supposed to be this side of heaven.
And as further assurance, as even more proof this is so, Jesus gives His body and blood. Jesus, who is none other than God in human form, laid in a manger, hung on a cross, emerging from a tomb, now gives Himself, to place on our tongues His very flesh and blood, that He may draw even closer, as close as He can until that one day when we are completely free of sin. And all the saints in heaven and angels sing.
AMEN