a brief Christmas sermon

my thoughts about the importance of Christmas in light of tonight's sermon at St Matt's Wanniassa
(i should add, the sermon made me think about the importance Christmas should, and does have, and i also got to thinking about what would i say were i up the front doing the talk &c.).


Christmas recognises the God who crossed THE great divide: on one side the wholly other Holy Other, on the other fallen humanity. yet in reaching out to a world lost in sin, God reached out, crossed over, became one with us.

  The Word became flesh
and took up residence among us.
We observed His glory,
the glory as the One and Only Son from the Father,
full of grace and truth.
  (John testified concerning Him and exclaimed,
"This was the One of whom I said,
'The One coming after me has surpassed me,
because He existed before me.' ")
  Indeed, we have all received grace after grace
from His fullness,
  for although the law was given through Moses;
grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
  No one has ever seen God.
The One and Only Son —
the One who is at the Father's side —
He has revealed Him.
John 1:14-18

yet even though this eternal logos became flesh, it became flesh in the most paradoxical of ways - a bub in a food-trough.

God has chosen the world's insignificant and despised things — the things viewed as nothing — so He might bring to nothing the things that are viewed as something,
1 Corinthians 1:28

the nature of the incarnation

i thought people might apprectiate this quote from Augustine. i'm not sure where it's from - it's quoted here.

He it is by whom all things were made, and who was made one of all things; who is the revealer of the Father, the creator of the Mother; the Son of God by the Father without a mother, the Son of man by the Mother without a father; the Word who is God before all time, the Word made flesh at a fitting time, the maker of the sun, made under the sun; ordering all the ages from the bosom of the Father, hallowing a day of today from the womb of the Mother; remaining in the former, coming forth from the latter; author of the heaven and the earth, sprung under the heaven out of the earth; unutterably wise, in His wisdom a babe without utterance; filling the world, lying in a manger.