The day after Christmas, our culture begins clearing out and cleaning up Christmas stuff because it considers the season to be over. And speaking from a commercial and consumer point of view, it is over—because the gifts have been purchased. All that remains are the exchanges and returns.

But for Christians, the Christmas season does not begin until midnight on Christmas Eve, and it continues until January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany. This liturgical celebration of twelve days of Christmas is good for us because it gives us time to ponder and reflect upon the expression of God’s love in the mystery of the Word made flesh. It gives us time to reflect upon the meaning of Christmas, lest its significance get lost in pre-Christmas preparations, parties, and rush.

Thus, today’s readings for the 1^st Sunday after Christmas are ones which require some reflection and pondering.

St. Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, compares and contrasts God’s revelation of himself in the law, the Torah, which he gave to his people, and his revelation of himself in Christ. Paul looks at human history not as a story of human actions and natural events, but as a story of God’s actions impinging upon and influencing human life. He views history not as a series of isolated and unrelated events over the centuries, but as an organic whole, with a God-given purpose and meaning. The purpose of this history is God’s wooing of his people, his repeated attempts to make himself known to them and to communicate his love to them. He did this in creation, designing a beautiful garden for them to live in and enjoy, where he could walk with them and guide them with his wisdom in intimate converse. They, however, in the persons of Adam and Eve, spurned his converse and his love.

God tried again in the Exodus to woo them, delivering them from slavery and giving them the law to show them how to love him and each other. But this, too, they spurned, off and on throughout their history. So, God sent the prophets to call his people back to him and remind them of his intention to restore all of creation and humanity to harmony with himself and with each other. The prophets, however, were also rejected, many stoned and killed.

All of this Paul sees as a continuing saga of God’s gracious approach in love to his people, repeated divine attempts to draw humanity into a loving and faithful relationship with himself, by trying to show and give them his love.

But God’s trump card, as it were, yet remained to be played. God’s emissaries—creation, the Law, and the prophets—did not yield their intended effect, so he would come himself to them in a form completely adapted to their needs and to their capacity to comprehend—he would come in human flesh.

For Paul, all of these former ways and means through which God had communicated himself to his people and tried to express to them his love and who he was—especially the Law—were not as complete nor as full an expression of God’s love and God’s being as coming himself to visit his people in the person of Jesus Christ.

Indeed, one could say that Paul sees these earlier and other means of God’s revelation as leading up to and preparing for God’s fullest self-expression, the Incarnation. Christ is the fullest and most complete manifestation of God and his love, a crowning act of his goodness and lovingkindness, a zenith in the divine plan:

"….when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave, but a child…"

The poetic prologue to John’s gospel also speaks of Christ as the one who fully expresses God’s being and love. The Word, with a capital "w", of which John speaks, was a well-known term to the Hebrew people. The "Word of God" was the creative agency of God—God’s speech—which brought into being the creation: "By the Word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the heavenly hosts." The Word of the Lord was the creative agency which inspired the prophets and told them what to speak: "The Word of the Lord came to me, saying…".

John identifies Jesus as the Word of God—the creative agency which has been with God forever, present with God before creation, and present in the creative process: "all things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being." Christ, the Word of God, expresses God’s very nature and being: "What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people…The true light which enlightens everyone was coming into the world…The Law indeed was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known." Only one who shares God’s being could be called life, light, grace, and truth.

Both Paul and John agree that the reason for this act of God in becoming flesh is so that we might become children of God: "…to all that received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God."

Let us stop and think a minute about what it means for us to become children of God. For our children, we have definite ideas about the kind of people we want them to become--responsible, respectful of others, able to work with others, successful, well rounded. We try to shape, guide, and mold them to develop and possess certain qualities and characteristics of personality that we think good and desirable. We play a part in their development and in fostering and encouraging the characteristics and qualities we want them to have. And the foundation of our hopes, dreams, and desires for them is our love. We want for them what is good for them. Yet, we also know that we must be attentive to and respectful of their particular gifts and abilities. They are not carbon copies of ourselves, and it would be idolatrous of us to try to make them so.

And although we want to protect them from harm and from failure, we cannot always do so, or do it for them all of their lives. Part of their growth and learning depends upon experiencing failure and learning how to stand up and try again.

In many of the same ways, God acts as our parent. When the scriptures say that we are to become children of God, it means that God desires us to develop and to possess certain qualities and characteristics—to be a "child of God" in scripture means to pattern one’s attitudes after God—to show the qualities and traits of character that are God’s—to be merciful, compassionate, forgiving, and faithful. To become a child of God is to begin to share in God’s nature.

And God is the supreme parent, perfectly respectful of and attentive to our unique gifts and talents, because he gave them to us. Although he desires our love and trust so that we are willing to be molded, guided, and shaped by him in the attitudes and traits of character which are his, yet he has created each of us as a unique individual, with particular gifts and abilities which differ. This variety in our make-up is pleasing to him. He did not make us carbon copies of each other or of our parents. Each one of us is intended to live out and to manifest God’s qualities and character in the exercise of our unique and individual gifts—in being the individual God created us to be. As Thomas Merton wrote:

"A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying him. It ‘consents’, so to speak, to his love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree.

The more a tree is like itself, the more it is like him. If it tried to be like something else which it was never intended to be, it would be less like God and therefore it would give him less glory.

For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. Trees and animals have no problem. God makes them what they are without consulting them, and they are perfectly satisfied.

With us it is different. God leaves us free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we please."

And although God does not desire either our harm or our failure, yet in his wisdom he knows that sometimes, in order to learn and to grow, we must be allowed to fail. Failure teaches us some lessons that success never could. This particular parenting tactic of God is often the most difficult for us to grasp, or accept, because something inside of us both desires and expects that God will keep us from all disappointment, all pain, and all failure. But if we look closely at the lives of the patriarchs, the prophets, and the saints, we will see that some of their most formative experiences came out of disappointment and failure, because it is those experiences which teach us most profoundly and vividly our dependence upon and need for God.

Christmas reminds us that God took on our nature in Christ so that we might share in his nature—so that we might become his children who manifest his goodness, his mercy, his compassion, his forgiveness, and his steadfastness in our lives. And it also reminds us that this is our lifelong calling and work—to become increasingly the persons God created us to be by revealing him and his nature through us. May we trust his molding and guiding and forming of us, and be willing to share more and more in his nature.

The Rev’d Pamela P. Snare is Curate at Christ Church, Covington.

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