Readings: Micah 5:2-5a; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-45
In these weeks before Christmas, I have received a lot of mail referring to the event. One of them was from a jeweller who suggested I `celebrate the joy of giving` by giving to my wife a diamond bracelet worth $3000. Another was from Dan Murphy who sent me a 35 page `Christmas Companion` encouraging me to `drink, eat and be merry` and detailing 200 alcoholic beverages with which to do this. And in the shops the endless singing of `he came down to earth from heaven`.

Let`s face it! Christmas as we celebrate it in our society is a farce - the definition of a farce being `A mockery, a ridiculous sham`. I concede that this may only be a view of the grumpy old man who stands before you. Others may experience Christmas day as a Holy Day, a day full of meaning and significance. For those who experience Christmas in these terms I have nothing but admiration. It is an uphill battle in the context of Christmas as we know it today, with its jolly old men in red clothes and partridges in pear trees. Phillip Adams in The Weekend Australian issued a red and white alert and called for off shore processing of Father Christmas on Christmas Island, on the grounds that if we are not careful thousands of sleigh people will be landing on our rooftops. I today would issue a red and white alert for Christmas as a meaningful event!

Why is it so? Why is Christmas such a farce today? It is customary to blame the commercial sector of our society. This is unfair. They are simply taking advantage of a religious celebration that has lost its way. The blame I feel lies fairly and squarely on the Church and its stories and songs about angels in the fields, a virgin conceiving and wise men carrying gifts. I am becoming more and more convinced that the literalising of the stories of Jesus has more to do with the collapse of Christian faith than any other factor.

The baby has been thrown out with the bathwater!

Let me be very clear. I am not suggesting that we drop the language and metaphor of incarnation - `God becoming flesh` as the dictionary defines it. It is a powerful metaphor as I hope to show. What I am pleading for is that we use it in terms of the twenty first century, not the first. It is nonsense to keep on singing `He came down to earth from heaven`. The three level universe with hell below and heaven above and God living in the seventh heaven bears no relationship to reality as we know it today. Why then in the name of God do we keep on singing about it?

I can almost hear someone thinking `OK! tell us about Christmas in the twenty first century. The floor is yours!` I accept the challenge on the understanding that I am not trying to convince you of the truth of how I see things. I seek only to share with you how I see it. Others will see it differently and that`s OK. Having said that, I see Jesus of Nazareth today as the pivot point of human history. He was not `just a man`. He was a man who revealed the purposes of God to such an extent that he revealed the nature of what we mean by the word God. He represents, re-presents, the nature of reality. Jesus represents for me the most significant revelation of God that I know. My point of difference with many is I believe that to confine the Christian faith to the cosmology of the first century is a recipe for disaster, and that this disaster is evidenced in the way we `celebrate` Christmas today.

First of all: let`s be clear about the scriptures and Christmas. It is quite clear from two thousand years of research that, although the gospels appear to be eye witness accounts, they were not written by the Apostles. Mark was written 40 years after the death of Jesus. Matthew and Luke were written 50 years and John 60 years after the event. In Mark, the earliest gospel (as indeed the writings of St Paul which were even earlier) there are no birth stories. Ten years later in Luke and Matthew the birth stories are added, and ten years after that in John we have Jesus described in terms of God made man. The process continues with the creeds where Jesus is said to be `the only Son of God . . . begotten not made`. And then, for some unaccountable reason, the process stopped and today the Nicene Creed is still recited as a statement of faith, in Greek, in Latin, in English and by many in inverted commas. We live in the twenty first century and use the language and thought forms and concepts of the first and fourth centuries!

This is particularly so in the case of the Christmas stories. Virgin birth stories, for example, were common in the first century. Indeed the Emperor of the day, Emperor Augustus, was believed to be of a virgin birth. The imperial secretary Suetonius relates how Atia the mother of Augustus had her bed set down in the temple of Apollo and had a serpent glide up to her and then go away. `On the tenth month after that Augustus was born and was therefore regarded as the son of Apollo` .(1) It appears that the length of gestation was not well understood at that time, and we are not told how many times she had sex in the month after her visit to the temple. Be that as it may, the coins of the Empire were inscribed with the words `Emperor Augustus, Son of God`. The point I am making is that in those days it wasn`t unusual to speak in terms of a virgin birth and someone being `Son of God`. It doesn`t mean, of course, that we should speak in terms of a virgin birth. Indeed it is quite tragic that we do! As Marcus Borg says `It is the theology of the child and not the biology of the mother that is at stake`.

How then should we speak of the `incarnation` today - the idea that Jesus was divine, God made flesh?

The first thing we must do is to be clear on what we mean when we use the word `God`. This is an enormous subject and I can only touch the edge of it this morning. As someone famously said `The only thing that can be said about God is that there is more to be said`. How true that is! And I must admit that the thing I find most aggravating about being a Christian is the way people assume what you believe without asking you, assume that you see God as a guy in the sky and that the aim of life is to end up with him in some kind of heaven. Nothing could be further from my understanding of the Christian faith! At the end of my life I have no interest whatever in `going to heaven`. I will rest content if I have in some way furthered the cause of Jesus of Nazareth as the man from God`s tomorrow. More of that later! The point I am making now is how people assume what I believe. It wouldn`t be so bad if they said that they didn`t believe in God, and I was crazy to do so. It would at least raise the issue of what we mean when we use the word `God`. It would enable me to say, `Tell me about the God you don`t believe in. It is likely that I don`t believe in that God either`. The question of what one understands by the word `God` is rarely raised. People simply assume that God means for you what they understand it to mean - their understanding having been gained in some inept way in their childhood of God being an all powerful big guy in the sky. What I am pleading for is that, for God`s sake, let`s do away with the idea of an all powerful guy in the sky and give some thought to what we mean by the word `God`. But that`s the subject for another sermon!

At this time let me simply say that the word God does not denote for me a big guy in the sky. God to me is not a being, but the ground of our being. God is not a person but a process; not a noun but a verb. And there is plenty of scriptural affirmation of this view, the best known probably being Moses and the burning bush where God`s name is described in terms of the verb to be, translated in English as `I am` or `I will be`. Growth into fullness of life is what it is all about - the God factor if you like - the same kind of thing as when John`s gospel has Jesus speaking of `fullness of life`. If you want it in simple terms, God is the `Spirit of Life` - the energising evolutionary force in which we live and move and have our being. And this Spirit of Life, Breath of Life, or however you want to describe the essence of life that all of us experience, is oriented towards the future. Many see life as located in the past and we being called to carry on a tradition. Others such as Buddhists see life located in the present, and yet others see life in terms of the future - and among this group I would place myself. I no longer see God as the Platonic pusher from the past, but the presence and power and process of the future. But that too is the subject of another sermon!

The point I am trying to make today is this. The metaphor of incarnation is a problem if you locate your idea of God in the past. It is a different matter if you see it in terms of the future. See God as a being who lives in heaven, and you have real problems! See God as the Spirit of Life there is no problem - just a claim, an outrageous claim, that in Jesus of Nazareth we see the man from God`s tomorrow - the personification of the process. That is what the incarnation is all about. Jesus incarnates, fleshes out, personifies the process. The idea of Jesus being the man from God`s tomorrow may be a bit difficult to grasp but it sure beats `he came down to earth from heaven.`

Let me then, sum up what I have been trying to say. The metaphor of incarnation, the divine becoming flesh, is a good metaphor but not in terms of the first century understanding of God in heaven, virgin births, angels in the fields, wise men bearing gifts and all the trappings of the first century stories. We are people of the twenty first century and must rethink Christian belief in the light of insights, and understanding not available to earlier generations.

What I am suggesting is that we should think of the incarnation in terms of God being the energising evolutionary Spirit of Life and Jesus being the personification of the process, the man from God`s tomorrow.

I don`t think that there is anything very radical in what I am suggesting. Pilate unconsciously said it many years ago when he said to the crowd `Behold, the man`. If you want something really radical, how about this - that you and I are also called to become an incarnation, a personification of the process. As John has Jesus saying in his gospel, `Whoever has faith in me will do what I do, indeed, will do even greater things`.(2) Now that is what I call really radical!! Jesus was, and we can be, incarnations of the evolutionary Spirit of Life.

The nine most powerful words in scripture were in our scripture reading this morning: Mary`s words `Let it be it unto me according to your word`.

`The Christmas story is not something that happened two thousand years ago. It is my story and your story. We are all visited by the presence and potential of God`s future, and yes, it is as strange for us as it was for Mary.`(3)

Christmas is about my life as a womb for the birth of a divine future. It is a concept full of meaning and significance and joy for all of us - if only we can liberate the Christmas story from the stranglehold of the first century and the travesty of the twenty first.

In the biblical sense of Joy as one`s relationship with `God`, I wish you all a very contemporary and joyful Christmas!

(1) `Lives of the Caesars` 94.4
(2) John 14:12
(3) `The Advance of Love` Bruce Sanguin p143