Making Us Family--January 2, 2023

Making Us Family--January 2, 2023

"But 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." [Galatians 4:4-5]

It's more--so much more--than a transaction.  What God does is to make us family.  In the coming of Jesus, God extends the kindness to us of making us belong.

We need to stop and sit with that today, because it is so easy to rush past the meaning of Christ's coming and to leave the news of God-with-us in the dust, along with last year's broken resolutions and the torn wrapping paper of the Christmas morning frenzy from last week.  Already the shelves at Wal-Mart have moved on to Valentine's Day, with Saint Patrick's and Easter all ready to go as well.  Already the rest of the world has moved on from whatever breath of "peace" there was during Silent Night on Christmas Eve, and drones and missiles have resumed raining down on towns and homes in Ukraine.  The world, it seems, has moved on from whatever observation of Christmas it was going to have, distorted by consumerism and watered down by marketing departments as it was already.

And not to be outdone, the church, too, has a way sometimes of rushing past the coming of Jesus or reducing it to being merely a divine transaction.  There's an impulse sometimes to talk about Jesus' coming as though it is ONLY and ENTIRELY about getting to the cross.  Sometimes Respectable Religious folk, trying to avoid the sentimentalizing and schmaltz of Christmas in the wider culture, will say things like "Jesus was only born so he could die for our sins," or "The manger of Bethlehem is meaningless except that it sets up Jesus paying for our sins the cross of Calvary."  That kind of thing.  And I get it--we can't separate the love that is embodied in the infant Christ from the love that empties itself all the way to death on a Roman death-stake on Good Friday.  And yes, the New Testament talks about the cross as more than a mere accident or tragic martyr's death--but rather that it follows a trajectory of Jesus' whole life and ministry.  Yes, yes, yes, all of that.

But we make a mistake when we say, either out loud or by implication, that the coming of Jesus is only about the cross.  And we get it even more wrong when we reduce the cross and the incarnation of Jesus to being just an impersonal transaction with God, where the Almighty demands satisfaction for the infinite debt incurred by humanity's sin, and Jesus pays our tab by dying on the cross for us.  Sometimes Respectable Religious folks, and well-meaning ones at that, get so focused on talking about Jesus "paying our debt" that we end up making God sound like a miserly banker who is only interested in the bottom line and sees all of redemption as merely a bit of accounting.  And again, while it's true that sometimes the biblical writers speak of the cross like the paying of a ransom or the cancelling of a debt, that's not all of what they have to say. The chorus from the Scriptures doesn't want us to believe that God is only interested in getting a "pound of flesh" like a Shakespearean villain, or that God wants some kind of abstract "satisfaction" to pay for our sins. And if we're honest, sometimes church folk, again often with good intentions, have ended up making God sound more like an investment banker seeking to get restitution for a financial loss than Someone who loves us.  And when we leap forward from the manger to the cross, sometimes we make it sound like Jesus is only important as the currency for paying off our debts to a cold, calculating, and impersonal Divine Department of Accounts Payable.  By contrast, the apostle Paul reminds us that Jesus' coming is deeply personal--it is about bringing us into the family and adopting us as children, beyond just being a heavenly transaction.

God's own Son--God in the flesh, as the early church would affirm in the creeds--came among us not merely to be groomed and raised to adulthood to be slaughtered as a sacrifice to an angry and bloodthirsty deity, but to claim us as children.  In other words, the coming of Christ has everything to do with the kindness of God's love, and we miss something big if we distort it or reduce it to merely being about divine accounting.  To hear Paul tell it here, Jesus came, not so much because God has some financial need to settle up the accounts we have defaulted on as though God just wants the cash, but in order to bring us into God's own family, "so that we might receive adoption as children."  It's not about cutting a deal, satisfying a debt, or sealing a transaction--it's about making us belong.  It's about inclusion in God's family for a bunch of outsiders and misfits.  If we've missed that along the way in our rush from the manger to the cross, we've missed an important part of what makes the Good News actually good.

So today, let's allow it to remain Christmastide [today's the day for nine ladies dancing, after all, and we ought to let them have their moment], and let's consider Paul's own reminder that Christ has come in order that we might belong in God's family, that we might be children of God, and that we might know we are beloved.  That is so much more than a deal, and so much better than a transaction.

Lord Jesus, thank you.  Simply thank you, for making us to belong with you as our brother in the family of God.