Work, family, faith, fitness, finances.
Injustices, corruption, crime, death.
Success, wealth, power, fame.
Depression, anxiety, sorrow, grief.
What is it all for? What does it all mean? What are we doing with them?
Answers can be enigmatic.
Depending on the severity of our adverse experiences, it can all be quite problematic. Without the health and fortitude of substantial support from family, community, and living conditions, effective management and positive outcomes may be quite difficult to execute and achieve.
What is your map to happiness and success?
What operating system is running your personal programming?
What effects are you experiencing from hidden defaults and dynamics?
As divine image bearers, we are made to be creative, productive leaders and managers of all things. But with the profound mixture and complexity of earthly existence, we encounter and suffer many challenges to fulfilling our purpose and calling.
Christ (the incarnation of the universal pattern of order, disorder, reorder) is the spiritual path to help us make sense of life's mysteries and overcome the chronic, potentially devastating difficulties caused by life's greatest challenges: fear and pain associated with trauma and loss.
This pathway began with an incarnation of descent—God becoming one with what He loves: people. The nativity story identifies the radical problems of society: government control and corruption by elites, and its persecution of threats; inconveniences, struggles, and sufferings of the poor caused by unjust economics and politics; the failures of religion and anemic spirituality. Jesus came into the world and experienced all of that. And the pathway also begins there for us. We don't have to look far to see those realities.
And yet, that's exactly the context of Christmas. Into this mess comes God's gift to redeem the perpetual, systemic madness and dysfunction created by broken, unhealthy leaders.
With this backdrop, the underlying mysterious purpose and goal of God's mission in Christ shines bright: "that they may be one as we are one" (John 17:11)
This desire for oneness first showed up in Genesis 2:24, "That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh." So we see that essential to oneness is departure from one's origins.
The departure narrative is seen again in God's call to Abraham in Genesis 12:1, "Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you."
When Abraham's descendants became a nation, the departure narrative shows up again in Israel's exodus from Egypt.
Now when they were about to enter the Promised Land of Canaan, in Moses' pre-entrance exposition of the law (Deuteronomy), he made the fundamental, unitive statement: the Lord our God, the Lord is one (Deut.6:4). And from His infinite resources, we are commanded to love Him with all our heart, soul, and strength (6:5).
Jesus identified this commandment as the greatest. To be one with Him by being one as He is one. To be whole as He is whole. To be an integrated being as He is the supreme, integrated Being.
What does this mean for us today?
Leave and cleave.
Depart old dysfunctional systems to embrace timeless, invaluable things of eternity: faith, hope, and love. Those who live this pattern find their identity in Christ, the universal template.
What does this look like?
Slowing down for solitude, silence, and stillness.
Growing deeper, broader, higher self knowledge to "...grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." Eph.3:18-19
From that place of security, begin letting go of that which is not aligned with the wholeness of God's Love. Create time and space for connections: to God, to others, to self.
Christmas is God's gift for an integral understanding and effective synthesis of the diverse experiences listed at the beginning of this message. It begins with the simple story of the Nativity. Christ's ministry was one of healing, ie. making people whole. He completed His mission on the cross: God's courageous, compassionate, and redemptive embrace of our pain and suffering.
The direction of this Love is oneness. More contemporary words are integration and wholeness. This will involve growing up and waking up, ie. developing maturity while also growing spiritually. This is the way, truth and life of becoming who we really are and doing what we were made to do.
This is in stark contrast to living hypocritically, always trying to please people, putting on personas that run on fumes of futility and fears. Not managing ourselves while trying to control everything else.
What does Christmas really look like?
Becoming more and more whole. A life of recovery from addictions and healing from abandonment. Forgiveness and freeedom.
Christmas is about the mystery of becoming one as He is one. We become witness to all things real and true: the good, the bad, and the painful.
Only divine love has the power to live the mystery of Christmas.
Echoing Paul's words in Ephesians 3:16-19,
"I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God."
Have a mysterious Christmas!