Dear Friends in Christ,
As we celebrate Advent this year as a way of getting ready to celebrate Christmas, I would like to call to your attention these words of the German philosopher Karl Jaspers:
The untruth of the present state of affairs…cannot be remedied by great political actions. No improvement is possible unless the individual is educated by educating himself, unless his hidden being is awakened to reality through an insight which is at the same time an inner action, a knowledge which is at the same time virtue. He who becomes a true man becomes a citizen.
This quotation helps me to understand what was happening to us in the incarnation. What was being born among us in that stable was “a true man,” one not seduced by “the untruth of the present state of affairs,” and, therefore, one able to “awaken” us to Reality, the insight that is also virtue.
The Christian doctrine of the Fall of humankind and the consequent (not just subsequent) expulsion from Eden is a very colorful way of stating that we are now living in a state of existential Untruth. That this is a fall from God means that it is fundamental–we have lost a hold of what life is really for and bought into a Big Lie. Genesis suggests that the Big Lie is that we can be like God. Jesus suggests that the irony is really complex–we are, in fact, refusing to be like God (who is agape–self-giving love) in the very act of trying to be like God. God is not a selfish imperial despot–that is our idolatrous misidentification, one that has turned history into one tragedy after another.
Jesus is born, and Jesus is born where and how he is born, to teach us what God is really like and to invite us to actually be like God–then knowing good and evil will no longer be such a disaster. This is why it is important not to subvert the celebration of Christmas into just more selfish Untruth. I love the Christmas revels, the feast of Light in darkest winter. I am not urging you to celebrate a spare, ascetical Christmas. But I am urging you to remember that the heart of our joy has to be our recommitment to Light and Love; if not, we succumb to Untruth and are not true humans yet.
So, I wish for you a glad Advent and a most joyous Christmas and a blessed New Year. The joy will be full and true if it is centered on the knowledge that God is present for us in this babe. The result of that knowledge will be a truer humanity that will qualify us to be upstanding citizens because we will be awakened to an insight that ends up as virtue. True faith always becomes love.
Have a Merry Christmas,
–Pastor Bastien
Subscribe by email