The Incarnation Is Really Unrealistic

The incarnation of Christ isn’t very realistic. Certain details in the Christmas story, for instance: Angels appearing in dreams. Angels appearing in person. A star hovering over one little house in one tiny village. An infertile older woman getting pregnant. A young virgin getting pregnant. God becoming a...

The Hang-Around God

Long before anyone ever came up with a word like “omnipresence”, humans believed that the gods lived “up there,” in the heavens. That’s right, before “Heaven” came to mean “the spiritual realm where the forgiven go to live in bliss forever” it simply meant “the sky and everything else up there.” It’s where...

Impossible

A Message Delivered on Christmas Eve, 2014 When you read the gospels it is evident that the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke aren’t the same. That’s because Matthew and Luke aren’t interested in telling what happened, but what it means. Matthew says everything he wants to say with Magi, and Luke says...

Kings and Harlots: A Genealogy of the Incarnation

The birth narrative in Matthew is found in the first chapter, but it doesn’t begin with the story of Joseph and Mary. We begin there; we like to skip the boring parts and get right to the interesting parts. Matthew actually begins the birth narrative with a genealogy, but who reads those? You can’t...

Heaven and Earth, Towers and Mangers

There’s a story in the 11th chapter of Genesis that tells how humans tried to go where God was. It’s actually the culmination of a series of stories in which humans try to take for themselves prerogatives that belong only to God. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve wanted to decide for themselves what is...

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