Christmas: Enchant Humanity.

Today, we’re met by God.

Not on a mountain, not in a vision, not in a dream in the night, but in our very own lives. And in case like me you tend to forget, it’s radically and permanently changed our human experience of this very moment. Right now. Even as you read.

Because today, God shows us what his presence is really like.

Jesus is the perfect manifest presence of God. There is nothing in God that is not seen and experienced in Christ. He is the fullness of him in every way.

Think about that for a moment, that God’s glory poured out in the earth perfectly and completely, was misdiagnosed as “just another day” by the world around him. If you saw Jesus in the manger he would have appeared as any other child. No gold dust, no angel orbs, diamonds or feathers, no lightening bolts or levitation. God’s manifest presence was profoundly ordinary.

HIs presence, it turns out, looks very ordinary.

And so, in the same way, today is no ordinary day.
Today, the mundane becomes miraculous.

Because this Christmas, this moment, is no different to the first. The divine still permeates our lives if we’re willing to look for him, to pay attention. Every crying child, every displacement within or around us, every ordinary moment begs the question, “is God here?”.

It’s true that in the incarnation we’re invited to participate in heaven in a mystical and magnificent way. But it’s also true that heaven has come down to participate in my run of the mill humanity. My body now the house of God, my self finding out what it was always meant to be.

Just over a year ago now my friend and mentor Bishop Bruce Gilbered went to be with his Beloved. He was 85, soft, kind, still an evangelist, richly alive in soul. One of my favourite memories is driving past him, paused by the bridge near my home, captivated, looking up at the Tūī and Kōtare, contemplating their beauty and life.

I look down when I walk, I don’t know why, it’s a weird thing. Bruce didn’t, he loved creation. He soaked in every second of it. Bruce got Christmas, he saw God everywhere. He’d let the reality of Christ’s arrival fully in. In looking up, his experience of the world was always enchanted, always permeated with heaven, and it made him the vital 85 year old he was.

Because of Christmas, you and I are invited to live every moment of our usual lives looking up. To walk with eyes open to the kingdom of heaven permeating every moment, even that which feels too human to us to be holy.

Whether you’re in joy or sorrow today, alone or with friends and family. Whether this Christmas is a high or low point, Christ is in the midst. There is no human experience God has not immersed himself in it and in touching it all he has made it holy. He has enchanted the lot of us.

That’s the magnitude of Christmas, that now nothing is outside the loving experience of God. That’s what prayer is. The conviction that no matter what I’m doing I’m doing with it God. All I need to do is look up, to experience it with him. The meal, the laughter, the loneliness, the sweetness, the chaos: Hosanna, God is with me.

Today, we remember that God comes to us, fills our ordinary lives, hides amidst our chaotic world and our humanity.

Merry Christmas my friends.

Much love,
Strahan.