God With Us: Let the Adventure Continue

Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.

How many Christmases have you lived through? How has the meaning of Christmas changed for you over the course of your life? As we enter into another season of Advent (the waiting and anticipating of the birth of Jesus), what does it mean to you?

Sometimes we get locked into a particular way of thinking about things. That’s not a bad thing. We need to know where our firm places are to stand. When we land on what feels like good footing, we feel stable, confident, and able to build. The problem sometimes comes when we don’t allow ourselves to wonder if there are other footings that may help us build in other ways. Building on images of God for our spirituality and theology is wonderfully human and good. This is called the kataphatic tradition. Sometimes we get so limited by the images of God that we come to realize that no image is adequate, and we resort to not welcoming any images since they will be immediately limiting. This is called the apophatic tradition. These two traditions work together, of course, since they are opposites of one another.

The question is, how are you employing each tradition this Christmas season? What images add to the richness of this time? What images have you chosen to not employ as much? How has the apophatic side allowed you to embrace more mystery in this season?

Before we jump into the full Christmas story, I think it wise to spend some time determining where we’re “at”. I know for fact that we are much less able to learn anything new until we identify what we know. I hope this season will be wonderfully stretchy for you, which is a deeply embedded yet often neglected aspect of our faith tradition. There is more to learn, more to imagine, more to write – this is a key part of the biblical tradition. The biblical narrative which includes the formation of the Jewish people all the way through Jesus and the early days of the church gives witness to the evolution of thought over many centuries. The collective people of faith are still evolving. Are you? Are we?

Let the Advent-ure continue...