Whose side is God on?  Lots of people with lots of different agendas, people with us today, people who lived hundreds of years ago have asked that question.  Throughout the lengthy course of human history, countless people have wanted to claim that God agreed with their agenda, and that he was, indeed, on their side.  And they all presented evidence, be it written, experiential, traditional, or all of the above, to back up their claim.
     So how do we decide?  From a European crusader set on "liberating" Jerusalem in the eleventh century, to Martin Luther and his ninety-five theses on the church door in sixteenth century Wittenberg, to millions of American soldiers being shipped to Europe to engage the "godless" German armies in World War I, to a modern day Islamic militant in Mali who insists that God had "told" him to amputate his brother's hand for theft, to a young Amish boy who told those who had just hacked off his father's beard and hair that, "God is not with you"--and the list could go on and on and on--how do we decide, really, whose "side" God is on?
     In a word, carefully.  Despite what we may suppose about the "rightness" of our particular cause, despite what we may imagine to be the unassailable correctness of our particular position, we too often forget that, ultimately, we march through a world undergirded by forces far greater than we will ever, in this life, fully know.  As God reminds us in the fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, "My ways are not your ways."  While this line of course represents a decidedly Hebraic posture on the divine, the larger point remains valid and true for every manner of transcendent belief:  regardless of whom or what we conceive God to be, we must be willing to admit that if we want God to be any kind of a God at all we must interpret his thoughts with utter and abject humility.  We are finite, he is infinite.  How can we really know what he wants?  Yes, we can through careful and broad ranging study, discussion, and reflection arrive at what appears to be God's thoughts and wishes--as we understand them in the scope of our spiritual tradition--but we must always do so in full awareness that, as the line from Isaiah reminds us, God sees things differently than we do.  We will try, but we will never succeed fully in grasping the full import of his vision.
     In this is the wonder, however, in this is the mystery, the wonder of humanity, the mystery of God.  In the end, all we can know for sure is that God is there, and that he loves us and our world far more than we can imagine.  We may reject or struggle with God's presence, we may laugh at or wrestle with his love, or we may embrace them both, but whichever we choose to do, we ought to do it understanding that, as Paul told his readers in Ephesus, even though we may believe, fervently, that God and his love are constantly present, we will never constantly comprehend them.  His love "surpasses" knowledge (Ephesians 3:19).  God's love moves mountains, and God's love moves human hearts, but precisely how it does so, well, we will never fully know.
     Do well, do your best, yes, but remember:  accept the mystery.  There is much more to come.

     A few weeks ago, the world, and the world of mountain climbers in particular, received word that one of its greats, the French climber Maurice Herzog, had died at the age of 93.  Herzog is most famous for his 1950 ascent of Annapurna, one of the fourteen so-called "8,000ers," the elite group of Himalayan peaks over 8,000 meters (roughly 26,000 feet).  His was the first ascent of a peak this elevation and size.  Though Herzog is rightly remembered for the ascent, he is perhaps better known for his descent, a long and harrowing journey marked by intense cold, storm, and frostbite that resulted in Herzog losing most of his fingers and toes.  But as he wrote in the final line of his account of his climb (Annapurna, published in 1952), "There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men."  Herzog managed to transform his pain into an enduring and inspiring metaphor for the challenges of existence.
     Herzog captured a fundamental truth about human beingness.  Those who seek out challenges, whatever they may be, challenges that stretch them to their very physical, mental, or spiritual limits, are those who most fully understand that happiness is not be found in simply embracing what is.  Real happiness often comes from penetrating deeply into its opposite.  And real joy, the more seminal--and lasting--counterpart to happiness, often emerges from life's darkest tragedies and sorrows.  Ask Herzog, ask Doug Scott, a British climber who, despite breaking both legs in a climb on the Ogre (also in the Himalayas), willed himself to survive and climb again, or ask the Catholic mystic St. John of the Cross, author of Dark Night of the Soul.
     Or ask Jesus, who as, the writer of the letter to the Hebrews tells us, "the author and perfecter of faith, and who for the joy set before endured the cross [crucifixion], despising the shame" (Hebrews 12:2).  Like Herzog, like Scott, like St. John, like countless others, so does Jesus capture for us the essential point:  only through seemingly insuperable challenge, of any kind, does genuine wisdom, and joy, come.
     What's your Annapurna?  Whatever it is, make it a matter of your deepest soul.  Make it a matter of you and God.

     "Though the mind of a person plans his way," notes the writer of Proverbs 16:9, "the Lord directs his steps."  On the one hand, this seems to put us into a trap:  what happens to our capacity for choice?  On the other hand, it may be a comfort:  someone wiser than we helps us find the better way.  Which should--or can--it be?
     Think about a bird winging its way south for the winter.  Does anyone tell it to go?  Does anyone tell it when to go?  Many decades ago, I was backpacking through the remote Brooks Range of northern Alaska when I chanced upon a duck tending to its affairs in a tiny pond.  I did not expect to see this duck; given the relatively late date (August in the Arctic), I had assumed it and its companions would have been long gone by now.  The next morning, however, it was gone.  Somehow, it knew.  And it knew at just the right time.
     As do we.  We know when we are supposed to do things, we know when we are supposed to be a certain way.  Unlike the duck, however, we can choose not to be or do them.  We are more than instinct.  We have a choice.
     Consider the universe.  It steadily spins itself out under the umbra of its creator, gyrating, expanding, turning in on itself as it deepens the abundance of its form and ambiguity.  We little know where it will end up. We only know that it is going.
     As we do for our lives.  We only know that they are going, going somewhere, and going, in an odd way, everywhere, everywhere the universe can be, the universe of our spatiality, the universe of our hearts.
     So, yes, God directs our steps.  But he does so as an infinite God in an infinitely transforming universe.
     The possibilities are endless.

     One of the most beloved ballets of all time, The Nutcracker presents a delightful and wondrous tale of opulence, warmth, and, perhaps most telling, imagination.  As Clara's Nutcracker comes to life and grows into a full-sized soldier, the wide-eyed girl is treated to a remarkable journey through a tangled and marvelous fantasy world of gingerbread, sweets, mice, and tin warriors, princes, and magical forests.  It is a world that, when she awakens from what we are led to suppose was a dream, may be more real than we or she think.
     Or believe.  But isn't that essence of imagination?  Though neuroscientists tell us that imagination is the production of overlapping and accumulating metaphor, synapse, memory, and neuronal form and structure, we know that, for us in our day to day activities, imagination is what helps us make our lives real.  We dream, we imagine, and we dream and imagine again.  We believe, we feel, we speculate, and we believe, feel, and speculate again.  We make our lives stories--stories all our own--that we write.
     Imagine a mystery, a mystery you will never unravel.  Imagine a mystery beyond all form and structure, a mystery that exceeds the boundaries of even--and this is entirely possible--your imagination.  Imagine the mystery of God.
     And believe it is true.

    

     As we remember the fourth and final Sunday of Advent and look towards its culminating event--the incarnation, the physical appearance of God in human flesh--tomorrow, let us ponder the import of its origins.  As the gospel accounts make clear, Jesus was born in Bethlehem (literally, "house of bread"), a town that we might today call a hole in the wall, a little village largely forgotten by the rest of the world.  Few people cared what happened in Bethlehem.
     Nor did few people care when, after God told Joseph to take Mary and Jesus and flee the country to avoid King Herod's deadly predations, Jesus lived awhile in Egypt.  Mary and Joseph were likely viewed as just one more set of refugees, one more group of aliens moving through the flotsam of the Empire, their lives a mirror of countless migrations before:  no big deal.
     But this is precisely God's point.  Though Jesus was an alien and refugee, born in obscurity and forgotten and overlooked by the rest of the world, he was the one in whom God chose to make himself known to all humanity.  Jesus was the one whom God would use to reconcile himself to his human creation, the one who whom God would use to draw all people to himself.  In Jesus, the poor and neglected refugee, was the greatest mission of all time.  It's the ultimate irony, the greatest surprise.
     But isn't that what God is all about?
      

    
"And the Word became flesh . . . " (John 1:14).  Wherever you are, whoever you are, and whatever you are this morning, rejoice:  God has come.  Time is meaningful, space is presence, history and journey are finished and complete. Messiah has come.
     All you need do is open your eyes.

     I once saw, in a house in which I was staying some years ago, a plaque, a very intriguing plaque.  A parody of Psalm 23:4 ("Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you [God] are with me"), it read, "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a b---- in the valley."  Some will find this amusing, some will find it blasphemous.  But the writer has, consciously or not, circumscribed for us two very different ways for living.
     One is to walk through life trusting in, no matter what, the goodness and protection of God for us.  The other is to walk through life trusting, no matter what, our strength and ability to overcome and master whatever it throws at us.  Ironically, though these seem diametrically opposite, they in fact work together to testify to some fundamental facts about existence.  If we assume that we are fully rational creatures made in the image of God, as Genesis tells us we are, we have every reason to put faith in our abilities and capacities to cope with the challenges of existence.  And why not:  God has made us effectual and, in our station, autonomous.  On the other hand, God presides over a world that, as we all know, malfunctions constantly, yet a world, though it may not seem like it, is one over which he exercises control.  He knows its form, he knows its destiny.  We have every reason to trust him.
     And we have every reason to trust ourselves, to trust ourselves to trust God with what we have been given, for we know that however we utilize what we have, we do so in a universe that ultimately is beyond our ability to master.
     We may well be the meanest son of a b---- in the valley, but even the meanest among us will never overcome the impact--personal and global--of his own brokenness and evil.
     We can't live without the help of God.

     Despite everything that has occurred--and, unfortunately will continue to occur--around the world lately, good, in various forms, seems to prevail.  For instance, how wonderful it was to see rock stars and musicians from all over the western world come to New York a couple of weeks ago to perform for a benefit to aid the victims of Hurricane Sandy.  Whatever we may think of their music, their lifestyles, or their politics, we applaud them for their selflessness, for giving of their time and resources to help those in need.  It was a beautiful picture of human goodness.
     Are we good?  Yes, we are.  We may do many bad things (a fact which we all know painfully well), but we are, in essence, good.  And we do good things.
     How do we know they are good things?  It is not because we think that they are, for how would we really know?  We can only know they are good things if we know what good really is.  And we can only know what good really is if, oddly enough, we do not define it.  How could we?  We're finite.  We only know what we can know, nothing more, nothing less.  And we're back to square one. What have we proved?
     We can only know good--and what it is--if there's a transcendent God.

     Besides gun control, the other discussion that seems to be emerging from the aftermath of the deadly shootings in Connecticut last week has to do with the role of God.  Where was God, many people are asking, where was God, this allegedly great and loving God as scores of schoolchildren were being senselessly slaughtered?  What was he doing?
     Countless of well meaning people have worked themselves into various conniptions trying to answer this question.  Though their efforts are both laudable and necessary, in the end we must accept that, frustrating as it is, we will never, in this life, fully know.  We will never fully comprehend the precise measure (and depth) of the mysterious--and it is indeed unfathomably mysterious--nexus of global brokeneness, divine sovereignty and agency, and human will and sin.  Never.  Our finitude guarantees it.
     So what can we do?  We can affirm that God is loving and omnipotent, we can affirm that the world is bent and broken, we can affirm that we are confused and wayward sinners, and we can try to put these together in a meaningful way, a way that we hope will bring some clarity to our angst.  But even this will not fully satisfy.  We are still left with the lingering--and unanswerable--question:  why?  Why, God?  Why?
     But God will likely never tell us.  In the end, we are left with far more questions than answers.  And no way out.
     Except one:  Jesus Christ.  In Jesus dying on the cross, God took on all possible human suffering and pain.  All of it.  Then he overcame it.  He rose again.  The resurrection is God's answer.  The resurrection tells us that God really is omnipotent, that God really is love, that God really is hope.  The resurrection tells us that God is present, that he is working, that he cares.  It tells us that, despite what we may think today, tomorrrow, or many years from now, God knows.
     Will this always satisfy?  No.  Will it always assuage or mollify?  No.  But it gives us a reason to trust.  For if we don't trust God, we really have nothing, literally nothing, there to trust.   Nothingness will never be more than, well, nothing.  As a line from Handel's Messiah (drawn from the 19th chapter of Job) asserts, "I know that my Redeemer lives."  God is there.
     Which will you choose?

     As the nation continues to reel from the horrific violence in Newton, Connecticut, last week, and politicians of all stripes raise calls for more or, alternately, less gun control, I would suggest that neither option will really resolve the issue.  We are looking at a situation that is far more than guns and whether and how we should control them.
     Ultimately, we are looking at ourselves.  We are looking at one of the most violent societies in the world, a society, though it can be one of the kindest in the world, can also be one of the most intolerant, a society, though it can be one of the most generous, can also be one of the most frightened and selfish.  We are looking at an enigma, a society that, despite its efforts to make everyone safe, seems to only succeed in making everyone feel more afraid, a society that although it craves freedom, dearly loves order--at all costs--a society that every year opens the door for increasingly graphic depictions of violence and mayhem while it continues to wring its hands over its effects.  It is a study in contradiction, a study of a society that thinks it knows what it wants, but cannot seem to agree on what that is.  It is a society that doesn't know itself.
     And nothing changes.
     We need a broader conversation, a conversation not about whether we should or should not own or control guns, though that is a conversation that may be worth having, but a conversation about who we are.  Who are we?  What do we want?  More importantly, what do we need?
     Our answer, it seems to me, does not lie with the material alone.  It is necessarily metaphysical.  It is necessarily linked to things bigger than we.  Like God.  Only God knows who we really are.  And only he knows what we really need.  But we have to ask him.
     Though I cannot say with certainty what God will say, I will say this:  the only act of violence that really accomplished its goal was the killing of Jesus on the cross.  Jesus' death is the only violence that really keeps us safe, that really sets us free.  It is the violence through which we should understand everything else, the violence with which we should frame ourselves, our wants, and our needs.  It is the only violence that provides a way out of itself.  Everything else is futility.
     We need a better way.

     Last summer, my son and I backpacked in the Wind River Range in central Wyoming.  Midway through our trip, we rose extra early to prepare for what we expected to be a lengthy hike over and across the Continental Divide.  When we got out of our tent, the sun had not yet risen over the peaks below which we were camped.  The air was still cold, the lake by which we had pitched our tent still shrouded in shadow.  So we waited.
     For what did we wait?  We waited for the sunrise, for the sun, that brilliant and life giving orb of light to rise over the peaks and bathe our camp in warmth and radiance.  As the day was still young, we waited awhile, packing up our camp, preparing breakfast, always watching for hints of the coming light.
     Then it came.  The sun seemed to explode atop the ride, bursting with rays of brilliance and wonder, its multiple filaments of splendor spreading over and across the waiting land.  We rejoiced:  the light had come.
     "For the people who walk in darkness," wrote the prophet Isaiah, "will see a great light (Isaiah 9:1)."  Isaiah speaks, in metaphorical terms, of Messiah, the one who would come to shower light upon an Israel darkened by disappointment, abandonment, and sin.  He speaks of the Christ who would enlighten and save all those who longed for him.  He speaks of the light that would come.
     On the third Sunday of Advent, we remember this fact of Messiah's light, how, like the sun exploding over a frigid mountain ridge, Messiah--Jesus--has brought us light, the light of enlightenment, the light of hope, the light of salvation, the light of meaning.  It is the light for which all of us wait, the light for which all of us, our lives spent in endless quests for meaningfulness wait, the light that if we embrace it, embrace it as ferevently as we did the warmth of the sunrise on an alpine morning, will change our lives forever.
     Once we touch this light, we'll never be the same.

     As I observe the increasingly tense negotiations between the U.S. House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama about how to deal with the so-called "fiscal cliff" due next month, I often think about the apostles Paul and Peter's words about the role and place of government in our lives.  Although both of these men lived in the confines of the mightiest empire of its day, Rome, daily subject to its many rules and regulations, they nonetheless uniformly encouraged their readers to obey its authorities (unless these authorities decreed laws which prevented them from exercising their, ability to worship God).  Why?  Because they believed that despite all Rome's flaws and shortcomings (and there were many), it was, oddly enough, one small part of God's way of maintaining order and comity in the world.
     Government, Paul wrote in Romans 13, has been ordained by God for the good of the planet.  We may not always like a particular government, we may not always care for the leaders of a particular government, but we understand that, often in ways we do not fully grasp, they contribute to God's bigger vision of human flourishing.  We need government.  (Yes, if a government does not function well, it becomes our obligation and responsibility to correct it (and this is another issue, one which warrants much further discussion), but this does not obviate the essential necessity of government.)
     We may not like what either Mr. Boehner or Mr. Obama are hoping or planning to do about the "fiscal cliff," but we can be thankful that they are at least talking with each other, that they generally respect each other and, perhaps most important, that they are working within the structures of the government the voters elected them to serve and sustain.

     "So are the ways of everyone who gains by violence," observes the first chapter of Proverbs, "for it takes away the life of its possessors."  As we look at our fractured world, full of animosity and strife, rife with war and conflict, violence seems ascendant, seems to overwhelm all attempts at peace.  Tragically, many of those pursuing or using violence to achieve their various political and economic ends are, more often than not, responding to violence, in numerous forms, that they have experienced and for which they see violence as the only viable response.  And perhaps it is.  Not all revolutions and upheavals produce an unpleasant or oppressive end.  On the other hand, as the writer observes, those who view violence as the only means of gain, as the only means of accomplishing a goal, may be in the end undermining, philosophically, metaphysically, and politically, everything they are hoping to achieve.
     And this is the perhaps the greatest tragedy of all.  Change may come, but with a heavy price, and those who pursue it by violent means, however justified they may seem to be, do well to remember that even if we are reaching for laudable ends, we achieve them in a broken world, a world bent under the weight of its turmoil and sin.  No victory is forever, no gain will last, and no conquest will permanently change a heart.  Life will go on, but it is a life lived in a world singularly inhospitable to spiritual and metaphysical clarity.  It will always be incomplete.  As are we.
     Though violence may be inevitable, it doesn't need to be.  Life is greater than its pain.

     "I wish I had never been born," sang the late Freddie Mercury of the rock band Queen.  Though he may not have been aware of it, Mr. Mercury is echoing a sentiment found in Ecclesiastes, which observes, in its sixth chapter, that perhaps the miscarriage is better off than one who has lived, only to die.  Although "it has never seen the sun and never knows anything," the text notes, "it is better off than he."
     Many people have doubtless felt this way.  Sometimes life really does not seem worth living.  As we continue through the Advent season, however, let's remind ourselves that, yes, although existence can be very problemmatic indeed and we may wonder we even bother, without it, nothing would ever be.  In fact, we would not even be here to think about why we would not like to be here!
     On the other hand, as we continue our journey through the Advent season, let us bear in mind that the Christian message that God really did appear in human form (John 1:14) validates everything about why we are here, everything about why we are even here to ponder why we are here.
     After all, had God not appeared in human form, all we would have is a world that, however grand and glorious it may be, is a world without a point and, even worse, a world without a name:  it's here, but not really.  Who would know it?
     Even if we were never born, we would still need a name.

     A line in a novel which I read recently observed that, "One day, there will be nothing left."  This is a truely radical thought.  And in the absence of a God, it is entirely true.  But what, really, is nothing?  And how there be nothing if there is, truly, nothing?
     It is so difficult for we who are something to imagine nothing.  It is counterintuitive to who we are.  And perhaps that's the point.  Perhaps that's why we have so much difficulty (and, for some, terror) imagining it.  We are something, made to be something, made to engage in something.  We are made to long for something, the something that explains our somethingness.
     How could Jesus, the one whose goings forth, as the prophet Micah observed, "have been from long ago," have been nothing?  Indeed:  we are made to long for the "somethingness" of God.

     "For the grace of God has appeared," writes the apostle Paul in the third chapter of his letter to Titus, "bringing salvation to all people" (Titus 2:11).  What is Paul saying?  Simply, that as we remember the second Sunday of Advent, we can come to understand more fully that in Jesus, God in the flesh (as we observed last week (John 1:14)), we see, in flesh and blood, concrete and visible expression of God's grace, physical manifestation and display of his truest posture toward us.  In Jesus we see the fullest possible picture of God's intentions for favor toward us.  Jesus tells us that, above all, God is gracious and loves us, and he provides us with a way to know him, fully and intimately.  Jesus is the grace of God.
     Jesus' appearance tells us that whatever else we may think about God, what we ought to think most about him is this:  God is loving, God is gracious, and God is for us, for us today, for us tomorrow, for us forever.  All we need do is accept his invitation, his invitation of his son Jesus, to us.  God's extended the invitation; now he's waiting for us to reply.
     What else do we really need to do?

     December 7, 1941.  For members of the so-called "Greatest Generation," this is a day, the day of the attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, which will forever remain in their memories.  In the same way, December 8, 1980, is a day which (along with November 22, 1963) will likely forever remain in the memories of their children.  On this night, John Lennon, the former Beatle, was assassinated in front of his apartment building in New York City.  Similarly, September 11, 2011, the day that two jets flew into the World Trade Center Towers in downtown Manhattan, is a day which, although it will certainly remain in the minds of all Americans for many years to come, will perhaps burn most strongly in the memories of the Baby Boomers' children.
     Three days, three generations, three seminal events, three liminal moments.  Such moments are the stuff of historical angst and cultural tragedy, the Urstoff that moves hearts and shapes minds, the liminality that bursts categories and horizons, thrusting those who experience them into unexpected perceptions of what life can hold.  They change the way that people see the world.
     As they should.  When such momentous tangles of metaphysical and material horror erupt into our everyday experience, we are often aghast, struck at the seeming capriciousnss and unanswerability of existence.  We weep, we ponder; we wonder why.  We wonder why they happen, we wonder why they have to be.  And we feel helpless that we cannot go back and stop them.  Our grasp of time is so fleeting.
     But this is our reality, our place, our world.  We wander in the shadows of forces and movements over which we have absolutely no control, living out our lives in the umbra of twists and turns of space and time from which we at times wish only to flee, only to find that we cannot.
     Yet, really, should we?  To flee is to deny the facts of existence.  Not that we embrace the tragedy, not that we rejoice that we experience it.  But we understand it is part of living on this planet, part of walking on a globe bent and broken by sin.
     What can we do?  We weep, we wonder, we restore and repair.  Ultimately, however, we trust.  We trust in the fact of a loving God.
     Darkness, be it come in 1941, 1980, or 2001, need not be ascendant.

     "My work isn't about form, it's about seeing," asserts the artist Roy Lichtenstein.  Though this is an aesthetic statement, an observation about the nature of an artist's craft, given the Advent season which surrounds us at the moment, we may profit from considering its sentiments in a theological light.  To the point, from the days of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have struggled to define form.  Is form, as Plato suggested, an ideal set in another realm, something into which we come, as he concluded, through the activity of the memory of our soul?  Or is form, as Plato's student Aristotle opined, simply a statement or expression about the characteristics of a given object of perception?
     If we assess these things in light of the Christian notion of incarnation, that God, in Jesus, became a human being, perhaps both positions are true.  If God is a distant form, lost in the heavens and beyond seeing, then we will not know him.  Yet if God is no more than an object of our sensory perceptions, as material as we, he may not be any greater or more useful than any other object on the planet.  If, however, God is a distant and omnipotent and loving and creator form that becomes an object of seeing, one to whom we can readily relate, well, then we have a profound artistic statement, one that affirms the wisdom of Lichtenstein's insight:  wouldn't we rather imagine--and have--a God whom we can see?

     "To be or not to be," says Shakespeare's Hamlet, "that is the question."  Indeed:  it is the question.  Every moment of every day, we bump into this question.  Should we choose to embrace life with its joys and challenges, or do we run away from it, ensconsing ourselves in philosophical oblivion.  The choice is always ours.
     As it was for George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life.  Though he didn't want to live, he eventually was persuaded that he really did.  He chose existence over its absence.
     But why do we pursue existence?  More often than not, it is because we do not wish to leave it.  And why is this?  Simply, we think that this existence is the only one we have.  From our mortal vantage point, this existence seems to be, in itself, the beginning and end.  It's it.
     And perhaps it is.  But have we really come from nothingness?  And we will really one day return to the same?  Have we really never had a point?
     It's enough to make one believe in God.
    

     How do we see?  We see what we want to see.  Although what is in the world, that is, what there is to be seen does not change, what we see about the world does.  Depending on our background, circumstances, and mindset at a given time, we all see differently.  We all see different things in what there is to be seen.
     Perhaps this is one reason why many of us tend to deny recountings of spiritual experiences.  We do not think human beings can see what people who have had these experiences claim to have seen.  Fair enough.  But this assumes that what there is to be seen is limited to, well, what we think there is to be seen, and how do we know--really know--that we are seeing everything there is to be seen?
     What if there are things to be seen that, due to our respective notions about what can be seen, we cannot (or will not) see?
     Enter faith.  But not faith in faith itself, for that misses the point, but faith in a someone, and a personal someone at that, a personal someone who, all things considered, is the only viable explanation for our experiences of seeing what we think we would otherwise not.  It thinks, it purposes, it acts.  Like us.
     Only this kind of faith will really see what it cannot.

     Running through the theology of the early Christian church was a belief called Gnosticism.  In sum, Gnosticism held that all things pertaining to the flesh, that is, of the body, were harmful and evil, while only that which was spiritual or intellectual, that is, of the mind, were good.  What the Church found most insidious about Gnosticism was that although it elevated God above all else, it at the same time made it impossible to associate God with anything having to do with matter, that is, things of everyday existence on earth.  God was there irretrievably distant from the flesh and blood problems and challenges of humanity.  And if God is impossibly distant from us, why should we both with him?
     Here is why we must consider, in this first week of the Advent season, the time of year in which Christianity remembers and celebrates the appearance of Jesus Christ on the earth, just how important Jesus' coming is.  If Gnosticism were true, we would never see God, we would never know God, we would never understand God as a personal presence in our lives.  He would be always infinities apart from us.  But Christianity says that, as John's gospel tells us, "The Word [that is, God] became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14).  God, in the person of Jesus, became part of our world, became an integral part of our everyday reality, became a being as flesh and blood as you and me, subject to all its infirmities, hardships, and limitations while, and this is crucial, remaining the omnipotent and creator God.  God became like us, as real as you as real as me, as real as anyone else in this world.
     Most importantly, God became for us, ready to be our counselor, friend, and greatest joy and meaning forever.  It's the ultimate paradox:  a perfect God in an imperfect world.  But it works.  How can flesh and blood ever be the same?