As 2014 winds to a close, I share thoughts about Interstellar, which I saw last week. For those of you who have seen it, you know that it presents a number of complexities and speculations about space and time and the meaning of existence.  Many of these are worth a blog, really, but on December 31st, I focus on this:  time is more complicated than we can imagine.  We simply do not know how it works.  Though we live in it, though we die in it, we do not really know it.  But we're forever in it.
     As this year ends and a new one begins, the mystery continues.  We live, we die, we live again.
     And time, the riddle of present and ground of future, remains.

     Christmas has come, and now it is gone.  People are taking their ornaments down, stores are offering their after Christmas sales, travelers are going home.  It's over for another year.
     Or is it?  If Christmas means anything, anything at all, it cannot possibly be contained in one day.  If God has really come, if God has really visited his creation, how can anything--and any of us--ever be the same?  History, and everything in it, including you and I, has irrecoverably changed.
     Enjoy the moment, enjoy the day.  Enjoy existence.  Enjoy them, rejoicing, fully aware that they now mean more than you can possibly imagine.  The light of eternity, the word of the ages, the spoken beginning of space and time has entered our world.
     God has come.

As I always do, at the December meeting of my atheist discussion group, I give all in attendance a little Christmas treat.  Last year it was a candy cane; this year, it was a peppermint and chocolate treat.  Unlike last year, when one of the group wished me, when I greeted her with "Merry Christmas," a "Sweet Solstice," everyone responded to me with, "Merry Christmas."
     Even though no one in the group finds any reason to believe the evidence for the historicity of Jesus, and even though no one in the group plans to attend church on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, all of them, like almost all of us, find a measure of joy in the Christmas season.  It could be the happiness of family; it could be a thoughtful gift; it could be a new grandchild; it could be a host of other things.  Christmas's aura is unique in the Western imagination.  Its power, however one defines, it nearly universal.
     This is a good thing.  We all benefit when our fellow human beings, even if for a very brief season, become more intentional about how we love each other.  We all profit when a little more love seeps into the world.
     Theology aside, this is the marvel and wonder of Christmas:  love becomes ever more visible in the world.  Though some would say that this is a psychological response to a particular cultural ethos, it seems more likely that, if God did in fact come into history as a human being then, clearly, we--and our history--can never be the same.

                                                 MERRY CHRISTMAS!

     After months of, for the children among us, waiting, and for the parents and other adults among us, pondering, shopping, scurrying, and worrying, the big night is upon us:  Christmas Eve.  For some, it will be just another night; for others, a time of deep familial connections; for still others, a night of profound religiosity; and for some, perhaps a combination of two or three.  Whatever the case may be, Christmas Eve is a night that resonates in our inner and cultural imaginations.  It's a night apart.
     Why?  Consider the words of the old hymn that, "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee [Jesus] tonight."  We all have hopes, we all have fears.  Some delight us, some overwhelm us.  Some amaze us.  Christmas Eve remembers and commemorates a night in which God, the loving and transcendent God, in the person of Jesus, enveloped, reconciled, conquered, and resolved all of them.  Whatever we hope for, and whatever we fear, in Jesus we find their meaning, trajectory, and resolution.  There is nothing more we need.
     Of course, we will continue to nurture hopes, and we will continue to experience fears.  We're still human.  But Christmas Eve tells us that we need wait no longer to know what life's hopes and fears, with all their challenges, frustrations, wonders, and curiosities, ultimately mean.
     God has come.

      As we remember the fourth and final Sunday of Advent and look towards its culminating event--the incarnation, God's appearance in human flesh--I think frequently about 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 for a time 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 manifest and reconcile himself to his human creation, the one whom God would use to draw all people to himself.  In Jesus, the poor and forgotten refugee, was the greatest hope of all time.  It's the ultimate irony, the greatest surprise.  It's God's way of demonstrating to us that just when we think we have everything figured out, be it our views about immigration, aliens, refugees, or anything else, we really do not.
     But isn't that what God is all about?

     Horrific death knows no season.  A cliche perhaps, but it is one I thought of as I read the news reports of the Taliban 's recent slaughter of 132 schoolchildren in Pakistan.  It's difficult to know where to begin in contemplating such awful pain.  We can offer comfort to the families who have lost children; solace to the families of the teachers who lost their lives while trying to defend their students; encouragement to the Pakistani government to redouble its efforts to eradicate the Taliban from the country; grief over the general immensity of the loss; or anguish over how religion has once again been grossly misused to make a point.  Whether we do any or all of these, however, we remain stunned by the scope of the event:  why?  Why must people do such things?  Why does the world breed such tragedy?
     As evangelist Billy Graham remarked in his speech about the events of September 11, 2001, in New York City, "How do we understand something like this?  Why does God allow evil like this to take place?"  Like all of us, Graham had no answers.  And like all of us, he probably never will, at least in this life.
     Yet as Graham continued, "We've seen so much that brings tears to our eyes and makes us all feel a sense of anger.  But God can be trusted, even when life seems at its darkest."
     As Graham would readily acknowledge, this is so easy to say yet so very hard to do.  In the face of such tragedy, however, it's really all we can--and should--do.  Difficult as it is, we can trust God.  Somehow, some way, he knows.  Somehow, some way, he is there. This is the Muslim's comfort, this is the Christian's solace:  God is there.
     For as this horrific rain of death makes clear, we certainly cannot trust ourselves. Pray for the schoolchildren, pray for the families enduring loss, pray for the Taliban who died. Be thankful for the goodness of God.

     A virgin birth?  That a woman who had never had sexual relations with a man conceived a son in her womb is one of the most controversial aspects of the birth narratives in the New Testament.  How could this, medically, be?
     Over the ensuing centuries, commentators have offered various explanations for this phenomenon.  Some have referred to rare stories about women--and men--giving birth when everything about their anatomy and interpersonal relationships indicated that they could not do so.  Others have argued that it is a metaphor to make a larger point about the meaning of Jesus' birth.  Still others have termed it misguided mythology.
     Everyone is of course free to draw her own conclusions.  If we are to take the text for what it says, however, we can only draw one:  Mary really did conceive Jesus without having sexual relations with another human being.  Why would we do this?  If we believe that the remainder of the Bible is trustworthy, which much archaeological and textual study indicates it is, then we have no reason to reject this particular part of it.  On the other hand, if we do not believe the remainder of the Bible is historically trustworthy, we will likely not believe this story at all.
     We must view this story in its wider context.  It is one of many stories (or episodes: saying that it is a story does not imply it is not true) in a document which has been vetted repeatedly by a great deal of analysis and scrutiny by scholars across the planet as being reliable and true.  In addition, however, and this is a large "addition," we must agree that there is a bigger reality in which ours is comprised.  We must agree that over and above it all is a God who speaks into this present moment.  We affirm the presence of the supernatural.
     And if we do this, we conclude that this God is fully able to do what, medically, does not seem possible:  to conceive a child in a virgin's womb.  It's a matter of faith, yes, but it is a matter of a faith firmly rooted and grounded in history.
     And that makes all the difference.
     

     Most of us have heard the "Christmas story" countless times.  Across the world for thousands of years, people have read and pondered, over and over, Luke's account of Jesus' birth.  One might almost think that there is nothing new to find in it.
     But there always is.  As I was reading it this year, I found myself struck, and not for the first time, by the thought that the first people to hear about Messiah's birth were shepherds. In the twenty-first century, unless we are living in an isolated rural area in various parts of the world, we do not think much about shepherds.  In Jesus' day, however, many people did.  Shepherds were an integral part of the economy of the ancient world.
     Socially, however, the shepherds were despised, viewed as the lowest of the low.  Few wished to associate with them.  They spent their days--and nights--largely apart from the rest of the people, living lonely lives in the fields and hillsides of the nations.
     Yet throughout the pages of the Bible, shepherding is held in high esteem.  Most of us have heard of Psalm 23, the psalm of the Good Shepherd, and many of us are aware that Jesus presented himself as the good shepherd (John 10).  In addition, David, the most famous king of ancient Israel and distant ancestor of Christ, was a lowly shepherd boy when he killed the Philistine giant, Goliath.
     Many of us devote the Christmas season to finding the most expensive gifts we can afford.  We strive to go one better than we did last year.  The last thing we aim for in our gift buying is humility.  Ironically, however, the first group of people to whom God revealed the birth of Jesus were people whose lives were steeped in humility:  forgotten by nearly everyone, the shepherds labored and toiled outside the margins of conventional society. No one knew them.
     We might say that in its purest form Christmas doesn't encourage greatness; it calls for humility.  It calls us to look not at ourselves and how we can spend our money on ourselves, our friends, or family, but rather what we can do for others, what we can do for the "shepherds" among us.  Christmas demands that reach out to those on the margins. While we will always be inclined to take care of ourselves, we may not be as eager to do so for others.
     So did Jesus say that, "The Son of Man [a name that he often used for himself and which reflected traditions deep in the Hebrew worldview] did not come to serve, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for the many" (Mark 10:45).

     A few weeks ago, the famous French-born German mathematician Alexander Grothendieck passed away at the age of 86.  While his death left most people nonplussed, mathematicians around the world mourned.  Why?  After much thought and research, Gorthendieck came to establish that underlying every algebraic formula was what one writer called a "schema," an "invisible" structure without which the formula could not exist.  In other words, these inviolate formulas could not be so unless something even "more" inviolate existed as well.
     The British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell once voiced his frustration that he had to accept various mathematical formulas without any proof for their validity. These formulas just "were."  The American philosopher Richard Rorty insisted that he was an anti-foundationalist:  he had no starting point.  Nor did he want one.  He claimed that he arrived at every choice in an epistemological vacuum.
     Russell and Rorty's positions demonstrate the necessity and importance of Grothendieck's conclusions. Nothing, not even the most basic of mathematical formulas, stands in isolation from everything else.  Nothing exists in a vacuum.  Nothing exists outside of a medium bigger than what it is.  Nothing.  As medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas pointed out long ago, unless we posit a non-starting starting point, we will never be able to begin.  Mathematicians may call it "schemas," philosophers may call it a Form, and theologians may call it God.  Either way, outside of a series of "experiences," we can make no sense of temporal contingency without the eternality of something that never began.

     One morning a couple of years ago, while I was backpacking in California's rugged Sierra Nevada mountain range, I got out of my tent to see the sunrise.  I was camped in a lake basin, a lake basin well above timberline.  Trees were few and far between.  The landscape was primarily rock, sculpted and cold granite that oozed out from the water and fusing into the mountains looming above.
     So I waited.  The light slowly rose in the east, its rays illuminating the sky even before the sun's orb surfaced over the highest ridge.  The sky gradually lit up.  Temperatures remained in the thirties and forties.
     Then it came.  Exploding atop the col, the sun burst, dazzling with beams of unfettered 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 of Messiah, the one who would come to illuminate 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 meaning that shines through the cold and ennui of an often profoundly befuddling existence.  It is the light of purpose, the light of value, the light of an eternity that, if we embrace it, embrace it as fervently as we do the warmth of a sunrise, mountain or not, of our lives, will change our lives forever.
     Once we touch this light, we'll never be the same.

     Most of us know Robert Louis Stevenson as the author of popular classics such as Treasure Island and Kidnapped.  What people may not know is that Stevenson began his career as an engineer.  As he did, he tried to use engineering to make sense of what he deemed to be a purposeless world.  Like many people of his age, the close of the nineteenth century, the human epoch that birthed modernity (the idea that God is absent or gone, and which was given graphic expression in Friedrich Nietzsche's observation that, "God is dead"), Stevenson saw no essential "big picture" meaning in human existence.  He sought many ways to counteract his constant sinking feeling that his being alive ultimately meant nothing.  One of them was engineering.
     Stevenson's observation is well put.  Those who are engineers understand that the world consists of various structures, some natural, some artificial, which are sometimes visible and sometimes hidden.  If the world is to have meaning, it must have structure, some sort of presence around which it can be organized and understood.  Whether these are the eternal mathematical structures of Max Tegmark or reflections of the eternal vision of God, it is these on which meaningfulness depends.  A world without any structure at all has no point; indeed, it cannot be.  Structure and order are essential to meaning.
     Whether we use engineering, art, music, mathematics, or religion, we understand that the world has structure and order.  As do we.  Otherwise, we would not bother.  And structure and order of course have to come from somewhere:  they have not always been here.  We want them, we need them.  So the question becomes:  why are they here?

     Recently, I read some of the work of the British writer William Morris, who lived and died in the last half of the nineteenth century.  If you are familiar with the writer J. J. R. Tolkien, you may like knowing that Morris's thinking exercised a significant impact on him. In his reflections on his craft, Morris talked about the notion of a Second World (Tolkien discussed this, too).  This is a world apart from present reality, a world completely unto itself, a self-contained world with its own laws, beliefs, and reality:  a world of fantasy. Tolkien's famous Lord of the Rings trilogy is a case in point.  Those familiar with this remarkable work know that Tolkien presents its events in a world that he has created and which has no connection to the world the rest of us occupy.  It's a fantasy world.
     Although we could make all kinds of parallels with other things with this, I mention it in relation to, predictably, the supernatural.  Part of the reason some of us have trouble grasping or accepting the supernatural is that it appears to function in a way that seems at odds with the world to which we are accustomed.  It does not always evidence a credible connection to what we currently know.  The perfunctory response to this is of course, "Well, one must have faith."
     While no doubt this is ultimately true, if it is all that is true, then we are left with intimations of a world that we will never really know.  It's easy to reject the validity of such a world:  of what value can it possibly be to us?
     On the other hand, if the Second World, e.g., the supernatural is accessible to us, its credibility magnifies considerably.  We can know it, feel it, hear it, and see it in our experience.  We connect.
     This is the message of Advent, this is the story of Christmas.  The Second World becomes the First.
     

     How much risk is reality?  I ask because I recently read yet another article about the famous high wall climber, Alex Honnold.  Honnold has made his name by scaling enormous walls, some three thousand feet high, alone and without using any ropes whatsoever. Some call him foolish, others crazy.  Still others admire his penchant for risk and adventure (and he is not the only rock climber who engages in such things).  Honnold has attracted a significant following.  As he put it in the article, "I have a gift" for dealing with high pressures situations in a calm and reasoned way.
     For Honnold, reality is a high risk activity.  He puts his life on the line every time he stands at the foot of a rock face.  For the rest of us, however, reality also is a risk.  It is a risk because reality is so frightfully unpredictable and contingent.  We frequently make decisions whose outcome we cannot precisely anticipate or fathom, and we almost every day engage in activities which, though they seem reasonable and wonderful at the time, can just as easily descend into a morass of confusion, even darkness and despair.  We can't tame reality fully, and that is why, despite everything we know about it, reality remains a profound mystery.
     And mysteries carry risk.  On the other hand, if life had no mystery, though it might be safer, it would also be immeasurably less interesting.  It wouldn't have a heart.  We're not made to pursue what we can clearly see and know.  We're made to seek that which we do not.  Whether you believe this reality dances before a thin veil of the supernatural or it dances with itself and itself only, you understand that to be human is to engage in quest, a quest for hope, a quest for meaning.
     Life is the greatest--and grandest--risk of all.  This is even truer if there is a God, for then risk assumes the more profound challenge of all:  faith.  Yet to paraphrase Honnold, faith is not a risk without reason, but a risk which, all things considered, is the most reasonable of all.

     For those of us who are baby boomers, we remember the night of December 8, 1980. John Lennon, the former Beatle and an enduring icon to many of us, fell to an assassin's bullet outside of his apartment in New York City.  As those of the "Greatest Generation" remember December 7, 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the momentous changes it unleashed on millions and millions of people, as the Millennials remember the darkness of September 11, 2001, so we remember December 8th.
     I've listened to Lennon's classic "Imagine" more times than I can count.  Though I look at it differently than I did on the other side of my embrace of Jesus and Christianity, I still marvel at the simplicity of its vision.  Though religious people may quarrel with "Imagine's" focus on the things of this world to the exclusion and detriment of things beyond it, we should, I say, identify with its passion to imagine what we do not now see. While Lennon did not see world peace at the time he wrote the song, he nonetheless longed for it and, it seemed, believed it would one day happen.  Similarly, most religions, Christianity and Islam and Judaism in particular, though they do not now see the fullness of that for which they long, nonetheless believe that one day they will.  We all long, we all imagine.  We all wish for a better world.
     We all dream of peace.  Before we experience it, however, we must imagine--and believe--it will happen.  For it will.  In the end, peace will be a work of human endeavor undergirded and sustained by the fact and activity of God.  Humanness craves it, God guarantees it.
     Imagine.

     "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, we see concrete 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 benevolence, favor, and compassion.  He has come.  Jesus is the grace of God.
      We grant each other grace every day, as we should.  Yet it is God's grace that enables us to see and understand that amid the frequent senselessness of the world in which we live, there is hope, a hope that reality is more than what we see--but which frames and orders what we do.  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.
     As the musician Johannes Sebastian Bach put it, "Jesus, joy of human desire."

     Most people, I suspect, are at least peripherally familiar with the great British scientist and mathematician Isaac Newton.  Moreover, most of us, I suspect as well, know that he is remembered for his "discovery" of gravity, a discovery that led humanity to realign nearly everything it had previously believed about the structure and workings of the universe.
     A good deal of this realignment had to do with religion.  During the Middle Ages, the era in Western Europe that preceded the period (generally called the Scientific Revolution) in which Newton made his discovery, the Church (at that time solely Catholic) determined what was right and true.  Few dared challenge it.
     As modern science (which, by the way, most historians believe, found its genesis in the then prevailing belief that because God had made it, the universe was one of rationality and order and therefore amenable to thoughtful investigation), bolstered by the development of instruments such as the microscope and telescope, began to learn more about how the universe worked, however, most intellectuals came to view the Church's authority on such matters as decidedly less credible.  As they saw it, it was the scientific method, developed by Francis Bacon, that now constituted the means by which responsible people should ascertain the inner structure of the cosmos.  Nonetheless, nearly all of these scientists continued to believe in God, and to place him as the center and impetus of creation.
     Newton was no exception.  Writing on page 440 of his famous Principia (translated from its original Latin), the mathematician observed the following:

     "And lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other mutually, he hath placed those systems at immense distances one from another."

     The way Newton put this is highly instructive.  He allows gravity to be the sovereign force that governs the movements of the stars (the "heavens"), yet notes that it is only able to do so effectively because the Creator (God) had set the stars in a certain way. Although we can argue about how God did so--whether he simply "spoke" it or used natural forces to execute his vision--we come away with an intriguing juxtaposition of divine presence and natural capacities.  It is a juxtaposition in which we see a perfectly balanced picture of supernatural and natural in which to frame our understanding of the universe.  God is there, yet gravity is, too, natural as well as supernatural, both present, both necessary, both contributing, both upholding, both ensuring the existence of the cosmos.

     Have you heard of Malala?  She is the young Pakistani girl who, due to her fearless campaigning for girls' education, was, a couple of years ago, shot in the head by the Pakistani Taliban as she was traveling home from her school.  Thanks to a generous Pakistani government and gracious British doctors, Malala was flown to Britain and made a full recovery.  Today, she is living in Birmingham, attending school, and continuing her campaign.  She recently was made one of two recipients of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.  She is the youngest person ever to receive the honor.
     After reading her autobiography last month, I found myself quite struck by her courage and bravery, of course, but also by her unwavering trust in her god, Allah.  She firmly believes that Allah preserved her life for a purpose, and that for the rest of her days she wants to travel the planet advocating for the right of all girls to an education.  It's hard to argue with her conviction, really, as making education universally available for girls around the world will benefit everyone, not just Muslims.  We can surely argue over whether it was indeed Allah who spared Malala, yet if we believe in one sovereign and loving and personal God, we ought to nonetheless rejoice that he saw fit to grant Malala more days, perhaps many, many days on this planet.  What kind of a God would God be if he only loved the people of the West?  Or only the people of the East or South?
     God's economy and intentions are vast beyond our imagination.  Only with enormous trepidation do we try to understand and grasp them.  We can only resolve to appreciate each glimpse of their outworkings, while marveling at how, one day, we will see how it all fits together.
     Thanks, Malala, and thanks, God.

     In a bit of terribly sad news, I received word the day before Thanksgiving that one of my cousins, a cousin with whom I had grown up and with whom I had many fun and enjoyable times, had died of mesothelioma.  She was 61.  Elizabeth left behind a husband, two children, three grandchildren, and a host of relatives and friends.
     In the days before she passed, I had occasion to chat with her husband.  He affirmed his belief to me that when Liz died, she would be with God in heaven.  Although he would miss her "immensely," he felt better knowing that she would be in a "better" place.  And she will be.  While given our finitude, it is difficult to describe precisely how much "better" this place will be, we can know this much:  my cousin now stands on the other side of the curtain.  For her, life's final drama has unfolded.  Eternity awaits.  Earth is no more.
     It is a world of faith, singularly, perhaps insuperably challenging to grasp.  We can accept it, we can reject it.  But we cannot ignore it.  We cannot ignore the possibility of the openendedness of reality.  Moreover, if possibility is ultimately probability, as theories of infinity seem to tell us, this is a world more real than anything we can imagine. It's a world without which this present world cannot credibly or meaningfully exist.
     Do we really live and die in utter darkness?

     Speaking to his disciples in what has come to be known as his final discourse, Jesus predicts that one day their opponents will seek to kill them in the name of God (John 15-16).  In today's world, we do not need to look far to see how true Jesus' words were. Christians are murdered in the name of God every day.  Conversely, however, far too many people have died at the hands of Christians for the "glory" of God.  Moreover, this practice is unfortunately not confined to Christianity.  Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and adherents of countless other religious traditions also kill people in the name of God.
     We who are religious should move carefully when assessing or discerning who our enemies really are.  Regrettably, too often it is us.  As a person who wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times a number of years ago said, "Although I am an atheist, I envy the solace religious people find in their God.  But when I look at the pain that religion inflicts on the world, I see little reason to believe in him."
     This person has a point.  As Mahatma Gandhi once stated, referring to the behavior of his "Christian" British overlords, "I like Christ; I just don't like Christians."  Religion can be profoundly wonderful.  Those who practice it, however, can often be exactly the opposite.
     Those of who believe therefore ought to tremble before the hidden and inchoate purposes of God.  Rarely does he disclose, to anyone, the full scope of his intentions and vision.  If we believe, we do so humbly and carefully, and realize we walk in the shadow of immense mystery.

     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 physical body, were harmful and evil, while only that which was intellectual, that is, of the mind, was 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, things of everyday existence on earth.  God was there, but irretrievably distant from the flesh and blood problems and challenges of humanity.  And if God is impossibly distant from us, why should we bother 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 always be 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.
      Most importantly, God became for us, our greatest joy and hope 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?