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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Faith and Values: God’s love is experienced through interactions with others

Paul Graves

Editor’s note: This is one of Graves’ occasional letters to his grandchildren.

Dear Katie, Claire and Andy,

Two days ago, we celebrated Christmas together as a family. Beside the gifts we exchanged, we also talked about the gift God gave us that we celebrate on Dec. 25: Jesus.

I hope you understood when I mentioned Dec. 25 isn’t literally the day Jesus was born. The story of Christmas being celebrated on Dec. 25 is filled with religious and cultural traditions.

What’s really more important than the literal date of birth is the birth’s meaning. The big word for the meaning of Jesus’ birth (regardless of its actual, but unknown, date) is Incarnation. It means “in the flesh.” God became a human being, in the flesh.

Why would God do such an outrageous thing? I think a simple, though incomplete, way to answer the question is this: Becoming the human being we know as Jesus, God was saying “yes” to the best humanness in each of us.

Obviously we will never be completely human as Jesus was. We may live as faithfully as Jesus did, or love as completely as Jesus did. But it’s like God realizes humanity needs a flesh-and-blood model so we know what we are capable of as humans. Jesus is that model.

God lives as a real person, then, to show us that even in our imperfect living, God will not turn away from us. It’s like God didn’t want us to settle for being deep-down fearful and hopeless. So God chose to show us how to live with love, a new sense of worth, a new reason to hope.

The people who lived before Jesus’ birth had conflicting pictures of God in their minds, as we still usually do. Too often, God seems perched on a heavenly throne, angry, ready to punish, seeking revenge on people who disobeyed God.

Incarnation is like God still saying, “That’s not who I am. I need a new identity!” So God decided to show that true identity in a way people might better understand.

So God became human. In Jesus, God showed what is really inside of every human being – the passion for healthy life, the compassion for human and environmental life, the capacity for unlimited love and forgiveness, the courage to stand up to the horrors that happen when human beings settle for so much less than we’re created to be.

But in addition to this amazing affirmation of the true human value we have deep, deep inside of us, there is another side. What we call Incarnation is filled with truly unanswerable questions and contradictions. Why can’t we live in that amazing affirmation all the time?

For complicated reasons, we just don’t seem to believe that we are as lovable as God thinks. So we can act out our disbelief in sometimes petty, sometimes hurtful, and, too often, very destructive ways. It’s like we want to show God (or someone else) we aren’t as lovable as God says we are.

Yet God is persistent in hanging in with us. God acts through other people to remind us that we are indeed loved, are love- able, are capable of positive changes in our lives.

The deeper down we experience being loved by others, the better chance we’ll realize God loves us through them.

You see, kids, God’s Incarnation is not just through Jesus. We celebrate God living among us “in the flesh” every day – not just Dec. 25 or whenever Jesus was actually born. We are God’s new identity also! Wow!

The Rev. Paul Graves, a Sandpoint resident and retired United Methodist minister, is the founder of Elder Advocates. He can be contacted at welhouse@nctv.com.