In the name of the God who is one with us. Amen.
Though it might sound like it, denominalization is not a term used to describe the splintering of Christians into different groups. No, denominalization is the technical term that linguists use to describe what is otherwise known as “verbing.” It’s when we take a noun and turn it into a verb. As in, “I miss being a child, adulting is hard,” or “I’ve been to enough Christmas parties, I’m ready for some introverting,” or “During the Christmas season, I’ve been priesting a lot.” These are all examples of denominalization, and they put the emphasis on the action, making the verb, even if it’s not normally a verb, more immediate and to the point.
Christmas is about one such word: oneing. Christmas is when God ones with us, fulfilling the promise of Emmanuel, which is a Hebrew phrase meaning “God with us.” The Incarnation of Jesus, which John describes as “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And this Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” is God oneing with us. One of the prayers of this season mentions that in Christmas, God is joining things together – the divine to flesh, heaven to earth, hope to reality, God to humanity.
One of the first theologians to ever use the verb “oneing” is the English saint and mystic of the 1400s, Julian of Norwich. She is the first female author that we know of in the English language and her writing is called “Revelations of Divine Love.” In one chapter, she writes extensively about this notion of oneing saying “Therefore our Lord wants us to know this as a matter of faith and belief, and especially and truly that we are blessed and kept whole and safe in our Lord Jesus Christ… [and we are] so joined and oned to him that we can never be separated from him.” It’s a lovely sentiment, that because we are one with God, indelibly united to God, we are kept safe and secure and can trust that all shall be well.
Julian continues, “For before God made us, he loved us; and thus, our souls are made by God and oned to God.” We are so loved by God that God’s love is imprinted within us – deeper than our DNA or the atoms that make up our body; God’s love is the most foundation building block of human life. It’s a similar to point as we heard made in Hebrews, that “Long ago, God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son… who is the reflection of God’s glory.”
At Christmas, that glory of God that was manifest in Jesus Christ is oned to all of human nature. One of my favorite prayers in the Prayer Book is used on the Second Sunday of Christmas, and in part it prays, “O God who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity.” Essentially, it’s a prayer of oneing and grace. It’s not that our human nature had finally made itself good enough for God, it’s that God came to us in abundant and unconditional love to redeem and transform us. Because if human nature is oned to God in Jesus, then all of us are oned to God as well.
And this is the true gift of Christmas, that in becoming human, we are blessed with divinity. No, this doesn’t mean that we are now the omniscient and perfect rulers of Creation, but we are tied to God in holiness and love. The very same love that exists between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and binds the Trinity into one being, that love is what ones us to God. In a sense, that love brings us into the life of God, which is why we can be assured of our forgiveness and eternal life, because these things are secured by the love of God. The curse and banishment from Eden are erased as we are restored to the glory and goodness that is our true nature.
This isn’t some New-Age spirituality, this is the beating heart of the Gospel – that all that separates us from God has been taken care of and put away by the love of God in Jesus Christ, and by the power of the Spirit, we are always alive in God as God lives in us and we in God. This is what our hearts yearn for – union with the love that made us – and it is what we are oned with at Christmas. God and sinners have been reconciled.
The foundation for this claim is in the verse that we heard from John. It’s John 1:14 and while it’s hard to pick just one verse from the nearly 31,000 verses in the Bible and say one is the most important, the strongest case can probably be made for this one: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Everything prior to that verse was anticipating and leading up to it and everything afterwards, including the 2,000 years since, flow from it.
We say in the Creed “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God” so often that we might forget just how radical of a claim this is because the ideas of “word” and “flesh” are polar opposites. Christmas is a paradox.
“Word” is that which is eternal, infinite, supernatural, transcendent, and divine whereas “flesh” is natural, worldly, superficial, immanent, and temporal. The concept of the Word made flesh, of the divine being oned to the human, is an impossible possibility. It’s like a square circle – two thing that, by definition, cannot exist at the same time. It’s a reminder to us that, as Isaiah puts it in another passage, “God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are God’s thoughts than ours.” Christmas is something to embrace, not understand. It’s something like a Celtic knot – something that is beautiful and makes sense, but is also mathematically impossible.
Martin Luther King once spoke about this paradox, saying “the doctrines of transcendence and immanence are both half-truths in need of the tension of each other to give the more inclusive truth.” And he’s right – it’s only half true that God is the inaccessible and transcendent wholly other. Yes, God is divine and unlike us. But that’s not the fullness of the story. Nor can we say that Jesus is merely a human on whom we’ve thrust our projections, hopes, and fears. No, Jesus is not just another human, he is “the” human; the one who reveals to us the fullness and blessedness of what it means to be made in the image of God. The Incarnation, the Word becoming flesh, is when the divine and human sound together in a symphony of both transcendence and immanence. The Gospel is the oneing of the knowable and unknowable, the sacred and the profane, the common and the paradox.
This mystery of Christmas reminds us that God is bigger than we are and has options available that we cannot conceive of. Sins can be forgiven, peace can follow conflict, life is more enduring than death. So no matter how hard life might seem right now, no matter how gloomy the news, no matter how intense the feelings, no matter how dim the outlook, Christmas is the gift of the true light which enlightens everyone and makes the impossible happen; for with God, all things are possible. There’s prayer that professes that God is doing “more than we can ask for or imagine,” and we know this to be true because of Christmas, when the Word is oned with our flesh.
And while I cannot prove with mathematics or physics that claim, I can witness to it through the lives of the saints, in the power of love to endure all things, with the amazing superfluousness of beauty. This is why Julian so clearly, even in the midst of her suffering, writes that “all shall be well.”
In this same section where she writes about oneing, Julian uses an image that we can take with us on Christmas to remind us that we have been oned to God in Christ. You might have already run into this image when you opened a gift tied up with a ribbon – the knot. Julian writes, “Furthermore, our Lord wants us to know that Christ’s beloved soul was so preciously knotted to us in the making; with a knot so subtle and so strong that is oned to God; and in this oneing is made endlessly holy.” At Christmas, our oneing to God in love is made manifest, which means that all things are being made well. Thanks be to God!
