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Robin White just sent me an invitation to call a Christmas Tree a Christmas Tree and not a holiday tree. Last week I sent a note through to Stephanie Macentire about celebrating the real Christmas...the one where the King of all Kings appears sidelined in an outlying shed possibly surrounded by animals, laid in a manger. In this note I thought this could be expanded. Anyone who has been through many Christian groups and movements will have experienced every strand of belief concerning Christmas. It is not Biblical. So some ignore it. Those in offshoot structures of the older denominations would be shocked that these others exist, since it is a given in Catholicism and Anglicanism that Christians do Christmas. If you are British Christmas is in your bloodstream. And it's fun. It's familial.It's extremely festive.Probably the most festive us Brits ever get! God's view on festivities is slightly different from the Brits. He does them BIG TIME.Generously.Over the toppishly. He made sure the Jews had at least 3 major ones and was probably quite pleased that they do a few others like Purim as well. Now each of the three major ones mean a lot. They are all BIG...whereas apart from the odd day here and there, Brits only really manage Christmas as a lengthier do. Then ofcourse you've got Jewish weddings. In fact most other nations do weddings seriously! We just charge seriously! All the factors that you could get thrown in for free in a Christian community...including your own house built if you are Amish....we godless brits have now to spend the first 10 years of our married life paying off. (In general, secular life is expensive, soulless until drunk,overhyped with little return, where you pay for friendship that should be given free. In a God filled community...and i mean that term very exactly...not what you have probably twisted it to mean...religious , boring, and long dead...nope a God filled community do all this stuff for nothing...or minimal charge and that's where you get this word which means God is in them....Enthusiastically...En- theos- ASTICALLY) So as everybody seeks to encroach on our festival of Christmas and wintervalise it....why don't we do it properly? I haven't got the Word of the Lord on this...because God's nearest festival to Christmas is the Feast of tabernacles. And He'd probably prefer us to do that one. At Christmas time those who attend church hear sermons about how Christ was God Incarnate. God made flesh.God come amongst us. Emmanuel. Well imagine those last phrases with 500 hundred watt spotlights on, and probably needing 3D glasses. Because dear reader...we've been lulled to sleep. Probably by all the candles.
Regardless of all the clear Biblical script saying Jesus laid His glory aside, the Catholic church has continually lifted Jesus' humanity somehow just that little bit out of reach.And the Anglicans caught the sickness by transference. Contagion. Especially high Anglicans. Now these churches do awe very well. And that is good. But they haven't a clue about the words "Jesus laid His glory aside". The first really flash thing that Jesus did was after being baptised in the Spirit. And he was only baptised in the Spirit after first being water baptised "to fulfil all righteousness". He was pedantically marking out a course for us without excuse. He who was perfect, yet totally unglorified human - He'd laid His glory aside in the heavenly vestibule- remember....insisted on doing all the things we would have to do to fully enter and move in the Kingdom. But the point of Christmas and His coming was that He got to succeed as an Adam, where the first one failed. He was Adam 2.0 injected into the human race, into our line. Adam was made fully grown. This Adam 2.0 had to grow from birth.Tested in every point, there came a day when He could freely announce at the time of the final Passover week,"The devil has nothing in me". So fully road tested, He allowed Himself to go into the ground as a seed, so that as He rose He could then transplant this same totally victorious life into anyone who would receive it by faith. As the carol says "Be born in us today". And in the same way that Jesus' life began in an unpromising cattleshed...totally unrecognised by anyone...except God's specially informed welcoming committee the shepherds..... So the minute we ask Jesus into our heart in unpromising circumstances, totally unrecognised by "our equivalent of the Jewish community", totally unrecognised by our "equivalent of Herod's rulership", yet this is His same life. Transplanted in us. With the same throne bound destiny. And we have to learn Him in the same day to day way, that He learned the Father. No different. Nope. No different at all. So with a godly ruthlessness we should assert ourselves. If we are going to do Christmas. Let's do the real one. Not shyly. Not twee twee Jesus meek and mild...all surrounded by haloes. Right there.Right there you just lost your salvation. Because in claiming Jesus to be something other. Something that was a Life with just a little speck of extra glory about it...you are calling God a liar, when he said He laid His glory aside. You are making your salvation far off. Special.And ultimately destroying your last hope of ever getting out of this religious pigsty we have lived in for centuries. What pigsty, you say. I say the pigsty where you get seminary trained men waddling around in penguin costumes, while secretly molesting children, having foul characters with an outward show of piety, blocking people's admission to the free Kingdom that the real Christmas opened up.Not all churchmen are ofcourse ungodly. But enough of them have come to light to seriously damage the reputation of this glorious way of salvation. Here's to an over the top Christmas
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