Sermon
Galatians 4:4-7
Christmas with St. Paul

Today’s reading from the Letter to the Galatians could be titled “Christmas with St. Paul,” because it tells of God sending his Son into this world of ours at a particular time.

Paul calls this moment “the fullness of time,” the time that is right for this intervention.

How the Son enters the world is the way each of us does: through a human birth. The Son of God is born of woman.

This passage from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians has all this in common with other texts of Scripture, ones that we associate more easily with Christmas.

But Paul’s special emphasis is on the results of this intervention. The Son is sent into the world so that we might receive adoption as children, children of God. In other words, Christ is the Son of God by right, by nature. His entrance among us makes it possible for us to be accounted children of God as well, children not by right, but by gift; children not by nature, but by adoption.

This is the other side of Christmas, which rarely is mentioned in the flurry of activity culminating on December 25. The Christian assertion is not simply that the Son of God becomes human in Jesus, wonderful though that is. The claim is also that humans share in divine life.

The Son of God, forever coming forth from the Father, is born of the woman Mary at a particular moment and place in history. Because of this, human beings, born into the world at some particular place and time, are born again of God, given a life that is everlasting. The humanity assumed by God the Son becomes the means for countless humans, including you and me, to share in the divine life which forever circulates as the holy Trinity.

So the great gift of Christmas is one and unique and general. It is the birth in time of the timeless Son of God, his Incarnation as one of us forever. Yet this great gift is also manifold and personal and specific: divine life available to each of us in place of human death and dissolution, a gift which is the end result of Christ’s mission in the world.

We, then, are to be sisters and brothers of the eternal Son, nothing less than that. He is the eldest sibling in the family, the one there from all eternity. We, on the other hand, are by nature children of time, adopted into the family, surprising additions.

This participation of what is divine in what is human, so that what is human may participate in what is divine–this is the fullness of grace and mercy shown to us, the divine superabundant goodness and generosity answering the deep, persistent longing, a longing often without words, that characterizes human aspiration at its highest.

So then, God deigns to recognize and call us his children, his children by adoption, yet his children completely and with no reservation on his part. There is in this naming a tenderness, an intimacy, a good-hearted acceptance, that exceeds our ability to comprehend. If we have enjoyed the love of a true parent, if we have been true parents ourselves, if we have seen true parenting in action, then we can begin, but only start to begin to imagine, the abundant reservoir of undying love which comes forth from the heavenly Father for each of us. The love of this Father toward each and every one of his children is something impossible to exaggerate.

But in his celebration of Christmas, Paul takes us still further. It is not simply that God sends his Son into the world for us, that God sends his Son to a cross and tomb for us, that we may be adopted as his children and put on the same level with Jesus. The gift he gives us is a double one, and in both instances it is the gift of himself.

Not only does the Word become flesh. Not only does God send his Son into the world so that we might enjoy eternal life. But also God sends the Spirit of his Son, the Holy Spirit, not into the world that failed to welcome the Son, but into another world no less dark and unwelcoming. God sends the Spirit of his Son, his own Holy Spirit, equal to the Father and the Son, into the depths of our hearts to find there an eternal lodging place, to lighten and animate the dark recesses, to burnish and brighten that image of the Trinity in which we are made.

This is the Holy Spirit, the one we call in the Creed the Lord, the giver of life, but it is specifically under the title of the Spirit of the Son that this holy One comes to live in us and enable us to live.

And so the Spirit’s prayer within us reflects our glorious status as God’s children. It is a prayer intimate and trusting and insistent and simple: the prayer is the cry: Abba! Father! These two words have the same meaning. The Spirit moves us to pray, to live out the relationship of divine parent and human child. This prayer is like the relationship it reflects: it comes as a divine gift. It does not originate with us. Instead, it is our participation in the endless and ineffable circulation of life wherein the one God is, simply is, the Trinity of persons.

Consider your own prayer, whatever life of prayer you may recognize as your own. Like any of us, you may be less than satisfied with how you pray. Your prayer may be at times listless, infrequent, self-centered, unimaginative, drab, or petty. Sometimes your interior existence may be so dry that you dare not even claim to pray.

But remember this great truth: through it all you remain God’s child. The Spirit of the Son still lodges within you, perhaps at a level so deep that it’s beyond your perception or even beyond your hope. Still that Holy Spirit cries out within you and on your behalf: “Abba! Father!” Though human words and aspirations may at times fail you, the voice of the Spirit remains unceasing.

Your failures cannot erase the fact that in Christ, God has become human so that we with him may be daughters and sons of God.

Your failures cannot extinguish the Spirit’s voice praying deep within you, nor can they overturn how you are constituted in God’s own image, an icon of holiness forever.

We human beings are slaves to any number of things. Call this state of existence addiction, or sin, or dysfunctional relationship, or spiritual blindness, it all amounts to a slavery and servitude which does dishonor to the work of the Trinity on our behalf.

Yet in today’s Christmas story, Paul, someone known for bold assertions, makes one of his very boldest ones. You are no longer a slave, he dares to tell each and every member of the Galatian congregation. You are no longer a slave, he dares to tell each and every one of us here today. Whatever your bondage, that is not your reality. You are instead a child, God’s own child. And if you are the child of God, then you are also God’s heir, an inheritor of God’s kingdom, in part now, in its fullness in the age to come. You are a child of God, a royal person, by the gift and goodness of God, by the conspiracy of love which is the work of the Trinity.

Paul dares to ask us to line up our lives with this truth beyond our comprehension. May we have the God-given audacity to do so as siblings of Jesus and children of the King and heirs of the Kingdom. Amen, amen.

––Copyright for this sermon 2006, The Rev. Charles Hoffacker. Used by permission.