Sermon for Nativity, Second Sunday after Easter, 2020

From today's gospel:  "My Lord and my God."
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Please be seated.
The faith that Jesus was the human life of God is the heart of Christianity.  We can see this from the Nicene Creed.  The Creed is the official statement of our collective beliefs, so official that we say it as part of our worship.  The primary emphasis of the creed is that Jesus is the incarnation of God.  The Creed stresses--perhaps even overstesses--the divinity of Jesus Christ.  He is "the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.  Through him all things were made."  Then the creed stresses--perhaps even overstresses--that this divine Jesus became human.  "He became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.  For our sake he was crucified . . .  and was buried."
The faith that Jesus was the human life of God is also what primarily separates us from our sister religions of Judaism and Islam.  We share much with both religions.  Indeed, it should dismay us that many conservative Christians can at least be friendly with secular humanists and even with agnostics and atheists and yet have deep prejudices against Jews and Muslims.  Christianity has much more in common with Judaism and Islam than with secular humanism, to say nothing of agnosticism and atheism.  From Judaism Christianity retained monotheism and the entire Hebrew Scriptures which we relabeled as the Old Testament.  Islam not only shares with us most of the stories in the Bible, but even honors Jesus as a great prophet.  I vividly remember one of my Muslim students insisting to me that as a good Muslim he had to revere Jesus.  The sticking point with Islam is the Christian claim that Jesus is divine.  The Qur'an insists that God does not beget and is not begotten; God does not have a son.  In connection with Judaism's reaction to the claim that Jesus is divine, I recall something which I overheard in a bus which stopped at a synagog school.  A little Jewish boy said to his fellow student, "The religion of Jesus, not the religion about Jesus!"
As that last quote suggests, the faith that Jesus was the human life of God only began with the resurrection.  The earthly Jesus worshiped his heavenly Father.  And during his earthly life, none of his disciples ever said that he was divine.  It was only when the disciples met the risen Jesus that they realized that the human being who had been their teacher and friend was also God.  We see this realization in today's gospel.  The risen Jesus repeatedly appears, even though the doors are locked.  He is still the one whom they knew, the one who was crucified.  He shows the disciples his wounded hands and side, and he dares Thomas to stick his fingers and hand in those wounds.  However, he now is obviously divine.  He gives to the disciples his own divine Spirit.  And Thomas bursts out, "My Lord and my God."
There are many reasons why it is important to believe that in Jesus God had a human life.  Here I will only take time to underline three.  
First, only if God had a human life, can God be just.  Like Christianity Judaism and Islam insist that sometimes God demands that his followers suffer and die for loyalty to their faith in him.  But if God never had to suffer and die, then God is demanding that humans endure trials that God never had to himself.  Is asking someone else to suffer and die when we never had to right?  And since some human beings have suffered and died for their faith, does that mean that they are morally superior to their creator?  These are challenging questions.  I do not know how a Jew or Muslim would respond.  But as a Christian I do not have to answer such questions, because I know that God in his human life did suffer and die out of love for others, and, therefore, he has the moral right to ask us to take up our cross and follow the example he has set.
A second reason why it is important to believe that God had a human life, is that this faith allows us to have a richer relationship with God.  Those who do not believe that God had a human life can only have a verticle relationship with God.  Their God is only their creator and lord, not their brother and friend.  As their creator and lord, God gives commandments on his own authority which the faithful are to accept without question.  God gives laws, and the faithful obey.  Indeed, the word "Muslim" means someone who submits.  And the primary intellectual activity in Judaism down through the centuries has been producing an ever more detailed set of regulations believed to come from God.  By contrast, Christianity has always insisted that God calls us to be more than his obedient servants.  We see that insistence already in John's Gospel which records Jesus saying, "I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends."  And Christianity does not have an elaborate set of rules from God that we are to obey without question.  We have only two rules that we must obey, to love God with all of our hearts and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  It is up to us as the community of God's friends to determine how to apply those two rules in the myriad different circumstances of life.
A third reason that it is important to believe that God had a human life is that this faith allows us to know that through spiritual growth we sinful human being can become divine.  Indeed, in the early theological debates over whether Jesus was fully divine, the orthodox side which prevailed insisted that God became human in order that we humans might become divine.  Non-Christian religions seem to fall basically into two categories each of which contains a lot of truth but also has a major contrasting problem.  Some religions, such as mainstream Judaism and Islam, insist that because there is only one God, human beings cannot become divine.  Of course, it is true that there is only one God, and so a Christian can agree that we cannot become God by nature.  But the problem with saying that we cannot become divine at all is that it limits our potential.  By contrast, other religions like Hinduism insist that in our deepest selves we already are divine.  The problem with this point of view is that it implies that sin is not serious.  If we, if all persons are divine, then nothing can be seriously wrong.  There is no injustice, only ignorance.  Indeed, what appears to be gross injustice is an illusion.  If innocent people appear to be suffering unjustly, they are not.  They are only suffering the due consequences of their mistakes in previous incarnations.   Christianity honors the truth in Hinduism.  We have the potential to become divine, but Christianity insists that there is grave injustice, so grave that even though God became human out of love for us, human beings tortured and killed him.  Yes, we can become divine, because God became human.  But we become divine by imitating Christ's sacrificial love.  Through spiritual growth we participate more and more in God's Spirit until finally we will be divine by participation and be not God's servants but his divine friends.