Talk notes:
Prometheus is the Christmas story in photo-negative!
Intrepid humans make treacherous journey into heavens
We try to make contact with our makers
They turn out to hate us and seek our destruction
Only our own efforts can save us from our makers
Christmas is the polar opposite
It doesn't begin with intrepid humans but with Luke 2:8...
Farm-labourers on a night-shift.
But all heaven breaks loose.
Verse 9: The opposite of the science fiction stories
He doesn't say "Take me to your leader", but "Here, have our Leader!"
Verse 10: The Messiah - do you know Handel's Messiah?
Here's the One promised throughout the Scriptures
The Hope of the ages, the Desire of all nations
One filled to overflowing with the Spirit
Like the top glass of a Champagne fountain
In Luke 1 He's called "The Son of God"
This is who God is: A Father pouring the life, love and joy of the Spirit onto His Son
Here's the good news... the Son is given to us...
To share everything He has and everything He is with us.
God the Son became God our Brother...
Verse 12: A baby, wrapped in rags, laid in a feeding trough
Lo within a manger lies He who built the starry skies.
Why? Verse 11 - He is Saviour.
What does He save us from? Disconnection
The human race is disconnected, like a Christmas tree.
All that's wrong is because of a foundational disconnect with God.
This Christmas will be hard because of disconnection...
Death, Divorce, Disease, Depression or simple Disappointment will ruin Christmas
We need re-connection and so...
The One connected to God connects Himself with us.
Will you receive Him?
He is a Gift "to you" - verse 11.
Around the ankle of the baby Jesus, imagine a gift tag "to you"
Will you receive the ultimate Christmas Gift?
.
TWO SIGNIFICANT OMISSIONS are Mary's costly obedience and our cost-free disobedience to know the whole truth about her reasonable objection, "I am a virgin. How, then, can this be?"
Love it!
(I would have omitted the last line, though - it throws it all back onto us - not necessary - a free gift, "to you" would have been a better way to end it)
I want to thank you for mentioning PBound. Aeschylus and PB were a stop along the way for me. Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and giving it to man was for me the possibility that divinity can be poured into this world. I had been seeking a career in agnostic philosophy after the manner of Kant, creating a mental imagined space of time in which nothing existed but me. The problem was, that mental imagination cannot be brought into the real world, since the world already was created--and not by me.
So I had to put down my epistemology and receive the possibility that a god might come to humanity--me.
Well, you know where that led. Aeschylus and the Gr philosophers say nothing cannot be generated from nothing, so I had to face the thought of a God who was already there. If He is creator, I am creature. That turned my epistemology inside out.
JDonne once said you can trust God for the things you cannot see on the basis of the things of God you can see. And that led to Genesis.
So thank you for reminding me of the journey I took from Athens to Jerusalem. I've never even looked back until now. And thank God for John Donne.
Paul