A Christmas gift from Sarah on teaching and the incarnation

This is our last podcast for the year and it is almost Christmas. It is a short piece by our daughter Sarah which has just been published on the ABC website - in the Religion and Ethics section. Here is the link https://www.abc.net.au/religion/sarah-golsby-smith-teaching-incarnation-christmas-end-of-school/104758846

In this piece, Sarah reflects on her year of teaching and finds in that experience a touch of wonder - wonder at the privilege of helping young human beings flourish. She sees these young students as vessels of grace, made in God’s image and at Christmas, as echoes of the ultimate image of God - Christ.

Sarah’s experience is a great example for us all - to find the wonder in quotidian moments as we walk the earth. I call these ‘burning bush’ experiences where we see the inner light of some part of creation burst forth and reveal itself. And of course, where greater to see that than in the experience of watching a child learn and grow.

Of course, Sarah is hinting at a far broader concept of ‘incarnation’ than just Christ’s brief sojourn on earth - begun at his birth and concluded at his resurrection. She is working with a bigger view that sees Christ’s incarnation as a synecdoche or crystallisation for all the created order. In this view, all of creation is templated after the image of God, and continues to be ‘created’ in that image. And as we see, like Moses, the inner glory of burning bushes, we participate in this living ongoing touch of God in the creation. The great 7th-century mystic, Isaac of Nineveh, saw this as the pinnacle of spiritual growth - he called it a ‘state of wonder’ at the mysteries of God’s involvement, his incarnation, in the created order.

Enjoy this talk, look it up and read it on the ABC website. In the New Year we will resume our series on Ilaria Ramelli and Robin Parry with an interview I did recently with Robin on his journey to a belief in cosmic redemption.

Of course, Christmas means the incarnation, the core of the Christian faith and the stunning message of God’s participation in our world. But just what does the incarnation mean? Typically it means the 33 year episode of Christ’s life on earth as a discreet event: it has an entry point at his birth and an exit at his resurrection.

But great theologians see it more broadly than that. They see the incarnation as beginning with creation, and they see the divine imprint holding all the creation together like gravity might be holding all of our mobility and earthly experience together. So in a sense, this latent divinity in creation was always ready to erupt - and this it did notably in the Burning Bush experience of Moses. But finally, climactically it erupted in the only way possible - by God himself presencing himself with us.

This wider view

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