The Scandal of Our Divine Potential
Oops!
Christ is born! Glorify Him!
We come today expecting warmth and wonder—candlelight, incense, the joy of this holy feast. And that’s exactly what we should find here. But there’s something about today’s celebration that should stop us in our tracks, something so strange and beautiful that if we really understood it, we’d never be the same.
Listen to what Paul tells us today:
“When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law.”
God—the one who spoke the stars into being, who holds all things in existence—became a baby. Not pretending to be human. Not wearing humanity like a costume. Actually, truly human. Nursed by his mother. Learning to walk. Growing tired and hungry.
Think about that. God became one of us.
But here’s the question that should take our breath away: If God could become human without ceasing to be God, what does that tell us about what we are? What kind of creatures must we be if we can hold divinity within us?
Ugh!
Most of the time, we don’t think of ourselves this way at all, do we?
We look at our lives—our struggles, our sins, our weakness—and we think: I’m just trying to get by. I’m just a regular person. We compare ourselves to others, we measure ourselves against the world’s standards, and somewhere deep down, we accept a kind of smallness about ourselves. We’re finite. We’re flawed. We’re … human.
And when we think about God, we imagine someone infinitely far away. Out there. Up there. Distant. Holy in a way that has nothing to do with our daily lives. We think: God is God, and I am me, and there’s an unbridgeable gap between us.
So we come to church, we say our prayers, we try to be good, but in the back of our minds, we think we’re just trying to please a distant deity, trying to avoid punishment, trying to earn our way into heaven.
We’ve forgotten something. Or maybe we never quite learned it. We’ve forgotten what we were made for. We’ve accepted a story about ourselves that’s far too small.
And that story has consequences. When you forget you were made for something glorious, you settle for things that can never satisfy you. When you forget you’re meant to be filled with divine life, you try to fill the emptiness with everything else—success, pleasure, achievement, approval.
But nothing works. Nothing fills it. Because the hunger inside you is a hunger for God himself.
Aha!
And then—today—”when the time had fully come”—we’re given the answer we’ve been searching for.
God sends his Son into the world. And watch what happens: in Jesus Christ, divinity and humanity aren’t enemies. They’re not strangers. They come together perfectly, beautifully, naturally. The baby in Mary’s arms is fully God and fully human, and neither part contradicts the other.
This is the clue that unlocks everything. The Incarnation, God taking on flesh, isn’t just a nice miracle. It’s the revelation of what humanity has always been meant to be.
One of the early Church Fathers, Saint Athanasius, said it this way: “God became human so that we might become god.” Not that we become God with a capital G—we’re not the Creator. But we’re meant to share in God’s life, to be filled with his presence, to be united with him so completely that his life becomes our life.
This isn’t something foreign to us. It’s not God forcing us to become something we’re not. It’s God showing us what we’ve always been meant to be. The manger shows us our destiny.
That’s why Paul says Christ came “to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” He’s not talking about legal adoption, where a stranger takes you in out of pity. He’s talking about being awakened to who you already are—a child of God, made in his image, created for union with him.
Whee!
And here’s the most wonderful part: this isn’t just history. This isn’t just something that happened two thousand years ago to Jesus.
Paul says,
“Because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!'”
Right now—in you—the Spirit of God is calling out to the Father. The same Spirit that was in Christ, uniting his humanity to his divinity, that same Spirit has been given to you. You’re not just trying to reach up to God from a distance. God himself is inside you, transforming you, filling you with divine life.
This is what happens in baptism. This is what happens when you receive the Eucharist—the very Body and Blood of Christ, given to you not as a symbol but as reality, uniting you to him, transforming you bit by bit into his likeness. This is what happens when you pray, when you worship, when you struggle against sin—you’re being changed from the inside out.
You are being deified. That’s not too grand a word for it. You’re becoming what you were always meant to be—a temple of the living God, a dwelling place of the Most High, someone who shares in the very life of the Trinity.
Think about what this means. When you look in the mirror and see your failures and weaknesses, God looks at you and sees his child, being transformed into the image of his Son. When you feel distant from God, the Spirit is still within you, still crying out “Abba! Father!” even when you can’t find the words yourself.
When you come forward today to receive communion, you’re not just remembering Jesus. You’re being united to him. His life is flowing into you. The God who became human is making you divine.
You are no longer a slave to sin, to fear, to death. You are a son, a daughter, an heir. Everything that belongs to Christ—eternal life, joy, peace, the fullness of the Father’s love—all of it is yours.
Yeah!
So let me ask you: How will you live tomorrow, knowing this?
How will you see yourself, knowing that you carry the Spirit of God within you? How will you face your struggles, knowing that divine life is flowing through you, transforming you?
And how will you see the people around you? That difficult family member you’re about to spend the holidays with—they too were made for this. That stranger you pass on the street—they too carry the image of God, they too are called to this divine destiny.
Even death itself looks different now. Christ has trampled down death by death, and he’s opened the way for all of us to share in his risen, glorified, deathless life.
This is Christmas. Not just a beautiful story, not just a warm feeling, but the earth-shaking reality that God has reached down and united himself to us so completely that now our destiny is to share in his own divine life forever.
The infinite has embraced the finite. Eternity has entered time. God has become human so that we might become divine.
Everything has changed. Everything is made new.
Christ is born! Glorify Him!
Amen.