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“On its own love is not enough.”

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I love watching space travel.  We walk around this place we call home each day without a thought.  And yet to leave this home requires a humungous massive great rocket.   All that fuel, all that power, all the hardware, all the critical systems all interconnected and monitored … just to leave this place we wander around every day without a thought.

And after blasting off and piercing the cloak of atmosphere protecting our home from “nothing” … when the spacecraft returns it is as a tiny piece of nothing: a heat shield and a lot of hope.  Everything else has been discarded.  Everything else has done its job and is unnecessary.  All that humungous massive great rocket has been stripped back to its essence: a protective cloak around a couple of human beings and/or a small payload of precious cargo.

All of that reduced to all of that.

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I think of Christmas like that.   All of the humungous massive great machinery we know as religious theology … All that religious money, all that religious energy, all the religious and theological hardware, all the institution of church critical systems all interconnected and monitored … just to find “a place” I wander around every day without a thought.  Me and God Soft Hands Jesus.

All that “stuff” shed day-by-day on this annual walk towards that stable and that baby.

A baby that is essence of “God” as we have created “god”.  God who is defenceless and speechless.  God created in our image not His.  God who cannot demand and require and reward and dismiss.  God who is Love without Condition.  That “God”

A God without that humungous massive great machinery of theologically correct (and incorrect) religion we create and serve.  A God who is outside ALL of the isms and ologies we have crated and cling to as “god”.  A God-baby who lives in this place we call home without a thought.  A God-baby who has shed EVERYTHING we know of as “god”.

And then when he can and does speak …?

Words of love, words of be attitudes, words of love without condition, words that strip EVERYTHING we have created as “god” back to “God”:

Love without condition.  Period.

And then we have to add all the stuff we cannot live without in this “god” of theological correct (and/or incorrect) religion.   We extract a little of this and make it bigger.  A verse that suits this ism just perfectly.  That trumps a sliver of a different ology so beautifully.  That gives me a deck of verses cards that ace yours.   With correctness rules to ensure I win hands-down.  So even when you create your own rules, find your own deck, gamble yours is better than mine – I can still know believe I have the best and winning hand am biblically correct.  My collection of verses – killer verses – verses that are my shield – that become my own personal humungous massive great machinery I call “God”.   A complicated God.  A demanding God.  A God who keeps count (of everyone else other than me – obvs).  A God of transaction.  A God I can defend.  A “god” I can attack if not my “God”.  A God whose essence is cloaked in so much humungous massive great machinery we call being “biblically correct” that we lose sight of the essence of God preferring to see the outside – the machinery – the stuff we now see as God.

This annual walk to the stable and that baby …

Why do we need anything else?  Why do we need to cloak innocence and love without condition into our sophisticated hi-tech adult grown-up God?  A “sophisticated hi-tech adult grown-up God” who grows up to talk like a baby – a child – talks words of love without condition … words of be attitudes … words that strip EVERYTHING we have added and created as our complicated sophisticated grown-up “god” back to “God”:

Love without condition.  Period.

I wander each day without in the presence of God.  God stripped back of all I was taught was “god”.  Stripped of demand and need and transaction and correctness … stripped of killer verses and the right way to do anything and everything … God who is Love without condition right here and right now … God who can make a second a lifetime and a lifetime a second … God of eternity right here and now.    God of Soft Hands.  God of Jesus.  God Soft Hands Jesus.

Who has nothing of the stuff we see and demand and require and count and keep a record of.  A God closer to a baby than a suffering God on a Cross.  A God on a Cross we need because we cannot live with this God-baby being enough – cannot live with Love without condition being enough – seem unable to live without the humungous massive great machinery we call “God”.

The baby is enough.  Love is enough. 

Why do we demand more?

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