The popularity of the Magi story in Christian art and imagination is because it includes a journey following a star, it has the intrigue of king—ruthless enough to kill his father-in-law, several wives, and two sons—now wanting to kill a newborn child, revelation from an angel, and the decision not to go back to Herod. Look at the crèche and many others; they frequently include the three wise men or magi. The magi denote people with specialized and superior knowledge, magic, astrology, and astronomy. But the Magi are true seekers of truth of God’s presence and compassion in the world. Two characteristics that jump out magi are: 1) They embark upon a journey to discover the truth about life, even crossing religious boundaries to engage the mystery of incarnational inclusivity. 2) They are changed by their journey and live with more openness to radical inclusive love.

Incarnational Christian spirituality is about God’s wild and radical inclusive love, breaking down barriers and removing obstacles. It means God entering created life, embodying an openness to overcome human exclusive categories and obstacles. Jesus, God’s Christ, has been used exclusively to deny and beat down other peoples and their religious.

Incarnational spirituality for Christian is betrayed by exclusive engagement with other religions. Christian exclusivism asserts that there is no salvation outside of Christ,

Here are some of the lines thrown at me by Christian excluivists: Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6) In the book of Acts 4:12, Peter preaches, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” This makes it perfectly clear to some there is no salvation outside the church or outside of Christ. What it breeds is Christian arrogance, exclusivism, intolerance, judgmentalism, violence, and just bad behavior towards other religious traditions.

Christian exclusivism fails to listen to the Holy Spirit and fails to understand the true nature of Christ as God’s incarnate one. I would suggest that “the word became flesh and pitched his tent among us” (John 1:14) indicates a certain flexibility and fluidity of God’s gracious revelation in Christ. Tents are mobile, and if I am raising the tent, it may not look the same a second time—even further mobility. This image of incarnational mobility resists tendencies towards Christian dogmatism, for God’s incarnation is not about constructing boundaries but the dissolution of barriers, and that includes between the followers of Christ and people of good and sometimes great faith in other religions.

There is an example of St. Francis of Assisi. He is patron saint of nature, a lover nature. But he practiced an extraordinary reverence for life, and this, in my opinion, places him as magi.

While popes and kings of Christendom in the Middle Ages called for Christians to take up arms to rescue the Holy Land from Muslim control, to die holy deaths for Christ against Muslim infidels, there was a singular counter voice. It was Francis who followed in Christ’s footsteps as a peacemaker. The crusades were terrible wars inflicted upon Muslims. To this day, there is a vivid remembrance of the Christian crusades as a war upon Islam. There was much Islamophobia, born of fear of Muslims in the Middle Ages, as there is today in 21st century America.

But one single man, Francis, who did not believe in war and sickened by the slaughter, decided to visit the Sultan of Egypt, Malik-al-Kamil. His initial goal was to convert the sultan to Christ and even face death and martyrdom. But his attitude was significantly different from the Christian crusaders who killed Muslims rather engaging in conversation with them. The difference for Francis from the crusaders was: He neither considered Muslims as his enemy nor the enemy of Christianity. He considered them as brothers and sisters of Christ.

Francis approached the Muslim sultan as approached all peoples, whether lepers or a pope, or animals or God’s creation. Francis approached all his brothers and sisters with love and careful attentiveness. He met the sultan with the attitude that here was my brother. Francis asked himself “how would Christ engage the sultan?” He did not insult the sultan, Islam, or the prophet Muhammad. He talked why he was a Christian and listened to the sultan about his religion. We don’t the exact conversation that Francis had, but we do know that he did not insult the sultan or his religion. He would not have come out their meeting alive. He respected him as a brother, a fellow seeker of God and truth. It was probably the first time the sultan met a real follower of Christ.

Francis learned some new things about Islam. And I imagined that he joined his brother the sultan in prayer because Muslims piously pray at least five times a day. When he returned to Assisi, one Franciscan commentator mentions, he encourages Christians to pray as often as Muslims. He understood and respected how Islam created in its culture and practice, a daily awareness of God through its rhythms of prayer.

Francis of Assisi encouraged Christians to learn how to live peacefully with Muslims. He took the model of Christ as a way to engaged the sultan and Muslims—the way of non-violence and peace. Here is the first Magi that I want to share. He treats an enemy demonized by popes, cardinals, and kings.

The second Magi is the Dalai Lama. He is understood by Tibetan Buddhists to be the incarnation of the bodhisattva Avolakiteshvara or Chen-re-zig in Tibetan. He is a prophet of compassion in the 20th and early 21st century. He has publicly maintained that “kindness is my religion.”

In a conversation on compassion between himself and another Magi, the Anglican bishop, Desmond Tutu—both recipients of the Noble Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama spoke. Let me excerpt a section of a book The Wisdom about Compassion, Victor Chan:

“I myself, I’m believer, I’m Buddhist monk. So for my own improvement, I utilize as much as I can Buddhist approach. But I never touch this when I talk with others. Buddhism is my business. Not business of other people. Frankly speaking”—he stole a glance at the archbishop and declared firmly—“when you and our brothers and sisters talk about God, creator, I’m nonbeliever.” He laughed, perhaps a little self-consciously…..

Tutu replied, “Let me just say that one of the things we need to establish is that”—long pause—“God is not a Christian.” He paused again and turned to look at the Dalai Lama with a mischievous glint in his eyes….

Tutu continued, “The glory about God is that God is a mystery. God is actually quite incredible in many ways. But God allows us to misunderstand her”—at this, the audience went wild; the applause was loud and spontaneous—“but also to understand her….”

“I’ve frequently said I’m glad I’m not God,” Tutu continued. “But I’m also glad God is God. She can watch us speak, spread hatred, in her name. Apartheid was for a long time justified by the church. We do the same when we say all those awful things we say about gays and lesbians. We speak on behalf of a God of love.”

“The God that I worship is an omnipotent God,” Tutu intoned, opening his arms wide. He paused to let this sink in. Then he said, sotto voce, “He is also incredibly, totally impotent. The God that I worship is almighty, and also incredibly weak.”

“But the glory of God is actually mind-blowing. He can sit and not intervene because he has such an incredible, incredible reverence for my autonomy. He is prepared to let me go to hell. Freely. rather than compel me to go to heaven.”

“He weeps when he sees us do the things that we do to one another. But he does not send lightning bolts to destroy the ungodly. And that is fantastic. God says, ‘I can’t force you. I beg you, please for your own sake, make the right choice. I beg you.’

“When you do the right thing, God forgets about God’s divine dignity and he rushes and embraces you. ‘You came back, you came back. I love you. Oh how wonderful, you came back.’”

The dialogue between Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama is a shared conversation of mutual respect between two great magi, sometimes with mischievous engagement, but profound attentiveness to each other. One of the highlights that Desmond Tutu shares is his comment , “God is not a Christian.” I would imagine that Jesus would have easily spoken the words, “Abba God is not Jewish.” Two prophets of compassion, fellow Magi—one a Buddhist non-theist and the other a Christian Trinitarian—find common religious ground in searching for the truth of non-violent compassion and forgiveness. They can even find agreement about mischievous God language of compassion and kindness.

The final Magi or so-journer I want to speak about is myself. During my college years and then in seminary, I was deeply influence by The Way of All the Earth by the theologian John Dunne.

Passing over is a shifting of standpoint, a going over to the standpoint of another culture, another way of life, another religion. It is followed by an equal and opposite process we might call back “coming back,” coming back with new insight into one’s own culture, one’s own life, one’s own religion.

Dunne’s notion of passing over into the stories of religious figures such as the Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Dorothy Day, Albert Schweitzer, Mother Theresa, Troy Perry, Rev. John McNeill, Thich Nhat Hanh and Aung San Suu Kyi and many more and then coming back to one’s one life and religion meant that if you engaged religious figures and their insights, you would come back transformed—changed by the engagement. I was transformed by the above mentioned religious figures and more. It was an inevitable that I became a religious hybrid—a magi and seeker of compassion.
Over time, I became a Buddhist Christian or rather a Bodhisattva Christian. A bodhisattva takes a vow similar to the following:

By the virtue collected through all that I have done, may the pain of every living creature be completely cleaned away. May I be the doctor and the medicine and may I be a nurse for all sick beings in the world until everyone is healed. May a rain of food and drink descend to clear away the pain of thirst and hunger, and during the aeon of famine may I myself change into food and drink. May I be a protector for those without one, and a guide to all travelers on the way; may I be a bridge, a boat and a ship for who those who wish to cross (the water). (from the Buddhist poet Shantideva)

I took a similar vow years ago. Rev. John McNeill also took the bodhisattva vow in his dedication and fight for justice for LGBT folks within the Catholic church. It is a vow to live compassionately in the world, to care for other life and to maintain a true reverence for life as taught by experience of God in numerous incarnations of compassionate action.

In my passage and engagement of the incarnational Christ, I have fallen in love with the Earth and all Life. I try through my contemplative practice to see life through the eyes of Christ as Francis did. I attempt to live the non-violent compassion of the Dalai Lama, and I tried to take the reconciliation program of Desmond Tutu to built bridges between racist supporters in South African and the oppressed peoples of color. I try to build bridges wherever possible.

What I have done in my sermon today is to show how God’s incarnational inclusivity in Christ breaks down barriers between religious communities and how people of faith can find incarnational values of our God in each community or perhaps scandalously in all religious communities dedicated to the truth of compassion, non-violence, and loving care.

The title of my sermon this Christmas Eve is taken from a meditation I read several weeks ago by Franciscan priest and spirituality author, Father Richard Rohr. He writes,

Christmas Eve is an invitation to fall in love with God so that what is impossible might come to pass in our broke, frightened, and confused lives and world. I know that tonight I am ready to fall in love with God again and embrace the Christ child…maybe you are too. And so we sing together this love song

My goal tonight is to invite you and myself to fall in love again with God and embrace the Christ child within you. We sing our Christmas carols, and they are really love songs. We ponder our primal connection with God by listening to an all too familiar story about the birth of Jesus. We find ourselves emotionally drawn into the familiar story that inspires and sets our imagination and hearts on fire. Or to put in terms that I like: It sets our inner child free to respond to a call of grace.
St. Francis of Assisi, one of my favorite Christian saints, originated the Nativity crèche with animals present. Francis believed that the birth of Jesus, God’s incarnation, was already salvation, breaking boundaries down between the divine child and creatures, human and animal creatures. Once the divine community of love—that we call God—took on human flesh, then not only humanity but all other life and creation in its entirety became even more precious to God because God became physical matter or embodied. God incorporated the embodied Christ from the moment of conception into God’s self.

We have been trained to think that the incarnation took place in the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem or the Mary’s pregnancy in Nazareth some 2000 years. But the incarnation is not separate from the process of creation, the big bang 15 billion years ago, and the salvation of all the universe in the distant future whenever that happens. For God, it is a singular event –outpouring of love and compassion to all.

The author to the Ephesians at the end of the first century CE describes how God designed a plan with Christ for the fullness of time to gather up all things in heaven and earth (Ephesians 1:9-10). From the beginning before time and space, which we call creation, God planned with Christ to bring a “fullness or completeness” to creation with Christ. I want you to ponder on this point; it was made a by 13th century Franciscan theologian John Dun Scotus, and I want you wrap your mind around this fact that he proposes: The first idea in the mind of God ever was to dream and think about Christ, and God has never stopped ever reflecting and loving the Christ and their love together has generated the Spirit—a threefold community of divine love for all time as we can imagine.

This divine community of love chose that the incarnation of Christ would start with creation of the universe, spinning off into galaxies of stars, our own sun and solar system, on earth with the first sign of light, water, plants, trees, air, and every kind of other life. God’s incarnation took place in the big bag explosion of creation and through the evolution of some 15 billion years in the proto-matter and energy of the emerging galaxies of stars before that the flowering of incarnation took place in the womb of Mary and the birth of a child in Bethlehem. One theologian calls this “ancestral grace.” Let me explain how this ancestral grace of creation ripens in a cold morning hours on the outskirts of Bethlehem.

I don’t know about you, but I am overwhelmed by the love I experience in the grace of God’s love life that from the first thought in the mind of God was Christ, creation, and us. Wow! In a wonderful book—The Body of Christ— environmental theologian Sallie McFague claims, ”salvation is the direction of all of creation, and creation is the very place of salvation.” When we stop dividing creation, incarnation, and salvation and understand them as one movement of divine grace and love originating from the first thought in the mind of God. In our Christmas hymns, we sing praise to Emmanuel, God with us. We celebrate creation, Christ’s incarnation, and salvation altogether. God with us has been always here in and with creation.

Emmanuel, God with us, is born of a young woman of 13 years or so. Emmanuel, God with us, is helpless, vulnerable, dependent upon Mary and Joseph for his survival. He feels the cold and the dampness of winter in a manger. The family has taken refuge in a primitive cave from the wintery night. We believe that God took physical flesh so that we humans could fall in love with God with a human face, body, and limbs. We have difficult as humans to fall in love with God as infinite energy or extravagant graciousness out there. But we fall in love with God now for us, loud cries, and tears of a baby. God is radically and inclusively available to us. There are no barriers or obstacles, God is vulnerably there as a helpless newborn.

The paradoxical mystery of the Incarnation becomes real in the Christmas story that we re-tell each year. What I mean by paradox is that we bring seemingly contradictory points of view to make sense of the mystery before us. For instance, the incarnation of God in human flesh is one of those paradoxical mysteries. UCC biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann, calls this paradoxical event, “the scandal of the particular.” As I mentioned, one such particular scandal is God’s taking flesh and living among us. The physical and the spiritual co-exist together in one body; or the eternal and infinite God are united in a human body.

As we try to unwrap the Christmas mystery, I want to throw into the mix an additional paradox. As God takes flesh in the womb of Mary and is born into the world, we encounter the mystery that the radical inclusive, unconditional love and grace of God takes shape in the world. Our infinite God becomes flesh in the fragile life and body of a child; his family and life are later threatened, and they flee from Bethlehem. The mystery is the scandal of radical infinite inclusive love—given to us as a gift—take on a particular physical reality. This is shocking to many non-Christians who want a superman Christ, not a vulnerable child.

To embrace this mystery challenges the way we see things. We are invited to view life differently. We have been taught God is out there or up there in heaven, distant from us. But actually, Emmanuel—God with us—points not out there but in our midst. God is available here tonight. And the mystery is that God has always been very near to us from the beginning.

Once we restore God’s incarnation to the center of our faith lives, we catch a glimpse that our views of God are too narrow. Our practice of Christian spirituality has a lot of walls that protect us from life around us and from God with us. Our lives have been too sheltered from love and life, connection to what ultimately matters. It has been covered over by our ego-centeredness. We have placed the birth and life of Jesus in a mission impossible perspective of God sending Jesus down to rescue us from ourselves. There is some truth to that, but there is another stronger point of view. The birth of Jesus, and his later life, is about celebrating and affirming the ancestral grace that started of all this. God’s love is so extravagant and abundant that it cannot be contained, but it flows into creation, incarnation, and salvation—fully being incorporated into the divine community of love. We carry that incarnation, that ancestral grace, in our bodies as well.

The birth of Christ is God’s communication and invitation to fall in love with Christ and the divine community of love. Christ is God’s wild love for us, or rather God’s radically inclusive love for all creation. God offers us an invitation to enter a loving relationship with Christ.

There is some startling consequences when we meditate on God’s incarnation—God’s birth unwrapped from mystery to break down all barriers and walls. All inclusive love originates from the divine community of radical inclusive love, and we are made a part of that community love.

The first consequence is God’s dissolving the boundaries of divine and human. God reveals God’s self, no longer in spoken word but revealed and embodied in flesh. God breathes air with a body, feels, experiences vulnerability and emotions, and all the experiences we share as human beings. God comes out as radical love, shattering all human boundaries and conceptual walls surrounding God. God becomes flesh because God wants us to know that God love us. It is also the fact that God wants to experience what we experience as creatures. God became flesh to allow creation—all life—to share in God’s eternal life. Early generations of Christians claimed that God became human to allow humans to become divine. This is the ancestral grace of creation ripening through history until a pregnancy of a young girl Miriam in Nazareth and the birth of a divine child in a stable in Bethlehem. God is with us and for us.

God’s radical inclusive love breaks down the walls between rich and poor, the powerful and the weak, insider and outsider. Humans exclusively divide the human world, peoples, and other life into categories: race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, classes, age, ability, religion, and so on. Our exclusions are the result of human sinfulness to separate ourselves from others by noting their differences from ourselves.

The human life of God” begins with images of homelessness and poverty. Two peasants are not in control of their lives, for they are subject to the administration of the Roman Empire. They are immigrants, undocumented traveling to make themselves legal statistics in the Roman Empire, but without any rights and privileges of citizenship. They are powerless, marginalized, and poor. They are in our midst as undocumented persons who carry the image of Christ.

God with us is birthed to dissolve exclusions, tear down walls, break down barriers and remove boundaries. Emmanuel was destined to become a rule-breaker and rebelliously tearing away obstacles. Jesus manifested God’s radical inclusive love in his lifetime, and I often why so many of us got it wrong by becoming exclusive and creating walls. Jesus came to include, never to exclude, for that is the very nature of God made incarnate to include us all.

What is so alarming about the nature of God’s as radical inclusive love is that its openness to include so much wider than any of us can imagine. Humans want to privilege itself with divisions, with categories, walls of prejudice and self-importance. We are not like that! We not related to…fill in the blank with whatever group of people make you feel uncomfortable—leather folk, homeless, the mentally ill, people from different cultures, religions, and races. We are better than them, were privileged, we are special, we are part of the in-group. Radical inclusivity means what it says. It is the intentional inclusion of all persons who have been marginalized and all those people who make us uncomfortable.

Yet there is more to this inclusivity. The incarnate Christ is born in a stable. Being born in the stable is not an exclusive group. Instead of saying humanity is superior to animals, the incarnate God blurs the edges once more with openness. But it is more radical when we realize that Christ was born in a stable with animals present. The divide we human make between us and animals dissolve in the incarnated Christ. Christ came to other life as well as for us humans. This time God says humans and other life are precious to God’s self because all creatures are loveable to God and have intrinsic value to God’s self. The consequences are staggering since the incarnate one says salvation is not just a human event as we were taught in our churches. Salvation is a cosmic event whereby all creatures, all creation, is included, not just exclusively humanity. Jesus would be later designated the Lamb of God; he died for all animals as well as human beings.

God’s arms are extended openly to all with compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and love. Our God is wide open with love, and this sends streaks of panick among religious conservatives with boundaries, walls surrounding God’s extravagant grace and exuberant welcome. They want to focus on sin and holiness to make distinctions and to set walls between us. But this is not way of God who includes. It is humans uncomfortable that everyone may be admitted to the table.

Jesus is the incarnation of God’s wild grace. And this means for us this Christmas the realization that to celebrate the birth of Christ includes a new vision of what is. It is a God-centered vision that all life is reverenced from the simplest to the highest. Incarnation is grace coming to a logical definition within history. We’re all saved by God’s compassionate love, without exception. Rohr writes,

Resurrection is incarnation coming to its logical conclusion. If God is already in everything, then everything is from glory and unto glory. We’re all saved by mercy, without exception. We’re all saved by grace, so there’s no point in distinguishing degrees of worthiness because God alone is “all good,” and everything else in creation participates in that one, universal goodness to varying degrees. There is no absolute dividing line between worthy and unworthy people in the eyes of God, because all our worthiness is merely participation in God’s.