Christmas - the Core of the Story

I'm excited about the "emerging paradigm" that theologian and professor Marcus Borg describes.
        Borg has written several books and many articles on the subject. If I dare summarize, the "emerging paradigm" is the freedom NOT to believe many of the dusty doctrines that have been part of church tradition for so long that most people can't remember why they were once considered crucial, let alone find them meaningful today.
        Borg suggests that the Christian church is splitting into two streams – those who cling to those old doctrines the way a drowning person clings to a sodden lifejacket, and those who have decided they can swim for shore better without the lifejacket.
        But I'm noticing that it seems a lot easier for people to describe the outdated beliefs they've discarded than to define what they still believe.
        So let me take a very brief try at what I believe.

Statement of faith
        First, God is God. I can no more define God than I can levitate. Whatever I am capable of thinking, God already is. I like the Hindu description of their supreme being Brahman: "tat tvam asi" -- "that thou art."
        Besides, it's not up to me to define God. Whatever words or images or analogies I might invent, God is more.
        Second, of all the Christian doctrines that have filtered down through the centuries, I believe most deeply in Incarnation. Incarnation is the core of the Christmas story, the idea that God chooses to be embodied in mortal flesh.
        I believe that's God's mode of operation, God's way of communicating.

An embodied God
        Most traditional theology limits God to a single Incarnation, in the person of the infant Jesus, the Messiah (Hebrew) or the Christ (Greek).
        But I'm not willing to limit God. So, to borrow words from the late Clarke MacDonald, one of my mentors, I believe that Jesus is the window through which I can see as much of God as humans can comprehend.
        Indeed, I'll go further – whenever anyone attributes qualities to God that are not also evident in Jesus, I'm sceptical.
        That belief doesn't preclude the possibility that God has also chosen to be embodied in Krishna or Buddha, in Mother Teresa or Mahatma Gandhi, in Oscar Romero or the Dalai Lama.
        Or in me, or you, or anything else.
        Could God choose to be embodied in a sparrow or a lily?
        Why not? I refuse to treat God as the private property of any one faith or of any one species. I cannot instruct God where and how to relate to the universe. If God chooses to be a field mouse or a grey whale, that's up to God, not to me.
        But even the possibility requires me to treat field mice and whales, sparrows and lilies, with respect, in case I'm dealing not with an inferior being but with God embodied.
        Finally, I believe that when we who are embodied die, we are gathered back into God. And God is somehow richer for our experience.