We’ve traveled quite a distance these last six weeks -- from the beginning of Advent when the incarnation was not a clear figment of our imagination, to now the manger-full of squirming, all too human baby-Jesus.

Isaiah foretold it to the Hebrew people in a vision of God who “became their savior in all their distress…no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them; in his love and in his pity he redeemed them.” And then that night in Bethlehem it came to pass. God so loved the world -- so yearned for our scent and touch -- God came to be a part of us, taking on the very flesh that God had originally created from dust.

What must it be like, I’ve often wondered, for God to see out through the eyes that she had created, to smell the very rose to which she had given not just color but scent? This is what we mean by Incarnation, and it’s God’s flesh-taking arrival that we prepared ourselves for during Advent, and celebrate from Christmas Eve throughout the entire 12 days of Christmas.

We’ve become, in the words of Richard Hooker, the 16th century Anglican writer, God’s “inseparable habitation” – from now on we cannot think of God without thinking of God-in-the-flesh, and we cannot think of ourselves without knowing that the flesh of our own bodies is capable of bearing the divine.

The season of Christmas is for discovering not just whom God was, who would take on flesh in order to be with us, this season is also for discerning who we are and how we become that creature through whom God so wanted to taste the reality of life? Christmas is for experiencing not only God in the bread and wine of Eucharist, but the bread and wine as bearers of our own humanity, and we as God bearers into the world with others.

As St. Thomas’ Parish, composed of real heartbeats and breath, what is the shape of our integrity as that particular Body of Christ, incarnate in the world around us? For each of us, have a share in the shaping of this reality we proclaim so boldly in the world. How do we begin again --everyday to be God-bearers, the gift of Eucharist, the very presence of God, into the lives of others who have never known it? The Christmas season is a time to rediscover that God came to us to show us what this Christian life looks like, and what the world might look like through the eyes of God.