Which is more important to you, accuracy in using ancient and so-called “widely accepted in Christian culture” meanings or meanings which the common person can understand and relate to? Did Jesus preach thus? Or did he make a serious effort to be well understood by the commoner?

http://www.godtube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=c776fabe5a09b21c707a&page=4&viewtype=&category=rd

If indeed you wish to say that Jesus humbled himself by coming here, I see little or no error in that concept. Humble service of others is indeed a doctrine He clearly taught.

But in today’s world, the word “humiliation” carries with it significant other baggage and a different meaning, and by referring to “Christ’s humiliation” you risk being wholly misunderstood by an overwhelming majority of listeners…some of whom may be otherwise receptive to your ideas.

The use of ancient meanings and interpretations is, I believe, yet another clue to a major problem with Christianity as it exists today. Christianity continues to try to rally people with the glorious trumpets of the middle ages, not realizing that the rallying calls which were highly effective in one age may not be as effective in other ages. For example, Jesus himself could not have convinced the people of Moses’ time of the efficacy or superiority of a fatherly God of love; they had no such mental capacity to comprehend such a concept. Likewise, the excessive and wildly dissimilar doctrines that various Christian sects have tacked onto Jesus’ relatively simple teachings have served, not to bring people to the light of God, but to push them away in great numbers.

It is forever true that a house divided cannot stand, and that alone should be a sobering thought when one witnesses the current state of Christian sects and denominations. Even worse, there are no real visible attempts to unify with each other over the simple doctrines that Jesus actually taught, rather we witness the disease of splitting into even further subdivisions over irrelevant and petty variations of doctrines that He never taught. And this continues at an ever-accelerating rate.

Martin Luther did Christianity a great service by severely pruning a tree which was bearing bad fruit, but he did not go far enough. The seed of that tree long before fell on poor ground and rather than transplanting it, he merely pruned its branches. Having grown back, it is yet again producing poor fruits. Ample evidence of this is everywhere one looks, from the decidedly un-Christlike behavior of both clergy and laity, the continual and accelerating splintering of the Church, the failure to attract new believers, and the loss of existent believers.

Fortunately, once all of current Christianity dissolves into nothingness due to the ignorant infighting over extraneous concepts, the clear and bright light of Jesus’ doctrines themselves will be allowed to shine forth into the world and will once again attract the seekers of spiritual truth. When Jesus’ teachings alone are held up for all to see, unencumbered by other irrelevant doctrines, they will once again draw all men unto Him.

Humiliation and Humility carry the same Latin root absent the morpheme suffix. Humility is the state of being humble. Humiliation is the act of humbling.

Without getting too much into kenosis, God humbled himself with the incarnation by becoming true man. When the Word became flesh his divinity wasn’t lost as Jesus is full and true God but in the unglorified humanity he took on all of the aspects of being human. He pooped, he felt pain, he got tired, he felt hunger, etc.

All this is old hat:
Philippians
although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Although I will disagree that the celebration of His birth on its own, absent any other concepts, ideas, doctrines, or whatever else, strips the miraculousness of His birth. To the extreme contrary, I believe it amplifies the true miracle here by focusing attention on it singularly rather than diluting our meditations on an array of other miracles.

If we stipulate that the preexistent spirit/soul of the one we called Jesus is that of a divine personality, we have a miracle of huge significance right at the birth, with no other considerations necessary. Even if he didn’t die in a certain way, even if Mary wasn’t a virgin….what we have is indeed a big deal. A divine spirit decided to come here to sojourn for a while, and such a divine soul got installed into a human body. The method by which such a spiritual-domain and a physical-domain translation could happens is, to me, quite amazing. I bet the physics and mathematics (of the physical side at least) of this event are awesome. I bet it’ll take me at least a couple hundred million years of earth time before I begin to comprehend exactly what went down here. For now, its an amazing miracle.

But the miracle itself isn’t even the big deal here, it’s that a divine personality would decide to grace us with His immediate physical presence. For that alone we should feel thanks and devote our meditations to the spirit of thankfulness and the consideration of why the decision was made to begin with.

Now if it takes the addition of all the other various miracles to add up to something you find worth celebrating, that’s fine. Whatever is necessary for you to get into a thankful and worshipful mindset during the celebration is fine. I’m merely saying that I don’t need all the other stuff and would prefer a unique celebration for a unique event, and that it would be nice to be able to find others who share the same sentiment.

I was simply saying that to me, the celebration of the birth of Jesus is significantly diluted by concentrating on things other than that event itself. I was saying that for once, I’d appreciate a simple celebration of the miracle of a divine personality being installed into a human child, with a mind towards thankfulness that such a personality made the decision to come here and try to enlighten us humans some regarding how God thinks and acts. Especially when that personality had to know full well how poorly we’d treat him while he was here.

I want a time to celebrate the 1st coming on its own; I think that discussions relating to the 2nd coming could be put on hold for just one tiny moment so we may fully celebrate the 1st. I’d like to pause and give thanks for His gift to us….His incarnation and the preceding decision to come visit with us for a while….prior to launching into the considerations of our personal salvation and his untimely death on a cross. It’s not that such things are of no import, indeed, there is an entire season devoted to that concept alone. At Easter, we hear the death/resurrection story, and at Christmas, we hear both the birth story and the death story. Personally, I never “celebrate” the reading of the first chapter of a new book by skipping forward to the end and reading that concurrently.

Others can celebrate the birth however they wish, it causes me no harm. My lament, however, is that I have a hard time finding likeminded people to celebrate with. Is it truly impossible for a Christian to celebrate the birth of a divine infant without using the phrase “Blood of Christ” or worse, performing a ritual where said blood is consumed by “worshipers” who are more concerned with their own salvation than they are the spirit of genuine thanks for the arrival of one who illuminated the path for same?

As I said in my post, it’s like we’re all impatient children who, when father arrives home, ignore the fact that he decided to come home and begin immediately clamoring over what other gifts he brought us. We’re saying “Nice baby. Now hurry up and die so we can get our salvation.” Ugh.

And as for your comment on the “first day of his Humiliation”….yeah, see, you’ve been screwed by your diseased view of the whole thing. When reading the birth story, I don’t see any humiliation. I see a child, a promised deliverer, being exalted, worshiped, and appreciated. He didn’t begin to be humiliated until the orthodox of the day felt threatened by his teachings. The ones who meticulously followed the scriptures and claimed the most knowledge of God were His enemies, and they remain so to this day.