"Those who belong to God participate in his Kingdom work. Therefore the church embodies and gives away the good news. And just as this good news of Jesus' coming shows us God's concern for is as the weak, the poor and the oppressed, so also the life of God in us will inevitably cause our hearts to burn with compassion for all vestiges of weakness and poverty around us. God's impartiality makes him partial to the poor. In fairness he favours the fatherless and receives the rejected. They have a special place in his affections because God is not blind to the harsh inequalities of this world. The material world matters to God. When we forget this, we become blind to the fulness of redemption and the joy of our kingdom work."
"The kingdom of God comes to earth not to deny our physicality but to show us how to live by the Spirit in this physical world that God created and is redeeming. Those who belong to Christ thus reflect his heart, his mission and his work. We seek to set the captives free from sin through the finished work of Jesus on the cross; this we proclaim by the spiritual preaching of the Word, through the material administration of the sacraments, and through the physical application of aid to the circumstances of those in need. In this way, those in the kingdom find themselves following the way of the cross by service, sacrifice, and even suffering. Life and proclamation should always be tied together in the generosity of God's people who know that they belong to their Master. He has set us free to live as agents of grace, hope and love. Thus, we enter the story and participate in God's good news. For God so loved, he gave."
The God Who Gives. How the Trinity Shapes the Christian Story, Kelly Kapic (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010) p. 263
So what kind of God do we believe in? This book argues all the way through that God is a generous God. Not a grudging judge; not an indulgent progressive; not a capricious interferer in the life of the world; and not any of the other distorted ideas and conceptions of God that are founded on our own fears, or desires or wishful thinking. The defining words in the Christian understanding of the Triune God of love are grace, gift, and generosity.
All through this book Kapic argues for a reset in the way Christians think of God. That reset requires a revisiting of the biblical narrative of God's ways with his creation, this world, and our human history. He traces the story of God reclaiming his fallen creation; he reclaims all by giving all. The Son is the Gift of the Father. The Spirit is the gift of the Father and the Son. This circle of generosity and grace, the inner life of Love's exchange in the being of God, encircles God's whole creation in a renewed covenant sealed by God's gift of himself.
It takes an entire book to argue that, and many of the chapters read as devotional theology at its best. Quoting Michael Gorman, another writer whose work is similarly rich and rewarding, Kapic condenses the burden of his book: "The cross is Christ's loving gift of himself for 'me,' for us, for all. His death for sins was not anything other than an act of love, a voluntary gift of the self."
The Christian life is an invitation to participate in the life of God in Christ, by the power of the Spirit. God's gift is not only generous, it is demanding, it is an invitation to that self-same generosity, self-giving and sacrifice that is summed up in the words of Jesus, to take up the cross and follow him – and to do so in the light of his risen life and by the power of the Spirit.
It isn't much of a leap from the vocabulary of grace, gift and generosity to the theology of Advent, Christmas and Easter. John 3.16 and John 1.14 are as close as John gets to the Christmas story. God so loved the world that he Gave his only Son…the Word became flesh and welt among us." Gift, from start to finish. Generosity that breaks all the limits and calculations of any cost / benefit analysis to the Giver. Grace best understood in language that struggles for articulation – "He was rich, yet for our sakes became poor, that we through his poverty might become rich…thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift." Those are theological distillations of the Christmas story, and the Easter story, and the story of God.
As Kapic says earlier in the book: "God's grace does not consist in anything we can hold in our hands, but in whose hands we are held." Pure Advent that!
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