Recognizing Grace (Incarnation / Pascha)

The following is an extract from a fictional sermon, preached by the curate at the end of Michael Arditti's novel Easter.

      "To respond to the Easter message, we must give up our obsession with sin --- and, in particular, Original Sin --- which is a libel both on us and our Creator. We must renounce the myth of the Fall which, by spreading a gospel of despair, gives rise to the very evil it purports to explain. If we are to take a leaf out of Genesis, then let it be the one on which "God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good." Good, mind, not perfect. Perfection is impossible in a world which exists in time.
     Time [is] a mixed blessing: the source at once of our freedom and our discontent. It is our fate, as the creatures closest to God, to be the ones most aware of the distance. Which is why, when Christ came to earth, it was as a man. By becoming one with us, He reminded us that we are one with God. And, although in our liturgy, we speak of Christ as perfect, what we're actually celebrating is his imperfection: that, in Him (as in us), perfection and imperfection are one. God's greatest gift to humanity is not that He gave us perfection but that He gave up his own. God personified Himself in Jesus and, by extension, in you and me...We must stop tormenting ourselves with our faults and see that humanity --- even the messy bits --- is a thing to honor, not to revile. After all, the Word became flesh...Can there be any surer stamp of divine approval?
     The truth is that Christ became incarnate not in order to redeem a sinful people who had cut themselves off from salvation, but to reassure a suffering people of their unity with God. Or, to put it another way, the world was not in a state of sin waiting for Christ to rescue it; the world was in a state of grace, waiting for us to recognize it.
     So I ask that...you acknowledge not just the Son's sacrifice but the Father's: not just the Crucifixion, when 'eternity redeemed time'...but the Creation, when eternity subjected itself to time. That is the Spirit from which we are born and that is the Spirit to which we will be restored. For, in God, there is no death but only an everlasting life in which we will be free of all the defects of our bodies and all the constraints of our personalities, as we return in a state of perfected energy to become one with eternal bliss. Amen."