Christmas Message...

Christmas Message
Monday, December 25th, 2006

The stories of Christmas are full of miracles, angels appearing in dreams and worshipping with shepherds, magi guided from the east by a star, and above all a virgin conceiving a child in a supernatural way. And all along the story’s paths we see the hand of God bringing time, place, person, and events into order to the end that He himself would come and take his place among us.

But strangely while we focus on those events as we read the stories and sing the carols there is perhaps the greatest part of the story, the most miraculous, that remains largely untold.

Why?

Why did God choose this way?

To be God is to have infinite options, all moral and good, to achieve any desired end. We humans make our decisions based on time, money, resources, our health, any number of things but God is not limited in the slightest by any of those considerations. God can simply will and it comes to pass. And knowing that I remain at a loss in the face of it, this incarnation, this day so long ago in Bethlehem.

We speak of God coming to rescue us, as the carol says “To save us all from Satan’s power when we had gone astray.” But God could have just as easily and with perfect justice looked down on what we had become and what evils he knew we would still do in the future and simply said “Enough” and willed it all into non-existence in the hope, perhaps, of starting over.

God could have, as well, just simply left us to our own devices like an exasperated parent and said “If that’s the way you want to live have it your way” and moved on.

Perhaps our Lord could have come in blazing glory, the glory that was rightly His and once and for all set all things aright in a flash of His power. The Bible tells us that even holy men tremble in the face of angels how so more would evil rulers, sinful people, and practitioners of any darkness fall before the face of Christ in His majesty?

Only time prevents the mentioning of all the possibilities of God in relating to His creation and especially to us human beings and when our imagination runs out it does not mean they end.

Yet why this way?

Why would the Almighty come so obscurely, not even bothering to arrive in Jerusalem or Damascus or Rome?

Why would the eternal God take on something so frail and temporary as humanity?

Why would the all powerful one subject Himself to becoming a creature that is so limited, so prone to evil, and broken?

There seems to be no answer that makes sense in the way we humans define that term. There is no logic which allows our intellect to understand. Our imaginations pushed to their limit can only touch the edges of the depth that lurks below the surface of the simple stories of Jesus’ birth.

The miracle transcending all others which we call to mind in this day is a miracle of love. Love of a kind and scale that makes child’s play of our deepest thoughts and renders our loftiest ideals small and mean in comparison. Love which always threatens to overwhelm us in its strength, drown us in its depth, and pull our feeble words out of our mouths in a holy silence. Love of a kind to the end that ours is similar only as a grain of sand resembles a desert, a single stem the prairie, an eye dropper the ocean.

It is a love that has seen us in our smallness and chooses to come in the smallest most gentle way possible.

It is a love that knows how little we often understand and so comes among us with a body and words and bread and wine so that we are not overwhelmed by it all.

It is a love that remembers that we are but dust and so takes dust upon itself in the hope that it can be divinely transformed.

It is a timeless love that knows we are prisoners of time and so takes on time for itself so that we can share in eternity.

It is a love steeped in the knowledge that we are sinners and despite our limitations are defiant and prideful and so chooses to humble itself in the hope of our deliverance from our dark state.

It is love that sees the terror of death and our struggles in the face of it and wills to endure our greatest fear so that its ultimate power is broken.

There will never be a way to fathom such love, a love beyond human that nevertheless choose to become one with us. To see it as it truly is is to stand in pure holiness, unfettered goodness, and undying light. We may travel to the end of our thoughts and still only realize we are on the thin edge of the love of God. And when we do there can only be worship of the deepest kind.

Yet for reasons beyond our comprehension this love is for us. Unearned, undying, and burning with holy passion. Our greatest response is to simply receive it, embrace it, and share it, and in so doing be ourselves transformed into the likeness of the child who came to us so long ago and far away and lives in us still.

As we do that we will truly begin to understand and live the miracle of Christmas