The wrapping is complete, Santa’s sleigh is loaded (only some assembly required and don’t forget batteries). The day is almost here. What is it that we long for on this holy day called Christmas? I suspect that our deepest longing is what I John 4 describes as the whole purpose of God in human life: love. “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us and God’s love is perfected in us”. My hunch is that giving and receiving genuine love is at the heart of all our longings. None of us really longs for a new toaster or a new set of mittens, though we might truly enjoy the gifts. But to know that we are beloved by someone else, even by God, and to feel within ourselves the energy to freely give away love to a stranger or a person we share a home with is to feel completely alive.
Christmas is the season for remembering that our faith is not a set of abstract concepts. It’s a grandmother’s wrinkled hand baking cookies and a warmth pack handed out to a man who sleeps in a tent all winter. The poet W.H. Auden puts it like this in his poem “For The Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”:
“Remembering the stable where for once in our lives
Everything became a You and nothing was an It.”
Christmas is not a creed but a baby, not a set of ideals but intimate love unfolding in the messy stable of our own lives.
Barbara Brown Taylor wrote a sermon called “God’s Daring Plan” in which she describes how God spent thousands of years trying to build a relationship of love with human beings. Nothing seemed to get humanity’s attention. And so God convened a conference with the angels and laid out a new strategy involving a baby. The angels thought it was genius but they worried about what people might do to the child. Maybe the child would need superpowers to disappear if need be.
“God thanked the archangels for their concern but said no, he thought he would just be a regular baby. How else could he persuade them that he knew their lives inside out, unless he lived one like theirs? There was a risk. He knew that. Okay there was a high risk, but that was part of what he wanted his creatures to know: that he was willing to risk everything to get close to them, in hopes that they might love him again.”
Grace and Peace,
Carla
