salt-shaker.blog

Our world right now is saturated with the celebration of Christmas. Holiday music has been piped through stores for what seems like eons. People relax a bit, smile more and use the season as an excuse to treat one another with a bit more kindness. We enjoy the prevailing mood, and one cannot help but marvel at how this tradition has prevailed for so long. True, in our current deconstructive mindset there are questioned aspects of the celebration, but on the whole businesses are thriving as people search for the perfect gift, some existing solely because of this particular holiday. People are reliably stressed with gifting, partying, decorating, cookie baking, visiting family and all the attendant Christmas customs.

There are two prevailing narratives. One involves a mythical fat guy in a red suit who watches all year to insure your worthiness, and then navigates his substantial girth through a chimney with a sack of gifts on his back. He is perhaps partially motivated by the cookies and milk that await him. Then he escapes in a sky sled pulled by flying reindeer (of all things), off to visit every home on the planet. The other involves the birth of a baby promised to Israel as a deliverer from oppression. The whole event is so obscure so as to be unnoticed except for the intervention of a celestial oddity in the stars which attracts foreign astronomers and a local announcement by alien beings – again a celestial incident. The details are also astounding – a virgin, pregnant! A feed trough in a stable as the birthing room. The offscouring of society are the ones alerted to the auspicious event while the religious and the political leaders are not. An unknown couple are the parents. Is this the way the God of the universe incarnates into humankind? And yet here were are some two thousand years later retelling that strange story.

You get the point, both accounts stretch the bounds of credulity. One is a cute warm and fuzzy backdrop to an annual season of merriment. The other is a curious tale of divine intrusion into the race. How unlikely that the Jesus story would prevail unless there were some truth to it. We are fascinated with the sheer surprise of God’s intention towards us, and His inconceivable method for revealing Himself. The story has become so familiar by annual celebration that we easily take for granted the implications. The Jews had the scriptural heads up that the long awaited king was coming to Bethlehem as a baby, and they were not there. They missed the birth. Their Messiah walked among them doing miracles, constantly fulfilling scriptures that would verify His identity, and they crucified Him. And He allowed it. They missed Him. Are we so different?

His ways with us are not obvious either. He gives us revelation, but it is easy to miss Him in the scriptures like the religious elite did back then. He moves in the ordinary movements of life like He did then – a humble birth, an obscure ordinary childhood, a remarkable short three year ministry which was plausibly dismissed by so many. We expect God to be dazzling and irresistible – not commonplace and mundane. And although, as we see from the Christmas story, the very heavens burst with exclamation of God’s glory and majesty, He has chosen the humble ways of an ordinary man – the very thing we try to overcome – to be with us. He veiled Himself in humanity, yet not in its natural human superlatives, but rather as a homely common servant. In veiling Himself He honors us with choice, for if we saw Him as the heavenly hosts do we would fall on our faces in terror.

Like our distant ancestor we hide ourselves from Him, excusing our disinterest and blaming others and even Him for our neglecting of His attention. We can use this holiday season to refocus and reflect on the possibility the God of the universe offers us. If we make the choice to accept the gift wrapped in swaddling clothes and bow down before Him in surrender and worship, we become His child. Oh come let us adore Him!

Selah