A Fragile Package Filled With Power!

We have a favorite wall-hanging displayed in our house. It's a beautiful wood carving of the Nativity Scene. It was a gift from a man who is an artist and wood-carver. It's really quite a conversation piece, made out of 21 different varieties of wood.  

It's interesting to me how much conversation this wall-hanging will stimulate, but almost never does the conversation turn to what the wood-carving represents. Rather, we dance around it dwelling on the beauty of the details: the varieties of unusual wood; the careful arrangement of the figures, etc.  It might as well be a carving of a baseball glove or a moose head.

It occurs to me that is much the way we celebrate Christmas. We get all wrapped up in the details of the season in a swirl of activity, but how much thoughtful attention does the incredible story that stands behind all of our activity get?  It is not until perhaps, tonight, that we have even thought about Jesus as he's been crowded out by holiday parties and shopping.

Perhaps it is because the story doesn't seem quite real to us. It seems distant and disconnected from the lives we live and the world we live in.  Perhaps the nativity, for all practical purposes, functions more like a traditional fairy tale in people's minds; a nice story but nothing that has any real power; nothing into which you can sink your teeth; nothing to live and die for!  I remember a child at my congregation in Anchorage, a boy about 10 years old.  I ask him if would play the part of Joseph in the Christmas program.  He looked me dead in the eye and in all seriousness he said, “Why do have to do that same story every year?”  Maybe the Nativity has become the central part of a tiny make-believe-world that seems archaic in the face of our modern age of technology and terrible conflicts.

Many manger scenes show Mary as a figure down on her knees, with her arms held up and palms upraised, with a look of saintly adoration on her face.  While that gesture is obviously and understandably meant to infer Mary's worship of the Christ Child, it tends to give her a look of surprise, as if she has accidentally stumbled upon this newborn infant lying in the straw-filled manger.  In many nativity scenes Joseph is distant and aloof, holding his place in the background as if this all was a great inconvenience. I ask, “How many new parents react to the arrival of their first child in such a fashion?  How many mothers who have just given birth could kneel even if they wanted to?”

Tom Clark is a Presbyterian minister who, in retirement, turned to sculpting and is renowned for his popular "Gnome Figures."  His other sculptures range from Jefferson to Beethoven to famous NASCAR drivers. His sculptures are noted for showing the deeper persona, acting like a window into which we see the hidden aspects of the deeper self. Clark has sculpted his rendition of the Nativity. He does not have Mary and Joseph kneeling and gazing at the infant in holy detachment. Rather Mary is holding the child tenderly, and Joseph is standing next to her, leaning over the child with a "goofy, new-father" grin on his face.

If there is any time when the real First Family should be pictured in a “hands-on-and-intimate” relationship, it’s at Christmas; for the message of Christmas is about God becoming “hands-on-and-intimate” with us - God personally involved in the world, and personally involved with you!

It only speaks of our lack of faith in the possibility of a down-to earth-God that we feel compelled to depict Mary on her knees worshiping the new born Jesus as though he were some tiny deity that had magically materialized before her eyes.  What we need is an ordinary Mary looking pale and worn, disheveled and exhausted, but with her face transformed by love as she snuggles the baby Jesus against her breast. I think it is more likely that Mary didn't so much gaze in respectful reverence at her newborn child, as she cuddled him, counted all his fingers and toes, chuckled at the hair he did or did not have, and wondered over the softness of his skin.

This is the true miracle of Christmas.  Jesus was not some glow-in-the-dark Christ-child, but was a real, alive, ordinary, crying, cooing, sleeping, eating, wetting, pooping baby. And just as with all babies, his greatest need was to be held in human arms, touched by human hands, and soothed by human words of love and reassurance.

Centuries before the prophet Isaiah had said, that the title of this child is to be "Emmanuel" - "God with us."  God with us!  Do you get it?  Can you begin to grasp what that might mean?

Do you get it that the message of Christmas includes:
- that your everyday and ordinary life is God's highest priority, even though your highest priority may be something or someone else.
- that God chooses you, even though some of the time you may not choose God?
- that God is for you, even though there are many times you may not act and live as if you are for God.
- that God cherishes nothing more highly than to be cradled intimately by your arms, attended to by your hands, and loved by your heart.

Christmas is all about God getting inside of us!  Christianity is not first about following rules, cleaning up your life, adopting the right values, or adhering to a certain moral code.  Before everything, Christianity is about God taking the initiative in the most intimate and personal way possible and getting inside of you: getting his life; his love; his grace; his forgiveness, his hope, his courage, his selflessness, inside of you!  And then, just like you nurture a baby, you begin to nurture that precious little seed of God’s presence in your heart so it can grow into something marvelous and miraculous, something that may even have a profound impact on the world. You see, Christmas promises that you can be changed, healed, empowered and restored from the inside out.

Frederick Buechner, author and pastor writes these provoking words:
"Once you have seen God in a manger, you can never be sure to what lengths God will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation God will descend in his wild pursuit of your heart.  If the awesome majesty of God was present in this least auspicious of events, then there is no place so forsaken or no life so lost, but that God cannot be present there too. This means that we are never safe, that there is no place we can hide and no place where we are insulated from God’s power to recreate the human heart, because it is just when He seems helpless that He is most strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully."

It is not that God has made himself so small that we do not recognize His face in the manger, but it is that we make ourselves too big to accept that it just may be true!

Faced with a God who was a baby in a manger, and a wandering preacher of Galilee, and a man dying on a cross, we have to look into our hearts long and hard, and ask just what it is that makes us too big, too puffed up, too proud, too preoccupied with ourselves to take him in our arms and invite him into our hearts; to consider that God’s power comes in such a small, tiny, fragile package. The world, and even the Church, is full of people who walk around puffed-up by inflated ideas of self that that crowds others out and pushes God away. The only way into this intimate, loving, tender nativity is to shed arrogance, put false pride and bravado on the shelf and open your heart to the divine heart that beats for you in that manger.

Only then, will you find to your amazement and total astonishment that what you thought was a tiny, make-believe world and an outdated story, is a power strong enough to transform your life – and even the world!