Christmas Morning

Christmas morning! What excitement for each and every family! Parents and grandparents pour expressions of love into children and one another. Families visit one another, enjoy a festive meal together, take time away from daily toil and struggles for livelihood. For this day, life is as idyllic as we can each make it.

Many families start their day with a reminder of the origin of this greatest festival of our calendar, gathering children together to reflect on Christmas before opening gifts. Some light the center candle in the family advent wreath (having built up to this moment with the lighting of each of the other four candles on the four Sundays leading up to Christmas); some read famliar passages of the gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus.  Children might be a little impatient, but they grow up to treasure these moments and will very often maintain these as traditions in their own famlies, anchoring Christmas in its context.
So let us reflect on this context of Christmas. We know that Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus; but furthermore, we are told in the Gospel accounts of the story that this was a most remarkable birth, in that Jesus was born as God appearing in the flesh, as a human being.
Now let's chew on that for a moment.  God didn't show up in the perfect likeness of a human being, as our nativity scenes suggest - a perfect little doll in the manger; no, God showed up in an actual baby, needing to be burped, fed and changed like any baby, growing up with all the bumps and scars from play as any child would have, facing manhood with all the struggles a teen has.
Think about what this means.  We think of God as perfect, and we all know that we are each very imperfect, subject to change, disease, hurt and decay in our physical bodies.  With a huge gulf between God and us, where is hope? Where is meaning?
But God came to us humans in Jesus; God took the step to bridge that gulf.  And in coming as Jesus, God celebrated being human as being a beautiful expression of God's creation.  With all our imperfections, God still loves each person, indeed all his creation.  When God created the world, he said it was good; when God created human beings, he called it "very good".  When God came in Jesus, he reaffirmed that each human has a value that we haven't really fully grasped.  Nor can we ever.
Christmas Morning.  God values each and every person, just as they are.  And so should we.

Emmanuel

At this time of year, anticipating Christmas, we sing “Emmanuel”, which we have been told means “God with us”.  But what does that look like?  Think “God moving into the neighbourhood”.    And when God moves into the neighbourhood, things look different; there are different priorities than those to which we are accustomed, just like the priorities of Jesus were different than those of the religious people of the time of his ministry among the poor and disadvantaged of his corner of the Middle East.

 

We get a clue of what this looks like when we read the verse of prophecy from Isaiah 61:1 which he quoted at the outset of his ministry, Luke 4:18-19, which, in “The Message” translation says: “God’s Spirit is on me; he’s chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor, Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, To set the burdened and battered free, to announce, “This is God’s year to act!”

When we look at what these words meant in the three short years that followed, we get an idea just what it looks like when “God moves into the neighbourhood”.  The self-righteous religious people are shown up to be unworthy on their own proud account, while the down-trodden, those at the edges of society are treated tenderly, lifted up with compassion and given a value they never believed they had.

Richard Rohr, in speaking about this says: “In each case Jesus describes his work as moving outside of polite and proper limits and boundaries to reunite things that have been marginalized or excluded by society: the poor, the imprisoned, the blind, the downtrodden.

“Jesus’ ministry is not to gather the so-called good into a private country club, but to reach out to those on the edge and on the bottom—to tell those who are “last” that they might just be first! That is almost the very job description of the Holy Spirit, and therefore of Jesus. Today some call it God’s unique kind of justice or “restorative justice.” God present with us and in us, Emmanuel, justifies things by restoring them to their true and full identity in Himself, as opposed to “retributive justice” which seeks only reward and punishment.”

So, this season as we think what “Emmanuel” means, let us resolve to do our little bit to help our community feel what it is like when God moves into the neighbourhood, when those who are down and despondent start to realize what a marvelous potential and value they really have.