The birth and incarnation of Christ... After all these years, after a hundred tellings and re-tellings and plays and movies and readings and poems and sermons, sometimes I hear it and it feels like more of a familiar story, a tenet of my faith, a piece of the bigger picture of the Gospel story, and not something alive and WONDERful and mind-blowing in its own right.
When you take a step back, the reality of it is staggering. There is NO story like it... A selfless God who didn't consider equality with God something to be grasped, a young virgin mother, a frightened man, a perfect baby, three searching kings, the least-of-these shepherds favored above anyone, a GOD - THE GOD - who slipped into the flesh of a baby with the tiniest footprint, a nose that maybe resembled his mother's, a heartbeat and DNA and soft baby skin- a thrill of hope, perfect hope, born into a weary world, the collision of natural and supernatural in the most intimate AND all-embracing of ways. It's the story of labor pains and the joy set before Him.
Yesterday marked the beginning of a new year's Advent season. I started a new Advent daily devotional and what I read yesterday pierced my heart in a new and profound way.
The Coming
by R.S. Thomas
And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Color. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many People
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
It is truly difficult to imagine the world before the first coming of Christ.
A created world, marked my sin, bereft of the presence of its Creator. Granted, God's presence came - it was carried around in an ark and placed within the Holy of Holies where a thick veil stood strong between the sacred blue flame and those who longed for it. Eventually, even the Ark of the Covenant was lost but God's presence remained, in a room, behind the double-veil. The blood-sacrifice of animals granted access to a select few. The rest were left on the outskirts counting on a High Priest's mediation for the expiation of their sins. Even the confident, prophetic voices of promise had grown muffled and distant with the passing of silent years upon years.
It was a weary world, an estranged people with a gnawing ache for the fulfillment of the MESSIAH promise.
I don't know what that world is like. As dark as the world is now, I cannot imagine a world where the ONLY hope had not yet arrived.
"But in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light, the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight..."
A THRILL of hope. JESUS came. GOD with us.
At Christmastime, the close of every year, I tend to (foolishly) look with grand expectations to the new year. 2016 will be THE year: things will finally fall into place, we'll be singing "joy to the world" and everything in OUR world will make sense and feel at peace. And every year I'm disappointed. My expectations come crashing down under the weight of real life, real pain, real struggles, real complications, real issues - mine or someone else's. For some reason, this reality can be even harder to grapple with during the holiday season.
And yet, under all the commercialization - the cards, the Hallmark movies, the decorations, the parties (please note: I am a HUGE fan of all of these things. I'm even one of those horrible people that puts the tree up a few days BEFORE Thanksgiving), the message of the Incarnation glows and sings and burns like a guiding star. A WEARY world rejoices. My world that is weary can rejoice. God has come. God is here.
In the midst of dwindling checking account balances, sick and hurting loved ones, poverty and devastation, war and inhumanity in places across the world, racial hurt and inequality and division in our cities and neighborhoods, broken marriages, and a million other scenarios, JESUS has come.
He looks into the circumstances of my world and your world, and He says, "Let me go there." He comes fully God, with skin on, to enter in and make all things right and new. And He will. And He IS.
Going into this Advent season, my prayer is that His very real presence becomes more tangible than ever, and that our sense of peace and joy has very little to do with the circumstances of the world around us or our own little personal worlds, but with the wonderful, truly earth-shattering fact that HE ENTERED THEM.
And my prayer is that we can in turn carry that same heart, that we see others hurting or hopeless or weary and we say, "Let me go there," that we can enter THEIR worlds and love them with the same fierce hope and determination that Jesus loved us.
Let the weary world rejoice.
Post Comment
Post a Comment