Lesson From a Front Yard Blow Up

As I stood there in the middle of the street admiring the curb appeal in the Nativity “blow-up display,” it seemed abit disconceting; the child in the scene is not quite the focal point that I intended; the fact hit me that the story of my spiritual life is a story filled with nativity scenes.

In those stories, I have found a God who was present before I have accomplished anything and longing to gather me long before I knew it. Thus David can pray, "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well." And God can say to the prophet Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations." And those who witnessed the miracle of Elizabeth and Zechariah can rightly exclaim God's hand upon the child before that child could say his own name: "The neighbors were all filled with awe, and throughout the hill country of Judea people were talking about all these things.  Everyone who heard this wondered about it, asking, 'What then is this child going to be?' For the Lord's hand was with him." Psalm 139:13-14, Jeremiah 1:5, Luke 1:65-66.

In a world where significance and identity are earned by what I do, by what I have accomplished, by what I own, and Christmas is about the lines I fought, the lists I finished, the gifts I was able to secure, the kingdom of God arrives scandalously, jarringly—even offensively—into my captive and often content life. In this kingdom, my personal value begins before I have said or done the right things, before I have accumulated the right lifestyle, or even made the right lists. In this kingdom, God not only uses my infancy in the story of salvation, not only called me to embrace the kingdom as a little child, but so the very God of creation steps into the world as a child.  

Children are not usually the main characters in the stories I tell, (unless they are my grandchildren “stars”) yet the story of Christmas begins and ends with a child most don't quite know what to do with. Here, a vulnerable baby in a stable of animals breaks in as the harbinger of good news, the fulfillment of all the law and the prophets, the anointed leader who comes to set the captives free—wrapped in rags and resting in a manger. Coming as a child, God radically draws near, while at the same time radically overthrowing our conceptions of status, worth, power, and authority. Jesus is crowned king long before he can sit in a throne. He begins overturning idols and upsetting social order long before he can even speak.

If truth be told, perhaps I feel a certain delight when I meet someone who’s birthday is at Christmas time because it is the season in which it is most appropriate—and most hopeful—to remember my fragility, my dependency, and the great reversal of the kingdom of God: For God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. 1 Corinthians 1:27. I'm thinking now, as I write that Advent, like childhood, reminds me that I am in need of someone to hold me.  Shamelessly, when my maternal grandfather used to do so; just out of pure joy and love of me.  It also reminds me that, like the baby in a Bethlehem stable, I too am somewhat out of place, homeless and longing, not morbidly, for my eternal home. The image of a tearful baby in a manager is a picture of God in his most shocking, unbefitting state—the Most High becoming the lowest, the face of God wrapped tightly in a young girl's arms.

How true that to be human is to be implicitly religious, for even within my most deeply felt needs for love and refuge, I am reminded that there is one who comes so very far to meet me. Inherent in my most vulnerable days is the hope that God, too, took on the despairing quality of fragility in order to offer the hope of wholeness. In my most weakened state of despair and shortcoming, Christ breaks in and shows the paradoxical power of God in an unlikely nativity scene on my front lawn . Glory to God in the lowest, indeed.