Christmas Eve— Luke 2.1-12
Two years ago during the twelve days of Christmas, I baptized an infant into Christ Jesus the LORD. By water and the Spirit, the drooling, drowsy baby became a part of the body of the boy born to Mary.
After the baptism, as kids ran around the sanctuary and their grown-ups chatted, a child pointed at a nativity displayed on a side table in front of a church window. Two of the shepherds had been knocked to their sides, perhaps bowled over by their astonishment at the heavenly host. Or maybe the shepherds had fallen over, exhausted from sprinting to the Holy Family from their far away fields. The magi, I noticed, had arrived at the manger approximately a week too early. Meanwhile, someone familiar with animal husbandry had placed one of Bethlehem’s sheep on top of the other. Likely the same culprit was guilty of attempting to yield some hybrid creature from the coupling of a cow and a donkey. A Lego stormtrooper, I noticed, stood hidden in the angelic ranks, blaster aimed at the angel Gabriel.
The girl pointed at the chipped manger holding the ceramic child as though a pearl in a shucked oyster.
“Who is that?” she asked me.
“That’s Larry,” I said, “St. Nick’s eldest by a first marriage.”
She looked at me like a stranger with candy, “No.”
“No,” I conceded, “That’s…”
I was about to say, “That’s the baby Jesus.” But I caught myself and stopped short. I thought this might be my only opportunity to afflict this child with the unmitigated audacity of the promise. So I decided to complicate Christmas for her.
“Who is that?” I asked.
She nodded, her curiosity genuine.
I pointed at the fired-and-glazed child— holding, I noticed, a small, gold crucifix in his tiny fist.
“That baby,” I said in a hushed, conspiratorial whisper, “is God.”
She turned from the creche. She looked at me, waiting for an explanation, but I did not have one. We do not have one. So I repeated myself.
“That baby is God.”
She wrinkled her nose and crinkled her lips and furrowed her brows, as though I had just posited the most preposterous assertion. And then, like air escaping from a pierced balloon, she let out an incredulous laugh.
“No!” she giggled.
She is not the first so to laugh.
Long before Luke’s nativity became church canon, pagan critics lampooned it. In his work The True Word, Celsus, a second century Roman philosopher, mocked the claims Christians make at Christmas:
“How can the Logos be God, who feeds like a babe at breast? How can the Beginning of all things have a beginning in time? No god travels down a birth canal. No god hides in bread and wine. No god suffers and dies. Deity does not have a mother and an executioner. Gods don’t do that!”
Of course, the unmitigated audacity of the promise goes even further. The mystery of the incarnation is not only that Mary’s finite womb contains the infinite. The mystery is yet as well that Mary’s ostensibly finite, flesh-and-blood boy is eternal. We mark the mystery with magi and mangers, shepherds and stars, angels and despots, but we need not rely upon Luke and Matthew. To ponder the mystery unveiled in Bethlehem, we could literally turn to any place in scripture.
For example—
Six hundred years before the shepherds were “keeping watch over their flocks by night,” the prophet Ezekiel is shown the heavenly prototype of the temple’s cherubim throne. And on the throne in heaven, as the source and energy of its glory, “was an appearance that was the figure of a man.”
“How can the one seated on the throne in heaven— God’s heaven— look like a man?” the ancient rabbis wondered.
Ever since Mary first pondered the mystery in her heart, classic Christian interpretation has answered the rabbis’s question thusly, “Because the one seated on the throne in God’s heaven is a man, Jesus of Nazareth. The man seated on the throne in God’s heaven is the boy in Bethlehem’s manger.”
As the theologian Robert Jenson writes:
“This stark proposition of the incarnation offends all normal religiosity, which at this point will want to talk about metaphors or symbols or figures; it is nonetheless the defining theological affirmation of Christianity…the second triune identity and the man Jesus of Nazareth are but one person. As the Apostles' Creed presents the matter…there is no way to speak of God that does not refer to the man Jesus, and no way to speak of the man Jesus that does not refer to God.”
Last year during Advent, following the children’s Christmas pageant, I sat at the altar and answered the children’s questions at random. It’s a tradition I like to call “Midrash in the Moment.” Thankfully, no child asked me to explain the word virgin. A little girl, however, did ask me at the end a question whose answer ought to inspire still greater amazement and incredulity than Mary’s pregnancy ex nihilo.
“How old is Jesus?” she asked me.
“Well,” I said, “He’s not 2,023 years old.”
After the service, the girl came up to me in the fellowship hall. Cupcake in hand, she said to me, “You didn’t answer my question.”
“I didn’t?”
She shook her head.
“You said Jesus is not 2,023 years old but you didn’t say how old Jesus is.”
I leaned down towards her and I whispered, like I was letting her in on a secret— because I was, letting her in on a mystery.
“He is before all things,” I whispered, “Jesus was before was was.”
She furrowed her eyebrows like she’d just sucked on a lemon.
She looked at me like I had a poopy shoe, “That’s not a very clear answer.”
“Well, it’s the one we got.”
The man the prophet Ezekiel sees seated on God’s throne “shimmers,” scripture says. He shimmers because sight is always uncertain when it cannot fix objects in the present.
We need not the magi’s myrrh or Caesar’s census to tell the story. The scriptures are replete with the mystery we unwrap at Christmas.
Take another instance—
In very first pages of the Bible, Abraham’s slave-girl, Hagar, grieves in the wilderness after she and her son, Ishmael, having been cast-off by Abraham’s wife Sarah. God hears Hagar’s weeping. And the scriptures report that an angel of the LORD speaks to Hagar, consoling her. The angel first refers to God in the third person, “God has heard the voice of your boy.” But then, without any break in his speech or formula of citation, the angel speaks of God in the first person, “I will make a great nation of him.”
Once again, the ancient rabbis wondered, nearly as incredulous as the pagan Celsus, “How can one who is other from God speak as God?”
And again, ever since the magi fled King Herod, the church has answered, “Because the one who consoled Hagar and her child is both an other from God and God; he is Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim, the second triune identity.”
Sight is always uncertain when it cannot fix objects in the present.
Since the fourth century the church has celebrated Christ’s nativity on December 25, yet the mystery of the incarnation does not fit so easily on a timeline. Christmas is not Jesus’s first appearance in the scriptures. This is the mystery we profess when we confess that God’s proper name is— and always has been and will ever be— Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Word does not become flesh in the sense that he becomes someone he was not. As the evangelist John proclaims in his own nativity account, “He— that is, Jesus— was in the beginning with God.” Somehow, Jesus is both begotten of the Father before all creation and born to Mary.
As Robert Jenson puts the faith’s puzzling entailments:
“The Bible violates our notion of time more or less on every page…That Mary is the Mother of God indeed disrupts the linear time-line or pseudo time-line on which Westerners automatically— and usually subconsciously— locate every event, even the birth of God the Son; but that disruption is all to the theological good.”
Time is not a straight line through the present.
Time is a helix, wrapped around Jesus, tighter than swaddling clothes.
As Charles Wesley puts it in the carol, the child in Bethlehem is the “heaven-born, prince of peace.”
The mystery of Christmas is not simply that the LORD meets us in Jesus. The mystery of Christmas— and, just so, the gospel— is that the child born to Mary is a protagonist in Mary’s own scriptures. He’s the man on the throne. He’s the comfort to Hagar. He’s the voice that stays Abraham from slaying his only son.
What’s revealed hidden in the little town of Bethlehem, is that God has never been otherwise than Emmanuel. God-with-us. And if this is a claim to which we have no explanation, then we can nevertheless dare a question.
Why?
Why does the Father again and again violate all of religion’s rules for deity by meeting us— in time— in the Son?
If we cannot unpack the how of God’s who, can we at least venture a why?
For the first seven years of his life, Daniel Solomon slept upright. He had no other option, sharing a crib with another child his age in an orphanage in Romania.
During the day, one team of workers fed and cleaned Daniel and the other hundred orphans, all of whom lived in the same room. A graveyard crew covered the night shift. Daniel never learned the names of any of the adults who tended to him.
Daniel did not go to school.
Daniel did not go outside.
Except to go to the bathroom, Daniel did not leave his crib.
And Daniel did not yearn for a family.
He had no such notion.
“It’s like, a kid who never eats chocolate doesn't know what chocolate tastes like,” Daniel recalls, “I didn't know what a family was to think about it at all.”
One day Heidi Solomon received a magazine in the mail at her home in Cleveland, Ohio. It was from an adoption agency and included in it, among hundreds of photographs, was a picture of Daniel.
“I just remember telling my husband,” Heidi remembered, “I’m like, I think this is our son. So it was just kind of weird. Like, for some reason, his picture just, shimmered.”
Heidi had always planned to adopt children with her husband Rick. A special education teacher, she knew welcoming Daniel into their family could pose difficulties. The ease of their first six months together defied her expectations.
Then came Daniel’s birthday in March.
“I remember at the beginning of March Daniel said, they don't have March in Romania because I never had a birthday before.”
Until his eighth birthday, Daniel had never confronted the idea that he had been born.
“After my birthday,” Daniel says, “I started thinking that they were my biological parents, and how I was really mad at them that they put me there for seven and a half years.”
Daniel’s confusion begat a powerful hatred of his parents, an anger that took on a logic of its own. His tantrums became tornadoes of rage. They started to fear their son. They called in social workers and specialists, several of whom left bleeding, needing medical attention.
But Daniel saved the worst of it for his mother.
He hated her.
And he took pleasure in her pain.
“There was a time,” Daniel remembers, “where my dad hired this bodyguard to come to our house because my mom didn't feel safe with me.”
Rick and Heidi ferried Daniel from one psychiatrist to another, religiously heeding their advice to no discernible effect.
No less than two specialists told Heidi that her son would never love her.
Heidi remembers one case manager who sat them down and said to them, "This is what’s going to happen. Daniel's going to hurt you. You're going to be in the hospital. He'll be in juvenile detention, and your husband's going to leave you.”
So Heidi sought out more about aggressive treatments for attachment disorder, resorting to a therapy with a controversial history practiced by a doctor in Virginia.
Offending the norms of nearly all his colleagues, the psychiatrist prescribed what at first sounded preposterous to Heidi. The doctor mandated that Heidi and Daniel spend months upon months bound together, side by side, never more than three feet apart.
The physician’s goal was to heal Daniel by re-creating the bond that never occurred.
“For months, I didn't go to school,” Daniel recalls. “She stopped her job. When she would go to the bathroom, I would be right outside the door. When I went to the bathroom, she'd be right outside the door. The only time she was not next to me was when I was sleeping. Like, literally, that was it.”
In addition to the physical bond between them, the doctor required the mother and son spend large amounts of time making eye contact. And Daniel was not allowed to ask Heidi for things he wanted. Like a baby, he needed to learn that his mother would provide for him what he need. Whenever Daniel resisted treatment, he was subjected to yet another program-dictated activity— time-ins. Every time Daniel did something bad his mother's response would be to spend more time with him, even closer together with him.
“Like, we would sit on the couch and I would hug him,” Heidi says, “That was, like, his punishment.”
Initially the radical treatment made Daniel worse.
But then something happened.
“I think it was around the third week,” Daniel says, "that I actually-- like, I was with her more. I think I realized maybe for the first time, that my mother loved me.”
Parts of the treatment continued until Daniel was thirteen years old.
For example, every night, for twenty minutes, Heidi and Rick had to hold Daniel and talk to him soothingly, cradling him like a newborn baby. Even though their boy was quite big at that point, the doctor ordered them to make their arms a manger for him.
Slowly—
Heidi’s and Rick’s hands-on, in-your-face, unconventional love began to transform Daniel.
Reflecting upon their journey, Heidi told a reporter, “If you're the kind of person who actually needs love— really needs love— chances are, you're not the kind of person who's going to have the wherewithal to create it. Creating love is not for the soft and sentimental among us. Love is a battlefield.”
Of all the animals the LORD has made, we are the only ones who know not how to be creatures. That is, quite unnaturally, we do not love God easily. Quite unnaturally, we do not love God reliably. Quite unnaturally, we do not love God well— certainly not with our whole hearts and minds and souls and strength.
We have an attachment disorder. This is what the Bible calls sin. And it’s why the translation for the Greek word for salvation— sozo— is healing.
We have an attachment disorder.
We have a Father and a family for whom we know not even to yearn!
We have an attachment disorder. And in order to heal us, in order to re-create the bond that should have occurred but did not, God resorts to a drastic remedy. Violating all of religion’s rules for deity, from the very first pages of the scriptures the LORD meets us in time and space. He binds himself to us in the flesh. Again and again, he gets hands-on and in-our-faces. Even more preposterously— even though he’s way too big for our laps, the Ancient of Days goes so far as to make himself an infant, to be cradled in our arms.
Around the same time that Daniel was coming to love his mother and father, the rabbi of their synagogue called to tell them that Daniel had won an award for the valedictorian of the confirmation class. As part of the award, Daniel was invited to give a speech to the congregation.
Daniel told his parents that he wanted his words to be his gift to them, that he wanted his words to be a way of giving himself to them.
By the time he got to the end of this speech, Daniel was shaking, struggling to keep his voice under control. His final words were for his Mom and Dad, and they were the first time he’d spoken those words to them.
“I love you very much.”
We cannot unpack the how of God’s who.
But the why is straightforward.
What’s unveiled in bands of cloth, the mystery of Christmas, is that even more so than Heidi and Rick, God has determined his eternal identity to hear from you those same five words, “I love you very much.”
We cannot explain the how of God’s who.
But the why!
The why of God’s who is right there in the carol, “And fit us for heaven to live with thee there.”
So come to the table.
God is so desperate to attach you to himself he makes himself not just a child at Mary’s breast but an object in your hands and on your lips. The bread and the wine are the way he teaches you that he will provide for you what you need.
Which is to say, the table is our altar call.
The loaf and the cup are how you get born again.
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