It's the eve of the annual Christmas pilgrimage. The bags are packed. The car is ready. The journey awaits. It will be good to go away, and it will be good to come home again when it is time to return. There is a rhythm--a holy rhythm--to the discipline of keeping Christmas.
Our journey is different than that of Mary and Joseph. But it occurs to me that nativity is always a call to a journey--a journey of faith. We never really know what our lives will become. Others remember and rehearse our story before we ourselves become conscious of it. Sometimes the dreams we dream for ourselves and those we love turn out as we imagine. Often there are twists and turns in life's path that hide the horizon and take us to places and people we had not known.
In my album of Christmas memories there is a little boy, no more than three years old. This toddler named "Tom" saw how our little church kept the baby Jesus--high up in a dark and dusty closet in the Fellowship Hall--for fifty plus weeks of the year. In mid-December, someone would get a ladder and retrieve the manger with baby Jesus down for program practice. (We never used a real baby in our churches. That might have caused a controversy, favoritism over who got to play the holiest part. After all, Jesus was so different, so special, so holy that no contemporary child could possibly stand in for him in the pageant. That is, of course, a topic for another time.)
Tom saw the sad condition of our plastic baby Jesus, and he insisted that he become Jesus' guardian until Christmas Eve, when Jesus would be at the center of the scene. Tom took Jesus home and prevailed upon his mother to help him bathe the baby, gently washing one who had not had a bath for several decades. He persisted in getting his grandma make some new swaddling clothes to replace the dirty, yellowed ones that Jesus had worn. Fresh straw was added to the matted straw of the manger.
I remember Tom, as we begin our pilgrimage to the manger this year. Tom took the baby to heart--so much so that he took him home. As a three-year-old, Tom's faith was not articulated in some systematic way--but it was sincere, and it was lived. Jesus was at the center to be cared for, cradled, and loved.
Tom now has a little child of his own. I wonder how this father's faith teaches his own little one about loving Jesus--and how that child's faith, perhaps, inspires his father on the journey. I hope both can see Jesus in the flesh-and-blood babies, who cry for love and hope and peace in this world. May that same faith take root and grow in all of us that Jesus will be at home in our hearts and our homes. May it be so!
O God, let your Christmas come.
Let your Child be born.
Prepare us to believe and to receive him now.
O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray;
Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels, the great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide with us, Our Lord, Emmanuel.
Alleluia!
Our journey is different than that of Mary and Joseph. But it occurs to me that nativity is always a call to a journey--a journey of faith. We never really know what our lives will become. Others remember and rehearse our story before we ourselves become conscious of it. Sometimes the dreams we dream for ourselves and those we love turn out as we imagine. Often there are twists and turns in life's path that hide the horizon and take us to places and people we had not known.
In my album of Christmas memories there is a little boy, no more than three years old. This toddler named "Tom" saw how our little church kept the baby Jesus--high up in a dark and dusty closet in the Fellowship Hall--for fifty plus weeks of the year. In mid-December, someone would get a ladder and retrieve the manger with baby Jesus down for program practice. (We never used a real baby in our churches. That might have caused a controversy, favoritism over who got to play the holiest part. After all, Jesus was so different, so special, so holy that no contemporary child could possibly stand in for him in the pageant. That is, of course, a topic for another time.)
Tom saw the sad condition of our plastic baby Jesus, and he insisted that he become Jesus' guardian until Christmas Eve, when Jesus would be at the center of the scene. Tom took Jesus home and prevailed upon his mother to help him bathe the baby, gently washing one who had not had a bath for several decades. He persisted in getting his grandma make some new swaddling clothes to replace the dirty, yellowed ones that Jesus had worn. Fresh straw was added to the matted straw of the manger.
I remember Tom, as we begin our pilgrimage to the manger this year. Tom took the baby to heart--so much so that he took him home. As a three-year-old, Tom's faith was not articulated in some systematic way--but it was sincere, and it was lived. Jesus was at the center to be cared for, cradled, and loved.
Tom now has a little child of his own. I wonder how this father's faith teaches his own little one about loving Jesus--and how that child's faith, perhaps, inspires his father on the journey. I hope both can see Jesus in the flesh-and-blood babies, who cry for love and hope and peace in this world. May that same faith take root and grow in all of us that Jesus will be at home in our hearts and our homes. May it be so!
O God, let your Christmas come.
Let your Child be born.
Prepare us to believe and to receive him now.
O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray;
Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels, the great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide with us, Our Lord, Emmanuel.
Alleluia!
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