“God travels wonderful ways with human beings, but he does not comply with the views and opinions of people,” observes Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book, God is in the Manger.

God does not go the way that people want to prescribe for him; rather, his way is beyond all comprehension, free and self-determined beyond all proof. Where reason is indignant, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps us away: that is precisely where God loves to be. There he confounds the reason of the reasonable; there he aggravates our nature, our piety.

True to this, the Christmas story is full of unlikely characters. At the center we have a single mother, in a culture that scorned those in such circumstances, and a father who was thinking about bailing. Together they form a subsistence-level family carrying enormous amounts of stress.

The next groups to arrive are the shepherds, outcasts of society, and the wisemen, who were likely both superstitious and pluralistic. In the midst of this we find the Son of God—first in a barn, laying in a feeding trough, then in the arms of political refugees fleeing across international borders.

If earthly comforts and riches are “blessings,” Christ lived a radically unblessed life. He was found far from the palaces of men. He spent much of his adult life homeless, detached from even the slightest of luxuries, and, upon his death, possessed only the clothes on his back.

“Do You Hear What I Hear?” asks the carol, of the same name, by Noël Regney. ”I am amazed that people can think they know the song—and not know it is a prayer for peace,’’ Regney told the New York Times in 2002.

Rome brought peace through the sword. God offered peace freely, though it was bought with the humbling and destruction of his own son. Grace confounds power and pride. Bonhoeffer concludes;

Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly.

Listen: Do You Hear What I Hear? by Mary J. Blige 

Today’s Reading
Zechariah 8 (Listen – 3:33)
John 11 (Listen – 6:37)

Christ is the gift we did not want. Herod, the king of Judea, was uninterested in another ruling power and went on a murderous rampage to destroy him. The religious elite were looking for a military leader in Jerusalem, not the baby of an impoverished refugee family in north Africa.

Even today the gift of Christ is uncomfortable because the world’s need for him draws attention to our own insufficiency. Modern versions of the 19th century song, “What Child is This?”—by Chris Tomlin, Josh Groben, Sarah McLachlan, and Michael W. Smith, and others—highlight this by dropping out the lines that speak of who Christ truly is:

Why lies He in such mean estate,
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christians, fear, for sinners here
The silent Word is pleading.
Nails, spear shall pierce Him through,
The cross be borne for me, for you.
Hail, hail the Word made flesh,
The Babe, the Son of Mary.

“’It is finished’ is not a death gurgle,” observes Stanley Hauerwas in Shattered Christ. “’It is finished’ is a cry of victory. ‘It is finished’ is the triumphant cry that what I came to do has been done. All is accomplished, completed, fulfilled work.” Hauerwas continues:

The Gospel of John makes explicit what all the Gospels assume—that is, the cross is not a defeat but the victory of our God. On the sixth day of creation ‘God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.’ So on the seventh day ‘God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work he had done.’ Accordingly the seventh day was hallowed.

But God’s work, the work of the Trinity, is consummated in Jesus’s great declaration from the cross, ‘It is finished.’ His life, his death, his resurrection, as Irenaeus insisted, recapitulates creation, recapitulates God’s covenant with Israel, uniting creation and redemption in Incarnation.

What child is this? He is Immanuel—God with us. Christ eschewed earthly riches, embraced sinners, and gave up his life so that we might live. He is our hope and peace—he is the gift we long for.

Listen: What Child Is This? by Rebecca Roubion (3:42)

Today’s Reading
Zechariah 7 (Listen – 1:57)
John 10 (Listen – 4:44)

The Christmas story is not, primarily, a news report of Jesus’ birth—it is an account of the significance of Immanuel; God with us. In his book, The Hungering Dark Frederick Buechner explains:

The longer I live, the more inclined I am to believe in miracle, the more I suspect that if we had been there at the birth, we might well have seen and heard things that would be hard to reconcile with modern science.

But of course that is not the point, because the Gospel writers are not really interested primarily in the facts of the birth but in the significance, the meaning for them of that birth—just as the people who love us are not really interested primarily in the facts of our births but in what it meant to them when we were born and how for them the world was never the same again, how their whole lives were charged with new significance.

“How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given. So God imparts to human hearts, the blessings of His Heaven.” remarks Phillip Brooks’ 19th century hymn, “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem.” Brooks had visited Bethlehem and was so moved by Christ’s birthplace he said the experience would be forever, “singing in my soul.” In a letter to his father in December of 1865 he wrote,

After an early dinner took our horses and rode to Bethlehem. It was only about two hours when we came to the town, situated on an eastern ridge of a range of hills, surrounded by its terraced gardens. It is a good-looking town, better built than any other we have seen in Palestine. As we passed, the shepherds were still “keeping watch over their flocks,” or leading them home to fold.

The simplicity of Bethlehem became Brooks’ artistic contrast for the remarkable brilliance of Christ’s advent. In the same spirit, Buechner concludes, “Once we have seen Him in a stable, we can never be sure where He will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation He will descend in His wild pursuit of men.”

Listen: O Little Town of Bethlehem by Sarah McLachlan (3:50)

Today’s Reading
Zechariah 6 (Listen – 2:08)
John 9 (Listen – 4:56)

“Emotions run high during the holidays,” observes the American Psychological Association. “People in the United States are more likely to feel their stress increase rather than decrease,” The research tracks increases in fatigue, stress and irritability along with the season’s happiness, love, and high spirits.

In this way, the human experience around Christ’s birth hasn’t changed since Mary responded to the angel’s announcement. Mary didn’t initially reply with exuberant praise but simple obedience; “I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” Her unadorned submission stands in stark contrast to the deluge of joy-filled worship Luke records just eight verses later:

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant. For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

Mary was overwhelmed in her first response; as an unwed mother in the ancient Near East her plans for the future—her marriage, social status, even friendships—vanished the instant the angel spoke. She told no one of the angel’s words, rushing out of town before anyone could notice her pregnancy. Then she walked into the house of Elizabeth.

Luke records Elizabeth’s generosity of spirit, “And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!’” This is when everything changes. There is such power in the affirmation of her trusted friend that Mary immediately bursts into ardent worship, looking toward her future with welling hope.

Sometimes the hope people need is carried in our prayerfully chosen words. It’s a risk to affirm something unseen—Elizabeth’s words made no sense apart from her faith. Yet they were the very thing that led Mary to her need for a Savior and her faithful response to live into the journey to which God called her.

Listen: Go Tell it on the Mountain by Francesca Battistelli (3:01)

Today’s Reading
Zechariah 3 (Listen – 1:48)
John 6 (Listen – 8:27)

This Weekend’s Readings
Zechariah 4 (Listen – 1:53) John 7 (Listen – 5:53)
Zechariah 5 (Listen – 1:35) John 8 (Listen – 7:33)

The promise of Advent is that of longings met. In this way, Advent—longing for God’s presence—stands in contrast to hell, which C.S. Lewis describes as a place of “infinite boredom.” In A Preface to Paradise Lost Lewis contrasts the brilliant longings of humankind (Adam) with what he calls the profound “un-interestingness” of evil personified:

Adam, though locally confined to a small park on a small planet, has interests that embrace ‘all the choir of heaven and all the furniture of earth.’ Satan has been in the Heaven of Heavens and in the abyss of Hell, and surveyed all that lies between them, and in that whole im­mensity has found only one thing that interests him.

Satan’s monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament. Certainly, he has no choice. He has chosen to have no choice. He has wished to ‘be himself,’ and to be in himself and for himself, and his wish has been granted.

To admire Satan, then, is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography.

Compare Lewis’ (and Milton’s) vision of hell as self-consumption with Isaac Watts’ celebrated 18th century hymn, “Joy to the World.” It is profoundly communal—“Let earth receive her King; let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.”—wonderfully enveloped in ‘all the choir of heaven and all the furniture of earth.’

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
nor thorns infest the ground;
he comes to make his blessings flow
far as the curse is found.

Watts was burdened by lifeless worship; ”To see the dull indifference, the negligent and thoughtless air that sits upon the faces of a whole assembly, while the psalm is upon their lips, might even tempt a charitable observer to suspect the fervency of their inward religion.”

His answer wasn’t simply better, or “more relevant,” music, but the restoration of the soul that comes filling the longings of our hearts in “the glories of his righteousness and wonders of his love.”

Listen: Joy to the World by Red Mountain Church (3:56 – lyrics below)

Today’s Reading
Zechariah 2 (Listen – 1:41)
John 5 (Listen – 5:42)