Here come the holidays my friends.
I suppose that by this time you are
stitching up the holes in your stockings,
braving crowded malls,
ice-skating and holding hands,
drinking hot beverages,
stringing strands of popcorn,
hoping for snow (flushing ice cubes down toilets and wearing pajamas inside out),
shoveling snow (and cursing those inside-out, ice cube flushing children),
trying to teach your children how to say “Emmanuel,”
or repeating “Emmanuel” over and over to yourself,
wondering how in the world it all came down to this:
God putting on skin and coming to redeem the mess we’ve made and
to inaugurate his Kingdom (in which “Peace on Earth! Goodwill to Men!”
can ring from angel tongues, over wars and rumors of wars, and not
sound like complete nonsense.)
Every year I’m struck by the way he came. From all appearances he was a baby born out of wedlock to poor parents. He
was born in the middle of a road trip in something close to a barn, and
spent his first few days in a feeding trough breathing in that stale
smell of animal dung, placenta, and donkey hide. Even the town he was from cast questions on who he
was, ‘Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?’ – john 1.46 It’s
a bizzare way for God to come onto the scene.
This year it isn’t striking me as hard. Somehow the whole thing just makes a lot of sense this year. I’ve
spent the last few months finding Jesus in strange and lowly places –
in the middle of dark towns, in the eyes of poor parents and single
mothers, in the cries of bastard babies, in shitpiles and fake drumsets
on the edge of dumps, in the tears of a drunk orphan streetkid in my
arms in the dark missing his parents and putting his loneliness into
words, in the shaky hands of people dying from secrets and diseases. God is consistent, he hasn’t changed his strategy. He still shows up in the badlands and in lives of the ‘least of these.’
I’m not so surprised by the Christmas story this year. I’m just so glad he came. Hope couldn’t come through the cracks of our lives and our world like it does, not without the Advent of something better.
Darkness would eat us alive without the Word becoming flesh and becoming a light that darkness cannot comprehend.
I’m glad that Kingdom is coming up all over the place in the middle of Satan’s world. I’m glad that hope and light can be the reality, even when everything can look so dark to our eyes.
It’s strange spending Christmas away from all of you. It’s
odd enough that I’m getting sunburned (blistered too!) a few days
before Christmas, and that kids are wearing Santa hats on the beaches
here – but on top of that there are oceans and miles between us. That’s a difficult thing because, for me, Christmas
has become about you, and about Christ showing up in the middle of our
fragile friendship to make it beautiful and better and bright.
You have all, in some way, served as cradles that carried the baby Jesus to me. You’ve
spoon-fed me Gospel through the pits of my life, you’ve stood with me
on the good days to smile and say ‘God is good,’ you’ve asked me hard
questions and forced me to scratch at life more and more, you’ve
breathed life into me at times when I’ve had nothing left. And over and over again I whisper ‘Emmanuel’ to myself. God is with us. God is with me. God is here!
So thank you. I wish I could ship you all large boxes
full of confetti and hand drums and small carved African animals and
videos of funny conversations we’ve had. I wish I could
send you a Mariachi band to play you Christmas carols and sing you love
songs every night before you went to sleep until December 25. I wish I could beam myself to various cities
throughout the United States of America and meet you in assorted living
rooms, national monuments, pubs, rooftops, and Italian restaurants (or
Thai restaurants!).
But I do hope you’ll settle for this little note. I
hope that you realize how much you’ve changed my world and made my life
better, and I can only hope that in some way I’ve been able to show you
Jesus like you’ve shown him to me.
matthew.
