As you may know, this is a busy time of year for pastors, but also an exciting one. This week I am taking a short cut with my blog, printing the article from my church's most recent newsletter (slightly modified for this format). Have a Merry Christmas.


Without the Nativity, we become a sort of lecture series and coffee club, with not very good coffee and sort of aimless lectures.
Garrison Keillor, Duluth NewsTribune, December 6, 2007

Hum? I don’t think our coffee is all that bad, pretty good most of the time, in fact. Okay, sometimes my sermons can be a little aimless, but I hope not often.

Garrison Keillor is right, though, Christmas is special and central to the Christian faith. It is the story about God coming close to humanity and the world. It is a story about God attending to the smallest, paying attention to the least significant. Theologian Nicholas Lash, quoting, in part, the Jewish theologian and philosopher Martin Buber, writes, “Through God’s indwelling in the world… through God’s address and presence, the world becomes a sacrament.” (Easter in Ordinary, 294). The story of Christmas is about God indwelling the world, about the world becoming a sacrament - a place where we can encounter God in grace and love.

That is an amazing thought when you consider the story itself, when you look at the circumstances of this particular birth. “The illegitimate child of a poor mother becomes the centre of the world” (Dorothee Soelle and Luise Schottroff, Jesus of Nazareth, 15). The emperor of Rome, the ruling power of the day, had promised peace on earth, the Pax Romana. This is the story about a God who doesn’t choose to come close in the imperial palaces, but comes to us in an ordinary birth. If there is anything extraordinary it is the “extraordinary” hardship of the circumstances in which Mary gives birth. Of course, the story soon turns extraordinary – stars and angels and shepherds and wise people from afar, but these elements are only meant to highlight how God coming close happened in the ordinary circumstances of a birth.

If God can touch the world in that place, in those circumstances, where else might God touch the world? Maybe through you. Maybe through me.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David