This Baby Is My Life: A Christmas Talk (Part Two)

So back to the offer: Christmas is not Christmas without us.

Mary provides a model for us here. She makes herself a servant of the Lord to birth Jesus and to make possible His Kingdom. I’m not saying God wouldn’t have found someone else if Mary had said no. But I’m saying LOOK! God chose someone! A human! To bring Jesus’ Kingdom into this world. Before Jesus had done anything, God wanted to involve all of humankind in this story of God’s Kingdom.

Joseph, the father of Jesus, went through this same thing. An angel visited him and told him about Mary.

“Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and they shall name him Emmauel, which means God with us.” (Matthew 1:23)

A God who is with us? A God who is on our side. A God who we get to interact with? A God who, in these stories, at least, speaks to us through angels and dreams.

This is related to my concern about Christmas. Jesus can be made a distant figure pretty easily. He is perfect. He is always obedient to God. He can do miracles. So making Jesus a baby can seem pretty alienating. What can this baby do for my life?
Think about how different that question would be for someone like Mary or Joseph, the wisemen or the shepherd.

This baby is my life.

I bore him. I am called to take care of him. We saw his name in the stars and journeyed to find him. We were told of his arrival and came to see for ourselves.

These are stories of people who are involved. These are stories of people who had hope that this little baby could become something much more. They believed in the impossible.

So what is the whisper from God that we have been hearing. Do we have a project of impossibility that would usher in the hope found in baby Jesus? Have we partnered with God in a way that would bring about a Kingdom that will have no end? Are we involved?

Christmas is about Christ and it is about us too. It has to be about both otherwise God wouldn’t have sent Jesus to be the God with us.

Let us get involved in this Christmas mess, this Christmas gift, this Christ who loves us.