12/25/2025
Nativity
We’re celebrating You, Lord Messiah, Jesus, every day for days now! Our nativities attempt to keep our minds on the very real meaning in this season: Remembering Your story’s human beginnings ~~~ and avoiding the pressures to focus on gifting and traditions and the labors necessary to satisfy our souls with the enchantment we all desire to experience at Christmas.
The nativity: the icon of simplicity that reflects the unpretentiousness Your nature portrayed throughout Your earthly life. The nativity, so unlike the glittering porcelain figures enrobed in lovely silky cloth and pristine spotlessness and serene faces that surround our traditional representations. Some are gilded on edges or solid gold masterpieces, even! And that imagery is contrary to an odorous cave with a prickly bed of (hopefully) clean straw softening Your frightened, laboring Mama pushing out Your fragile, wet body to the inexperienced, trembling, calloused hands of a panicked husband. That gilded image misses the humanity every birthing mother knows and cannot honestly trivialize. We shudder at the thought of such a birthing experience, and if we think beyond the sterile images to the historical nativity, we know the clothing of Mary and Joseph was soiled from childbirth. We know their faces reflected weariness and pain from their difficult journey and the stressful circumstances that brought them to Bethlehem. We can’t imagine halos, but rather human fatigue and natural odors of sweat and pungent earth and animal f***s.
Did their souls glow with wonder? Yes!
Relief? Such deep relief that you were here and they were safe!
Awe at Your beautiful perfection and sweet little face? Absolutely!
The amazement at human birth is unlike anything else in human life! But childbirth is laborious and scary and painful and messy. Childbirth is a holy miracle every time. And You, the supreme Creator God of the Universe, wrapped Your Deity in infant humility and entered our mess that Christmas evening to bring the life of heaven’s kingdom to every messy soul.
Please open our tradition-glazed eyes to see clearly the rugged reality of Your entrance into the broken world You came to rescue, King Jesus: Not the glittering, pristine version that accompanies our holidays with gift lists and overspending, idealistic décor and feasts, busyness and tension. But the very human nativity that included stress and fear and pain and sacrifice, and strangers dropping in on an unfamiliar stable nursery telling stories of singing angel armies and living heavenly birth announcements. That nativity that was exhausting and messy and left so many questions unanswered for two very bewildered people. I remember Mary. I remember Joseph. And I remember God, tiny and fragile and humble, and utterly dependent upon two vulnerable human beings and His powerful, protective Father in heaven. That nativity is the best one my imagination can frame this Christmas day.
May the gold and porcelain and twinkling lights and familiar worship songs be authentic gifts of worship for You alone, the King of Kings, the indwelling Messiah we appreciate anew when we remember the very first Christmas. And may our humble circumstances, without the gold and porcelain and silk, or even if we enjoy gold and porcelain and silk (!), permit us to humbly welcome You as the everlasting King and Messiah, and love you with wonder and awe and gratitude, this day, and every day.
Immanuel. You with us. Now. Forever.
Happy Birthday, Lord Jesus!
