A Savior Has Been Born . . .To You

My apologies for the recent absence of posts. I could give lots of excuses, but the main reason is that I am re-learning the importance of protecting time to reflect and to write. I had forgotten that a minister’s schedule is a lot like a Tetris board; oddly shaped things, Godly shaped things can stack up very quickly. God is the only being I can think of who lives heedless of the incessant sweep of a second hand. The rest of us must develop and use a schedule.

Plus, we had our first grandchild. Years ago, I swore that, when the time came, I would not be one of those grandparents who took every opportunity to bore people with pictures of and stories about how talented, intelligent and gifted were his grandchildren. What a silly little man I was. I knew this, but I had forgotten it; a baby changes everything. Speaking of which . . . .

And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby . . . .”  (Luke 2:8 – 12, NIV).

Mind boggling. God chose to invade the world as a baby. God poured divinity into six or seven pounds of human flesh. The mightiest being in existence came encased in the most vulnerable form. The most self-sufficient being in existence submitted himself to total dependency. God came not with a sword or a scepter but with a squall.

The incarnation was God’s solution to the problem of sin; God’s refusal, as Athanasius said, “to leave men to the current of corruption.” Human beings, made in the image of God, had effaced that image, left it wasted, ruined and broken. So God made himself like us to redeem, restore and repair us. The incarnation wasn’t just God’s way of coming to us; it was also God’s way of bringing us back to himself.

But was such an extraordinary measure really necessary? Had corruption carried us so far away from God that God had to essentially start over — to say to us through the Incarnation, “This is what I look like — this, not what you have chosen, is your destiny?” Had we really fallen so far that God himself had to descend into our depravity? Was it necessary for Him to embrace the humiliation of being human? Was the Image of God in which we were made so ruined that God had to be made in the image of humans to restore it — to restore us?

You can look back through history to find the answers to those questions. In his gospel, Matthew relates Herod’s order to kill all the boys in Bethlehem under two years of age in a failed attempt to eliminate the threat to his throne. Individual acts of violence against the vulnerable are bad enough. Government sanctioned slaughter of the innocent is nothing less than institutionalized evil.

But you don’t have to go back that far. Seventy-five years ago, Hitler’s regime killed millions. Twenty-one years ago, nearly a million Rwandans were slaughtered over a 100 day period. By other Rwandans. ISIS has killed thousands in the last five years. This year, in the U.S. alone, there were nearly a million abortions. In addition to these examples of industrial grade violence, dozens of isolated, random acts of brutality and bloodshed seem to show up every week. Last week, a gunman killed three in an attack on a Planned Parenthood office in Colorado, a clearly un-prolife, un-Christlike tactic if there ever was one. A nine year old child was executed in a Chicago gang retaliation a week before that. Nine people were shot dead at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon in October.

So, yeah. We have been carried a long, long way in the current of corruption. The evidence is overwhelming, well documented, thoroughly archived, and irrefutable. But it’s not enough just to acknowledge our depravity in the annals of history, Biblical or otherwise.  Our ruin isn’t just affirmed in the latest headlines. It shows up in our selfies and stares back from the mirror. The angel said, “A Savior has been born to you.” Not just to jumpy tyrants who slaughter children or crazed fuhrers who dream of world domination or even deranged gunmen who are trying to carve out their fifteen minutes of infamy. God was born to me, to you, because we, too, are taken in the torrent of sin.

Every time I hold my grandson, I cry. Every time. Maybe that’s because I’m just overwhelmed with my love for him. Maybe it’s because of what he represents to our family or because I’m so grateful that he is healthy or because there isn’t anything more pure and sweet than a sleeping baby. And then there is this — when I hold him, he reminds me of how and why God came to me, to you, to all of us. God came like this. God came to make us like this. Innocent. Pure. And new. When I hold him, I remember the words the angel spoke to the shepherds; “You will find a baby.”

My prayer for you this season is that the Baby will find you.