Human Christmas

In this episode, I reflect on the significance of Christmas, acknowledging the mix of joy and challenges it brings, especially during family gatherings. Drawing parallels to the first Christmas, I highlight the humble and imperfect circumstances of Jesus’ birth, emphasizing that even revered biblical figures like David and Solomon were flawed. The essence of Christmas lies in accepting our own brokenness and confusion, recognising that Jesus shared in our human struggles. This season, let us embrace the accessibility of God through Jesus, finding comfort in His understanding and love. Join me in prayer, seeking a deeper connection with the Lord.

00:00:01 So we gather to give thanks, to honor, to worship. We gather at a time when Christmas can mean all kinds of different things for all sorts of different people. You know, it can be a time of celebration, a time of gathering with family. But often for that very reason, the gathering with family bit that can also bring all kinds of challenges, all kinds of hurts, all kinds of old wounds might be reawakened. There might be different political positions, different points of view, different presentations. And it brings all kinds of different realities, often very raw to life, to birth within us. And so in so many ways, that makes the first Christmas, you know, even more relevant. You know, as we saw acted out just before us, there was nothing glamorous about the first Christmas, nothing earth shattering, nothing incredible about a heavily pregnant woman making her way back to the home. Not even her home, but the home of her new husband, Joseph. To go back to that line, all of the gospel authors are very clear that while Joseph isn’t the father, he becomes the adopted father of Jesus, that Jesus is brought into that line of King David by adoption.

00:01:47 And they want us to remember that that’s about as good as it gets within Judaism. But again, there’s nothing extraordinary, nothing incredible about those people, because all of them and the Hebrew Scriptures are very clear on this point. All of them stuffed it up. All of them got it wrong. All of them, without exception, were great sinners. All of them were unable to remain faithful to God, even the great ones like David and Solomon, who begin so well. But again, they turned their hearts away from God. They turn their hearts, in both cases to very attractive women and allow them to to lead them into a state of of awful and terrible sin. In the case of David, of of raping his the wife of somebody else. And that whole experience reminds us that our heritage, the family that we aggravated unto the people that we become by being members of Christ’s body of justice. Flawed as all of the Christians who have gone before us, all of the Jewish people who have led the way before us.

00:03:09 All of them failed to understand what this longing was all about. And so Christmas isn’t a time about getting everything right and being perfect, and finally understanding all of this sense of of what Jesus birth means for us. It’s accepting and realizing that to the extent that we’re confused, to the extent that we’re broken, to the extent that we don’t understand that we’re living on the margins, that puts us actually in the very center of God’s reality, that puts us in the truth of what God is longing to establish within us and for us during this beautiful night. And so as we gather, we acknowledge this incredible gift of the God who is for us, the God who becomes one of us. The God who is wanting to remind us that he could have simply stayed as the God who created the universe, the God who made himself visible at times in angels and made himself present. But people were able to experience him him in dreams that were able to encounter him in various ways. But it was very distant for most people until the time of Jesus, until Jesus becomes one of us.

00:04:35 And by being human, he experiences everything that we experience. You know, the frustration of being out on a sunny day and having to try and shield your face from the sun. He knows that reality from walking there in the hot Judean desert. He knows what it’s like to be tired, to be hungry. To be thirsty. To be overwhelmed. The gift of Christianity is the gift that our God has drawn near, that our God is accessible, that our God is able to be our friend. That Jesus invites us to be the children of God. That’s the power of this feast that we celebrate today. So if you’re feeling a bit weird, a bit tired, a bit overwhelmed, know that that’s exactly where Jesus will meet you, because he’s been there before. He’s experienced it before. And so we have the freedom and the capacity to be known and loved by God precisely in this space. So let’s indeed pray that we might encounter the Lord, trusting that he is present, that he is here, and he wants to make himself known to us in the child born for us and placed in the manger.