The Most Powerful Story in the World!

The most powerful form of communication is story. 

The Christmas story is no exception. 

Unfortunately we have tamed the Christmas story with overly literal and mushy sentimental interpretations that have stripped it of its powerful meaning. Remember, God’s ways are always revolutionary in character.

The Christmas story is meant to open our eyes to how God operates in the world and the extent to which he will go to bring love and joy into the world. But in order to fully appreciate this we must cut away all the sentimentalism that has come to define the Christmas story.

The Christmas story is rich in symbols that first century recipients of the story understood much better than we do. 

The manger for example is often depicted as a cleaned up sterilized stable with the  Westernized looking parents of Jesus looking no worse for the wear. But the manger was a feeding trough out of which livestock ate. It’s where the animals lived, manure odor and all (see picture above).

Truth is Jesus was born not among the well scrubbed elite, the affluent, the acceptable citizens of polite society, but rather among common animals. 

And if Jesus was “God with us” as the Gospels suggest he is, then God himself came to earth by way of a stable or feeding trough. This is certainly not the image of God many Americans envision today—a God who would enter into the human experience by touching the unclean foul smelling straw of a common feeding trough. "Manger" does sound a bit more acceptable doesn't it?

But this is how God decided to reveal himself in Jesus.

Then shepherds came to visit Jesus. Not the city fathers, or the ruling elites, or the intelligentsia, or even the religious authorities, but those who were thought of as the lowest of the lowest.

The common unclean and smelly shepherds welcomed Jesus (God) into his new abode: Life among us.

I have always loved Richard Rohr. He has been a wonderful teacher of mine and has opened my eyes to see beyond the literalism of the Americanized version of the Christmas story. The sanitized version that looks so much more Western and American than it does a story right out of the rugged and violent first century Middle East.

Father Rohr has helped me see that God cannot be all powerful if he isn't also all vulnerable. Right out of the box we discover the true meaning of the Christmas story: Love revealed is always vulnerable and subject to the dangers we humans impose upon it. 

What this Christmas story reveals to us is that Jesus came to offer real life (salvation) to all people, starting first with he disenfranchised, the outliers in society, the down and outs, the homeless, those on welfare, those struggling with their sexual identities, those looking for a home to accept them, the strangers among us, those struggling with alcoholism and drugs and other life debilitating addictions, and the list goes on.

In Jesus God sent a message to the power brokers of this world: Love that flows downward is the solution to all that is wrong with humanity to date. God took a huge risk in making himself this vulnerable to human rejection and resistance, but it is the way he operates. 

If we don't get this then we have misunderstood the Christmas Story all together. 

Politicians, Presidents, Prime Minsters, kings, and world leaders beware: 

Christ the King is born on this day and the love of God has been revealed as the change-agent to right the world and bring salvation to humankind.

When Jesus was born God began his project to renew and redeem our world. This is why I have little confidence in politicians and their flawed strategies to make the world great (even "again"). 

Christ’s kingdom is not policed nor sustained by huge armies, weapons of mass destruction, or powerful leaders but rather by the self-emptying power of God’s love.

May we teach our children this powerfully subversive version of the Christmas story for the sake of their own future and the future of our world. May we strip the current version of the Christmas Story of all the syrupy sentimentalism that we have layered on top of it.

Merry Christmas to all and may you discover the true meaning of the child born in a manger.