Abiding in the Wonder-filled, Wildly-Enfleshed, Miracle-God (December Newsletter)
Abiding in the Wonder-filled, Wildly-Enfleshed, Miracle-God
You did it. You made it to Christmas Eve.
All the card writing and cookie baking and present searching. It’s done! (Hopefully.) Maybe you’re traveling today. Maybe you already made it to your destination. Maybe you’re settled cozy in your house, grateful to be overeating cookies and sitting by a fire.
This year I’m in California with Chris and the kids, prepping for a day-after-Christmas cross country flight to my second home-away-from-home on the east coast, where we’ll sit at the counter in my mother-in-law’s kitchen, read by the fireplace, and fill our days with friends and family we’re thrilled to see.
For me, even as life changes, as I’ve lost and gained souls I love, the coziness and sweetness of Christmas calls to me with a kind of magic I never find anywhere else. It’s a combination of warmth and flickering light and the never-ending contemplation of Jesus as our hope-bringer. The whole story of Christmas is wonder-filled, wild, and a little bit wacky. And there’s a reason there are a million clichés about coming to Christmas with wonder.
I mean, how dare we profess that God would encase Godself in flesh and settle into humanity? How dare we accept easily that God would show up in our skin and live in the exhaustion and fear and sorrow of human existence? What kind of people believe that God would live among us, take on a human name, and humble himself to ordinary friendship, language, and sleep? If Advent is the waiting, the preparation for such a ridiculous and overwhelming claim, Christmas is when we receive the reality of God-with-us. God incarnated into human existence. God here beside us.
Christmas is when we cup the glory of the whole story of Christ. Our redemption. Our hope of flourishing in this world that often feels entirely dark and cold: Light in our hands.
Today is the last day of Advent. We have waited. We have wondered if this God could really come among us. Tonight, in the candlelight we take a deep breath, open our eyes to the angels shouting, “Glory” all around us, if we’re brave enough to believe it.
Yesterday I prayed with my favorite contemplative prayer podcast (Contemplative at Home) and listened for one word or phrase in Isaiah 11 that rang deep. The Spirit of the Lord will rest upon him, the passage read.
That word—rest—settled on me. I wondered how the Spirit of God could actually rest. (Of course, we know God rested as Creator, and we know that God instructs that we rest. But what does that actually mean?) It is a wonder that God’s resting could be upon a human. God’s rest upon a baby named Jesus. Perhaps that’s what it means to abide: To rest upon another.
As we head into the season of Christmas tonight. As the candles light and the kids giggle and the grown ups finish all the tiny tasks that make tomorrow magic. Let’s ask ourselves what we are resting upon.
This story is magic. Can we lean back into the gift of God among us in flesh? Can we rest in that miracle and set our selves upon it?
It’s almost Christmas, friends. Rest upon the God in flesh. Abide there.
Darkness
We are all some mother’s child,
all born through great pain,
then a flood of release, an unbearable empty.
I sang a broken song, a wail of psalm
until you came. We were cold, alone,
this man who will raise you, and I.
No mother, no midwife, one blanket,
a borrowed pot of water on the fire.
Did I not expect you would cry with me,
you who had willed every infant's cry?
Did I not expect you would need me,
your body suddenly cold, craving my skin?
You bobbed your head along my chest
in search of milk: ordinary, human.
Where were the trumpets, where the showering
of gold? We three were hushed in the dark,
my blood trickling to the ground, my husband’s silent tears,
your infant body learning to swallow.
And in this, somehow, Glory.
My God, you deserve more than the two of us,
torn open and shivering with you in the dark.
By Micha Boyett, all rights reserved.