Dear Church Family,

This is my first Christmas as a parent; it’s Ziggy’s first time seeing the lights and hearing the story, though to be fair he seems much more interested in eating his Christmas storybook than listening to it. Ziggy may not have a profound Christmas experience, but something feels different to me this year, just because he is here with us. Now, I resist the kind of philosophy that tells us parents are existentially different from non-parents (especially the gendered version of this that says mothers are another kind of people entirely). I am not a different person than I was last year, or the year before. But my heart has opened up in new ways that seem important and worth sharing. Whether or not you have been a parent of any kind, I hope these insights are helpful on your advent journey.

This year I’m entranced by the mess of Christmas: the journey at an inopportune time, the birthing place not being where it was hoped to be, the unexpected strangers showing up. The blessing of the hospitality received, even though it was “only” a manger. By the way, recent scholarship has pointed out that mangers in Jesus’ day and place were often located in the same house as the people, just below the “upper room,” where even more guests would be hosted. The ground level had a dirt or clay floor and was used to keep valuable animals close by – the fatted calf, perhaps, or a goat or sheep that provided milk daily. Rather than imagine some far-off barn, lonely and windswept (like where the shepherds kept their sheep, perhaps), imagine a warm and festive house full to bursting with out-of-town travelers, so busy that the only place to fit one more baby was downstairs, in the manger. Mary and Joseph may have been lodged with animals and strangers but they were by no means all alone. This year I love the idea that they were surrounded by community, human and non-human.

This year I’m touched even more deeply than usual by the vulnerability of Christmas, the intimacy of the incarnation that God would be born in fragile infant flesh. This year I remember that Jesus was a real baby. He needed to be diapered, and had to be rocked to sleep, and probably bit his mother in frustration sometimes. Even though in some of the early Christian writings (Mark, notably) it seemed as if Jesus became divine at his adult baptism, in others (Matthew and Luke, from whom we take our Christmas story) he was divine from birth or conception, joining us in our fleshly form at the very beginning, as a pre-verbal chaos nugget. What a staggering mystery, not just the presence of God in peak adult flesh and brains, but God living in a little infant body with all that entails.

This is good news when we ourselves are messy and vulnerable. Instead of praying for God to rescue us from our vulnerable mess, we can seek God’s presence within it all. So no matter what you feel, this Christmas season I hope you can find refuge and strength in the incarnation. God is here with us in the midst of it all.

Every Blessing,

Talitha

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