Grace Toronto. A church for the city in the city. Get to know us.

A life of service and surrender

December 22nd, 2009 by Dan

Sometimes we lose focus on the real meaning of Christmas. We get pretty sentimental about the little baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. Soft pastel colours come to our mind; we picture it somewhere between a Norman Rockwell poster, a Hallmark card and a Thomas Kinkade painting.

But Christmas is not about that, really. The scene is bleak and cold and alienating; a young family, shivering with cold, stuck out in a stable reeking of animal dung and hay and dampness. A pregnant mother, in her early labour, with blinding pain, no epidurals, having large contractions and no mid-wife to help. None but her poor, hapless husband who culturally has never been trained to be a part of this event. And with the noise of the laughter at the inn, and the clinking of the glasses and the sound of food being prepared and served- all this is not for them. What is for them is the cold and the pain and the aloneness of trying to bring this Promise Child into the earth without dying or killing him; of feeling overwhelmed and pushed away from all that they know and desire and need.

The story of the incarnation, read to a first century Jewish person, would evoke pain and sympathy and outrage – outrage that no one would help a poor family; sympathy for a young mother forced to bring a baby into this world with no one but her husband to help; pain for the humiliation of bearing their first child in an animal shelter.

But the story of the incarnation would also evoke wonder; that the God of the universe would allow his entrance to be under such miserable, humiliating, alienating conditions. What kind of God would do that? Frederich Buechner, Pulitzer Prize finalist and one of America’s most prolific writers, put it this way:

Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man. If the holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too.

This, then, is the entrance of the majestic God into our shabby little world. Think more deeply about His wild pursuit of you. And reflect about the depth of his pursuing grace. And reflect that His life was really about two things: service and surrender. He served us, and surrendered his own agenda to the will of His Father. Service and surrender. This is the meaning of Christmas. Ridiculous love, rabid grace.