The incarnation, the birth of Jesus is truly a cosmic event (Luke 2). It is cosmic in the sense that the bonding of heaven and humanity takes place when God chooses to disclose his divinity in human form in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. And this troubles many believers and nonbelievers as they try to figure out the mystery of God. How could God and man be the same? For generations many people have and still do get hung up on the virgin birth. How could a virgin birth be possible? The danger of denying the virgin birth is that we lose a divine savior, we lose a sinless, perfect sacrifice, we lose any sense of an actual sign the Messiah has been born and we are in danger of having to throw out the entirety of the gospels as untrustworthy. There is an awful lot on the line.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his 1940 Christmas sermon “The Government Upon the Shoulders of the Child,” understood quite well the obstacles in understanding and receiving the incarnation of God. “How shall we deal with such a child? Have our hands, soiled with daily toil, become too hard and too proud to fold in prayer at the sight of this child? Has our head become too full of serious thoughts … that we cannot bow our head in humility at the wonder of this child? Can we not forget all our stress and struggles, our sense of importance, and for once worship the child, as did the shepherds and the wise men from the East, bowing before the divine child in the manger like children? From the opening chapters of Genesis throughout all of Scripture, we see miraculous things happening and God doing all sorts of things we rightly insist are humanly impossible. If our hope is to free ourselves of such awkward things like denying the virgin birth, we will find ourselves cutting out much of the Bible when we repeatedly run into God doing things that are impossible to square with our rather finite and materialistic view of the world.
Frederick Buechner writes, “What deadens us most to God’s presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought.” But what would it take to stop the chatter of our minds, our disbelief and even our spoken prayers for a moment and sit, just sit in holy silence before the child in the manger. That is what the angels did—they held their breath waiting to hear God utter his first cry. To sit in silence in this holy place and ponder the pivot point of history when eternity broke into time—God became flesh for us. This is surely a cosmic event.
The fact is from the very moment the infant Jesus took his first breath, God was working through Christ to reconcile the whole world back to himself (2 Cor. 5:19). And this reconciliation would only be made possible if God no longer held humanity’s sins against them. And this one truth is the epicenter and purpose of Christmas. What we celebrate at Christmas is that sin does not have the last word. The last word is love. God’s love for humanity and the whole human family. There isn’t a part of the world that God’s love does not touch. The message of Christmas is this: God loves you. God intended you to be something. He intends for you to be something wonderful and great, and he will bring you there. No matter your circumstances or who you are, no matter where you’re from, no matter what you’ve done, the true miracle of Christmas is this: there is no limits to what God can do to bring you and I to an unbelievable and wonderful place. He steps into our lives right where we are and offers us the mystery of His presence. Christmas then is an invitation to receive by faith the mystery of the child born to us, the Son that is given to us. May you joyously celebrate the mystery of God giving himself to you through His beloved Son Jesus Christ! Amen.
