At Christmas: Why bother celebrating?

Today we remember that God literally breaks into the world as one of us.

Not only does God come into the world as ahuman being but he enters as a vulnerable little baby--justas we all did. How often do we fail to see the many ways that Godcontinues to break into our everyday lives?

It seems manytimes as if we want to push God out of our human existence;to pretend that God isn't present--especially when God calls us to places we may not wish to go:

To care for the poor

To sit by a sick child's bedside

To watch a parent die

The world is often indeed a harsh and bitter place. Tonight we remember that Jesus knows all too well just how harsh a place the world indeed can become. Jesus comes to us in all of our human vulnerability--in need of a parent's care, as a baby in the middle of the cold winter storm. Homeless and ostricized at the start, Jesus' life also ends just as it begins.

So why celebrate Christmas at all?

Simply put, God could simply have not bothered with us humans at all. In breaking out of the comfort of being God, the omniscent God becomes the God-man--filled with an equal mix of heavenly power and human vulnerability. It's the choosing of this human fragility that stymies all of us. God so loved our world that he chooses, freely to enter into a world that we all know can indeed be cruel to human beings.And when the world is indeed cruel to our God, our God trumps that cruelness with the power of love, a power so great that death itself cannot kill this little homeless baby that comes on a frigid night in the middle of nowhere.

Let us pray tonight that we can simply remember the gift of God's life breathed into our human flesh that dwells amongst us. May we be aware of the fragileness of humanlife and care for it, embrace it and honor a life that is so precious that, harsh or not, even a God would choose to live.