Isaiah 59:15b-21
Psalm 89: 1-29
Romans 5: 1-11
Philippians 2: 5-11
Can you imagine the amount of love that would be required for God, the infinite, the unimaginable, the powerful, to become a tiny, dirty, powerless little baby? Thinking of it is amazingly overwhelming. Madeleine L'Engle writes, "The incarnation is called the “scandal of the particular;” it is scandalous that the Lord should condescend to be an ordinary man." What a scandal! Mary the good Jewish daughter is having a baby out of wedlock, her fiancé is still going to marry her, and then, the claim comes that this scandalous baby is the Messiah! The Chosen One! Immanuel. God with us! And here we are, two millennia later, having a party for him. God, condescending to be an ordinary man! I can see Miss Manners having to politely excuse herself from the room.
Today Christians gather together across the world to celebrate the birth of this one child. This birth is an invitation to each of us. An invitation into the story of the relationship between God and humanity. Each of us has our own nativity story, our own birth narrative, and the act of sharing those stories is an act of invitation into each other’s lives. Not all of our birth stories are scandalous, but all of our stories are washed with God’s steadfast and enduring love. God’s love is like that. It is scandalously open to each and every one of us.
The Reverend Elizabeth Yale