God-with-us

The Christmas moment continues, day after every day

She had just turned 3, and it was late for her to be awake. But this was Christmas Eve. So she was in the choir loft with us, wedged between open guitar cases and pressing her nose between the wooden slats. The sanctuary of the Old Mission, with its decor culled from its Spanish and Native American origins, was crowded with vivid red poinsettias. Candles winked slightly as drafts of chill air crept in from the California winter night.

We were anticipating the end of the liturgy. The pastor, as local tradition dictated, would emerge from behind the altar, the antique statue of the Christ child cradled against his vestments. He would then proceed the length of the aisle and exit out the wide doors to the Nativity on the Mission's lawn. There, warmed by the breath of the donkey and the wooly presence of three sheep, the child would be laid-in a crude manger between the statues of Joseph and Mary. From her perch, my daughter could make out the movement near the altar. But it wasn't until the procession had come halfway down the aisle that she caught sight of the Christ child. She inhaled quickly, turned and looked at me.

Nearly a quarter of a century later I recall that look as if it were yesterday. It wasn't the look of a little girl who has seen something delightful, not even that of a child who had anticipated and then received a marvelous gift. In the air between us-which still reverberated from the chords of a carol-stretched an inarticulate arc of knowing. It took my breath away.

I suspect if I had tried to tell her about that moment when she was a teenager she would have rolled her eyes and sighed wearily about her mother's "poetic moods." I don't know what she would say today-- perhaps that her only memories of those Mission Christmases are of the fragrant fir festooned with paper, yam and gilt ornaments created by the kindergarten classes.

Occasionally I wonder if I'm remembering accurately, or if heightened emotion colored my perception. Then I recover the moment and simply savor it: the sense of God-withus. In that was a universe of wonder.

Christmas is the celebration of Jesus' birth, an event that took place two millennia ago. It's also the liturgical acknowledgement of the Incarnation. It's the feast of God-with-us. For Christians this means that at a crucial point in history God spoke a Word that ushered humankind into a radical new relationship with the divine.

But God-with-us doesn't end with that historical moment: It's deep in our everyday lives.

In some part of ourselves we know this. But the knowing is obscured by so much-the cultural messages of "what you see is what you get"; our propensity to become engulfed in worries and woes; and the inability of family, friends or community to dream with us beyond our common wounds or quarrels. Yet, in some deep part, we know God is with us.

We come into this graced awareness most vividly when we experience a life-changing event. All parents recognize the unspeakable wonder felt at a child's birth. You hold that tiny person for the first time and sense the mystery of the life that is beginning to unfold under your protection.

It was Francis of Assisi who introduced the practice of celebrating the feast of the Incarnation by placing a baby in a manger.

In Greccio, Italy, on the feast of the Nativity in 1223, Francis was grieved that so little was being made of this extraordinary day. He was overwhelmed with the thought that God had come to us in poverty and helplessness as a tiny child.

For Francis, poverty was the key to understanding how God both was and is with us. To be a Christian was, in his eyes, to imitate the poor man Jesus who was born in a rude stable and died on a rude cross. Francis identified with the suffering of the humble and marginalized, as well as with Christ's suffering.

In midlife, weary from the administrative conflicts in which his followers were embroiled, Francis sought rest in the little town of Greccio. Wishing to reflect on the nature of the child whose birth was celebrated that night, Francis arranged for a crude stable with live animals and a newborn child to be set up in the hermitage where he was staying. He wanted to stand by the cradle and see God-with-us.

The poverty of the babe in the manger is realized in us when we have hearts simple and naked enough to be touched and changed by an encounter with love. If we have eyes and hearts open not only at Christmas but all the year, we, too, might sense God-with-us: in the vulnerability of the children we are given to protect and tend, the love between spouses, the sustaining relationships of friends, in the faces of the poor and the cries of those in need, in the ordinary fabric of the created world.

Wright is a professor of theology, Creighton University, Omaha, Neb.

Copyright Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Dec 2000
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