Sent: Jesus is God with Us Matthew 1:18-23-25

Incarnation. God is with Us. The belief that God came to us in the form of a baby is one of the key tenants of the Christian faith that set us apart from other religions. Our God loved us so much that God sent Jesus, both fully human and fully divine, into the world to save us. And because of that we are not alone.

Some people get a little squeamish with the idea of Jesus coming as a baby. Wouldn’t it have been easier if Jesus came as a ruler, fully grown and here to conquer evil. Couldn’t God have saved us another way? Possibly. But when we let our own misgivings about Jesus coming as an infant get in the way we miss the point. Jesus, God’s own Son, came as the form of a baby to usher in the Kingdom of God in the most unexpected of ways - a way that people can easily miss or look over if they are not paying attention. Jesus came in the form of a human so he could feel our pain and die our death so he can welcome us fully, into eternal life.

But all of those theological beliefs sometimes take a lot of effort to hit the ground during the season of Advent. We know that for too many, the season of Advent can be painful. It may be a painful reminder that things are not as they should be. It seems like every day we are hearing more reports of violent acts. People hurting other people. It can be painful because ones that we wish could be here aren’t - either because of physical distance or because of the separation of death. And other times the sheer magnitude of the cheeriness doesn’t reflect what we are feeling inside of us. We feel alone. 

During times of hurt and pain, especially during the season of Advent, it can become hard to cling to the truth that we are not alone. That God is with us through Jesus Christ. We get so caught up in the heady part of theology - wanting to reason out the nature of God - that we miss the heart issue, miss the presence of God right in front of us in so many ways. Its almost like Jesus is hidden in plain sight. 

Sometimes, some years, I reflect back on the Holiday season around the first of the year and I have this aching feeling that we missed the point. That I missed the point. That under the guise of wrapped gifts and twinkling tree lights, the truth of the incarnation is missed. The truth of this God who sent his very son to us in the form of a baby just to understand us better and walk our life so we don’t need to be alone. That is a gift that cannot be easily wrapped in a box or put in a bag with tissue paper. 

In fact, sometimes all of the gifts and large meals and tinsel leave us with this hallow misbelief that God is indifferent to us, and that we are alone in our pain. So the holiday season can do the exact opposite of what we intend for it to do as we start to doubt the love of God. The very love that we are to be celebrating. We start to think that we have all of this pain inside of us that God cannot possibly understand and that the culture at large tells us to shove aside this time of the year. 

Perhaps that’s why we have the countercultural season of Advent. To stand up and say that maybe what we need is a little less of the twinkle and a little more of the silence. A little more of the time to sit in silence with our grief and hand it over to God, instead of pretending like it doesn’t exist. Perhaps we need a little less of the bustle and a lot more of the stillness in our spirits. A lot more waiting. 

I say all of that while acknowledging that for some of us the waiting and the silence seem like torture. Because in the silence we have to come face to face with who we are and what we are running from with all our busyness. If we sit in the silence we may be afraid at what we are going to find, but it may be exactly what we need.

Somewhere along the line we bought into this lie that if God loved us then God would give us everything that we want - like a giant cosmic Santa. In fact, I have this secret hobby of looking at Christmas books that try to compare Jesus with Santa just to see how far culture’s incorrect beliefs about God have marked our Christianity. There is one book in particular where children were taught that Santa gave us the gift of the Christ child that I found particularly troubling. See Santa gives us what we want, but God, God gives us exactly what we need. And just because we may not get what we hope and wish for does not mean that God is unloving or indifferent. 

So this holiday season, this time of waiting during Advent, what to you need? Not want, maybe, but desperately need? What can you do this holiday season to connect with a Holy God and with the incarnate Christ? How can we hold each other in the silence? Amen.