Several weeks ago our family of 5 took a picture. I have seen the proofs and selected just the
right one to be used for our Christmas card because we are all smiling and
looking in the same direction. Recipients
of the card might think, “Wow! What a
perfect little family.” The picture is
perfect. It captures that moment in time
when all was well at the Queen house. No
one was yelling, screaming, crying, or pouting.
Everyone was keeping their hands to themselves. Everyone had on clean and pressed, color
coordinated clothes and our hair was fixed, my make-up was fresh and the girls’
faces were clean. The picture creates a
false sense of the reality of our lives.
Most of the time we are not put together and at least one of us has an
attitude that is out of sorts. Our lives
are far from perfection.
I imagine if we had taken a picture of the
birth of the Christ Child, we would try to capture something like the live
nativity scenes we recreate annually at our churches. Our picture would have a clean stable where a
young woman draped in blue cloth gently rocks her baby and a man stands gazing at
the beauty of his newborn child. For
that moment in time, the shepherds would bow down and the animals would be
quiet and still. It would be just as we
sing in the beloved carol, “The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes, but little
Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.”[1] It would be another perfect picture. This kind of snapshot would not show that the
Christ Child entered the world to unwed parents, his first bed was feeding
trough, and his life was in danger shortly after his arrival. The real picture of the birth narrative would
far from the image pageants recreate yearly, and yet the reality is that
perfection was born that Silent Night. Emmanuel, God with us, was born; the living,
breathing expression of God entered our world in the form of a tiny baby. A perfect God came into an imperfect
world.
The image of our world then and now
is a messy, dirty picture filled with blood, lies, and pain. Young girls are victims of human trafficking,
innocent lives are taken in mass shootings, terrorists threaten our sense of
security, addiction and abuse ruin the home lives of children, infidelity leaves
spouses alone and hurt, and many, too many to count, go to sleep on empty
stomachs without a covering over their heads.
This real life picture is too painful to capture and would never find
its way on the cover of a Shutterfly or Vista Print Card. This image forces us to sing, “O Come, O Come
Emmanuel.”
God in Christ was born to redeem
this picture by saving a broken world and taking our mess and junk and transforming
us into something beautiful and wonderful.
This year as Christmas Cards are sent and received, perhaps our attempts
at perfection embody the truth of the incarnation. God IS with us. Perfection has come. We can smile because we can have faith to
live life unafraid. We can appear we
have it all together because we embrace hope, long for peace, and journey
towards Christian perfection. We can
laugh and love and share joy because God IS with us and we are not alone. We can live in the image of our world and
know “unto [us] is born this day a Savior, who is Christ the
Lord.”[2]
