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Messy Christmas
Scripture focus: Matthew 1-2; Luke 1-2
THIS IMPOSSIBLE, MESSY FAITH
“Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” the White Queen tells Alice in Lewis Carroll’s nineteenth-century story Through the Looking Glass. Alice has just insisted to the Queen, “There’s no use trying…. One can’t believe impossible things.” And laughed. But the Queen presses Alice: “I daresay you haven’t had much practice … When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.”
OK, yes—Lewis Carroll wrote dreamy, gothic narratives for children (like the more famous Alice in Wonderland), what we might instead call today rather dark fantasies. And, yes, Lewis Carroll was weird. But—wow—really smart. And, like many fantasy writers, he loved revealing deeper truths by using fiction. The real truth is—faith and imagination are God’s great gifts for us to exercise.
To be sure, scripture about Jesus’ birth is neither fantasy nor fiction. Yet today even long-time Christians might have moments when it’s pretty hard to “believe impossible things” about this Jesus, about miraculous coincidences, about angels and kings and traveling stars and prophesies.
There’s a lot of this sort of thing in the Christmas story. You might start asking questions, as some of our pastors’ Christmas sermons have, about those shady characters among the long lists of names in Jesus’ genealogy. Then consider the gospel writer’s dry assertion that before Mary and Joseph are married, the girl “was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1:20)—really. Next, an angel shows up in a dream to talk Joseph out of breaking off the engagement, reminding the groom (who’s quite naturally a little shaken by this pregnancy) of Hebrew scriptures which foretell the Messiah’s birth: “The virgin will… give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel,” which means “God with us” (Mtt. 1:23). These are just three of the huge crowd of humanly impossible things Matthew and then Luke relate. We could go on; these appear in just the first couple of pages in the first gospel. Yet it doesn’t seem to me these writers have simply sat down before breakfast to cook up as many fantasies as possible, one after the other. Their language is not fantastic. They aim not at spectacle that entertains, but at a record of history.
Well, if these are not fantasies and not impossible events, either of which would confuse and trouble us humans seeking the living God, then our stunningly powerful and present-with-us God is real and both natural and supernatural. Born of a woman’s body and of the Father God.
This is messy faith. It is impossible and necessary for human hope beyond our dark lives in an often dark world. This God loves us. He came to us. He keeps coming to us in the middle of our mess and unbelief. He won’t leave us alone. He cares for us.
They say children start asking “Why…?” questions between two and three years old. The barrage of questions reaches full force around four and five and finally tapers off (they say) about six. You with kiddos between these ages, and you who’ve survived those years have every shred of respect from me. I’m sure it can be fun and sometimes thrill your hearts to answer such questions (over and over?), but also exhausting. For many—maybe all—of us, those questions still continue in our grown-up disappointments, loss, and the pain we witness in others’ lives. Those questions, for us, can be difficult to live with, exhausting.
But God can take them. Just as He responded to Joseph’s agonized questions and faltering faith, this Jesus Himself waits with open arms to receive us and our Why…s. He enables us to remember His faithfulness to all those generations before us. He offers us Light to look ahead for hope in our future. Or maybe for just one more step in His direction.
The Holy Spirit bless you and each of us with faith and imagination as we face and ask the tough questions about faith and Jesus’ coming to us. He is with us as we seek. He’s waiting to be found.
Wendy Johnson
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