Christmas Morning 2007

It seems like only yesterday that my boys, Josh & Gwyn, were babies. I will never forget my shock at how small they were even Gwyn at just 10 1/2lb -- it didn't seem possible that a person could be that little and still be all right! I was nervous about holding them at first. I was afraid I would do something wrong and I’d break them! It wasn't until I had to baptize a very small baby that I realized that our kids were big. I was awestruck by his tiny perfection. Such fragility. So tiny. Everything in him working away at the new business of being alive.

To see a little baby is to see what the shepherds saw, what the three kings saw, what Mary and Joseph saw. Just a little human being: weak, fragile. Never again could people dismiss the weak and the fragile as unimportant. God's own self chose this form in which to come among us: a decisive choice of the weak as the vessels of God's love for the whole of creation. God chose weakness.

When I think of Gods weakness I think of the little babies: our own babies, the tiny premature babies, the baby Jesus. Of their innocence, yes, but also of that very same longing: longing to live, trying hard to live, fighting every minute just to stay alive.

Christ came as a baby. But he also comes as a recovering alcoholic longing for job and a home and a family. He comes as a divorced man or woman who has lost a family, a broken-hearted child who has lost their parents, a lonely stranger sleeping on the streets, an old man in a nursing home not knowing who he is. God chose our brokenness in which to appear because it is in our brokenness that we need God. Longing for the fullness of life. Weak and broken, but trying to live.

What did I feel when I saw my own babies?

What did I feel when I touched that very small baby.

What do I feel when I hear about the recovering alcoholic?

All of them are weak. All of them are at the bottom of the chain of power, as the world knows power. But what I feel in their presence is awe. And we see that the world's understanding of power is upside down. Power is not the naked ability to coerce. It is the God-given ability to live. It comes from our loving. In power that works through our weakness, God is with us. All of us -- those whom we know to be weak and those whom we think are strong.

It seems that most people did not see the power in the baby Jesus. Or in Jesus when he grew up -- most people didn't see the power of God in him. Most people saw only the weakness. Most people didn't care much one way or another when he was executed as a common criminal. Most people thought they knew what power was.

But for those of us in whom the spirit of Christ lives, teaching us daily, changing the way we see the world -- the categories of power and weakness are forever changed. Seeing the victory of Christ through the embrace of the cross, our own weakness is transformed. Weak, we are strong in Christ. Dying, we live. We live, yet it is not we who live. Christ lives in us. May the love of Christ coming to you this day in the infant Jesus fill your heart. AMEN.