It is often said during Advent and Christmas that we should seek ways to newly "birth" Christ in the world. I find for myself, however, that the hardest part is to simply let ourselves be utterly present in the world, as nothing more or less than the creatures God has intended for us to be. Only when we are able to remain alert with fully human senses to the real sufferings and joys of the world can we hear God's call and act upon it.

It is, therefore, no coincidence that it’s the marginal people in Jesus' world—the women, the Gentiles, the lame, the blind, the children—who most knew the simplest and most profound sufferings and joys of embodied living, and were therefore the ones to perceive and lay claim to the reality that Jesus embodies. Nor is it surprising that it’s those most capable of shielding themselves from the changes and chances of the world who also have difficulty with an incarnate-savior, who is to be known in life’s pleasures and pains, the one which cannot be fully experienced without the other.

God-incarnate brings heaven close not by shielding us from life, but by immersing us, along with God, into the surprising, frightening, reality-shaking places where life is embraced with abandon. God's Christmas-presence is discerned not where we are protected from life, but where we experience, alongside God, the fullness of incarnation, as Martin Luther put it, from crib to cross. God is with us in glad solidarity with the victims of domination and exploitation, and in joyous reconciliation with enemies and strangers. It is in these risky & messy spaces of life that we know again, or perhaps for the first time, the unending life of God who is forever wed to our flesh, and to this dizzyingly astonishing thing we call ‘creation’. 

May God-incarnate make your life in 2008 a new place for God’s “inseparable habitation.” May prophets’ calls and angelic dreams draw us out into the fullness of the joys and needs of life. And may each of us dare to give flesh to God’s presence among us, bringing grace and truth to all of creation.