Imagine...a Christmas meditation

Imagine a young girl who has accepted a great challenge, which is also a gift. Because she has accepted this challenge, the gift she finds is courage and she is fierce to the end. The courage she finds is her capacity to be theotikos, the “God Bearer”, the one who literally births God into the world. This was no small task, the story tells us that the risk was so great it could have cost her her life. But her betrothed, who, as the story goes, was not the biological father of the child she carried, yet he protected her and the unborn babe, and with them created the holy family. This mother had no idea, at this birth, how the story would end, with her holding vigil at the foot of the cross as love died a wretched death. That she would stay fierce and courageous to the end. But she did. 

Imagine, as the story goes, that this young girl Mary, and Joseph, about to be a mother and a father, have travelled a long way and when they  arrive at their destination, the girl is already in labor and a place to give birth must be found. Only the most humble of places is available, a space in a barn, with hay and cattle, and sheep. It’s cold and smells ripe with life. And here the baby is born, his small cries stirring even the animals to look on with care. 

This girl, on this night, bravely birthed God’s love into the world. She did not give birth at home with her mother and sisters and aunties around to coach her and help her. Apparently there were no midwives around either. As the story goes it was just her, and Joseph, amid cows mooing and sheep baying, as she cried and pushed that baby out. This girl who delivered God’s love in human flesh. 

Imagine a God who so loved the world that this God chose to send God’s love, God’s Word, to come and live among the creation, beginning as a tiny vulnerable babe. Once this love was born, there was little God to do but trust the girl, the mother Mary, to look out for God’s love. Which she did to the very end. 

Imagine a world without this love. What would the world look like if God had not sought out a way to birth God’s love into the world? What would it look like if Mary had said no? What would it be like if Joseph had rejected Mary, pregnant with a child that was not his, or inflicted some other punishment common for unwed pregnant girls? 

Imagine a world where, when the holy family fled to Egypt to avoid the death that Herrod imposed on new born baby boys, the family had been stopped at the border and the baby had died from exhaustion or famine?

Imagine a world without Christmas. Imagine a world without love. 

Now, imagine that you are this young girl. That God has asked you to do something really brave and difficult, one that could cost you your life. Would you do it? Would I do it? 

The Christmas story tells us that it only takes one person saying yes to God, being willing to be brave and vulnerable, to change the entire trajectory of the world. One person who loves almost as deeply as God loves, who is willing to reveal God’s love into the world.

One person. 

Will this person be you this year?

Will you be the one in whom and through whom God’s love is birthed, enfleshed in human form, and given life?

Imagine, if one person can change the world, what might happen if all of us here became God’s love in the world? 

Why that just might bring peace on earth...

 ....and then it really would be Christmas.