Tonight Christians celebrate the mystery of “incarnation” – the idea that an All-powerful Creator would take on the frailties, temptations, and pain of human experience for the purpose of also sharing in the joys, passions, and triumphs of mortal life.
Regardless of your faith tradition, of if you have none at all, I invite you on this evening to pause for a moment to ponder the preposterous magnanimity of a God – whose grip could sunder planets like they were walnuts – giving up unlimited power for the pudgy hands of a newborn. Certainly this says something about the Christian notion of God’s priorities and love for creation, but I think it also says something about us as well. As frustrating as our limitations can be, there is something about human experience, something about mortality – even grief and loss – that has a divine poetry to it.
That poetry is so uniquely seductive that it can lure almighty God from beyond the stars into the arms of loving parents and a broken world.