Bee Boxes Behind the Christmas Tree and a Baby in the Manger

We spent an evening earlier this week wrapped up in one of those good old 5-hour-long family business discussions…you know the type—where there’s more raised voices than calm compromises and you begin to wonder how we ever got along as a family. Not nearly the example of Christmas family cheer painted on postcards and sprinkled throughout Hallmark Christmas specials.

The irony of it all is that as we were “discussing” around the dining room table, bright twinkling lights are all around us, stockings hung, merry little glimmers of shimmering light bouncing off the ornaments on the tree and… oh, perhaps more fittingly,  bee boxes  and piles of junk stacked up behind the tree—more of our family’s projects expertly shoved in the corner by me to make room for the Christmas decorations. Honestly, what a mess! And yet another defiance to the perfect and orderly Christmas scenes we like to paint.

 

Yet, there is an even more messy, disorganized Christmas story than my family’s:

“..and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn”  (Luke 2:7)

In our nativity scenes and Christmas children’s programs, we’ve painted baby Jesus in the deepest serenity. Cozy and peaceful in a beautifully rustic feeding trough, framed by smiling mother and proud father.

But I can only imagine that the reality of that manger scene was ANYTHING but serene. Birth itself, though miraculous and incredible, is a messy, filthy process, filled with pain and oozing body fluids. I’m certain Mary giving birth to Jesus with anything but tranquil.

The place in which he was born could have been no more peaceable. On our  little farm there is a tiny shack we call “the birthing barn,” where we put the mama sheep with their new little lambs. I can’t say with certainty, but I imagine Jesus’s humble beginning began in such a little place. Low bent roof with musty old straw shoveled to the side. A chilly breeze spiraling through the rafters even as you pull your jacket close. Ancient of days cobwebs clinging to the ceiling, and a musty mixture of dirt and stale sheep poop mingling in the air.

And so, one can only image the moment of Jesus’s birth. A tiny baby, forced from a familiar home of comfort and rest in his mother’s womb, into a rushing haze of emphatic expulsion out into a bitter cold world. Oxygen forcefully filling the lungs for the very first time, as blood rushes forth with an endurance it never had before, changing everything physically inside Him in a sudden moment.  And the very first air that fills his lungs reeks of the stench of musty cow poop mixed with sour hay and dusty cobwebs, as His sudden first breath contorts the very anatomy of his internal vasculature.

THIS was Christ’s entry. . . A dirty, musty, smelly, painful, shocking manger scene. Not serene. Not beautiful. Not organized.  No Christmas perfection.

THIS IS GOD! Come to Earth! And He CAME THIS WAY?!?!

 

Max Lucado writes “Majesty in the midst of the mundane. Holiness in the filth of sheep manure and sweat. Divinity entering the world on the floor of a stable, through the womb of a teenager and in the presence of a carpenter.” (Max Lucado, “It Began in a Manger”)

Though He could have, He did not come in perfection.

And this moment, unexpected though it may be, pointed towards another such (and even greater) moment.

Christ’s death on the cross.

There was very little beauty and peace and joy in the way Christ entered the world, and even less in his death on the cross.  It was horrid and smelly and painful and terrifying on both ends of the story.  And yet, God entered the world and removed our sins purposefully in this manner.

 

The beauty of Christmas comes not from the coziness of time spent with family and the jolly rejoicing in Christ’s birth, but for the direction in which his birth points. God himself, came into one of the most messy, disorganized spaces of this world. And he enters into OUR brokenness as well.  He doesn’t want us in our glittering Christmas light moments of goodness. He doesn’t ask for perfection. He simply pursues us as we are. He pursues us when bee boxes  have been shoved aside behind the Christmas tree, when our family discussions are a devastating display of our broken pridefulness and bitter hearts, when our closets are full of skeletons, when our hearts are breaking and we don’t know how they will mend, when we need condolence in our poverty, when our very souls ache with loneliness, when we are weeping in sorrows, when we are longing for new beginnings. He doesn’t ask us to be cleaned up, ready and waiting for him. No! He says, “Come as you are. (See Romans 5:8. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”) Broken and Bruised. Come into my loving arms and accept this grace given not as a reward for perfection, but as the most tremendous gift of love that has ever been given.” Love Himself came down to be with us.

“But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ EVEN WHEN WE WERE DEAD IN TRANSGRESSIONS (even when we were broken)—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:4-7)

 

There is a messy stack of bee boxes shoved out of the way behind my Christmas tree. And my actions this week (and many times before) demonstrate that I am a prideful, broken human being, who daily falls to pieces. But on this Christmas day we remember that Christ (GOD HIMSELF!!!) loved us so much that He came down into our messy, disorganized, brokenness (into the very filth of a stable), and said, “I want to wrap YOU up in my love anyways! Forever and always!”

Jesus doesn’t just come to us in the joyous, twinkling, happy moments of Christmas. He comes to us in our utter brokenness, sees our complete filth and wretchedness, and says “You are still mine!”

 

As Pastor Tim Keller writes, “Christmas means that God has gone to infinite lengths to come near to you.”  “There’s no other religion that says God has suffered, that God had to be courageous, that he knows that it is like to be abandoned by friends, to be crushed by injustice, to be tortured and die. Christmas shows He knows what you’re going through.” Christ, the most perfect one of all, came and met us in our imperfection so that we could cling intimately to Him despite our follies.

 

God is so tremendously good!  Merry Christmas!

 

12/25/2019

“Who can add to Christmas? The perfect motive is that God so loved the world. The perfect gift is that He gave His only Son. The only requirement is to believe in Him. The reward of faith is that you shall have everlasting life.”  – Corrie Ten Boom