It's Not Magic: It's Your Savior

The wonders of Christmas, the electricity in the air, the children who look at this all-too-real world with wonder and awe… and there are times I wish that sort of feeling could last forever. Christmas is a magical time of year. It is a time for believing the unbelievable, for doing the impossible, for seeing hope in the unlikeliest of places. It’s a time when we’re all a little more kind, a little more generous, and a little more patient. It’s a time when the inner child in each of us comes out. Maybe it’s the decorations. Maybe it’s the music. Maybe it’s the anticipation of Santa. Or maybe there is something more to it than that.

Part of the problem with Christmas is that it all goes so quickly. We rush through the stores, picking up last minute gifts and groceries. We rush on the roads, trying to cross off the next place on our list before we need to get home to wrap presents. Almost as soon as we have put up the tree, it is time to take it down again. Almost as soon as we have wrapped all of the presents, the paper is filling our garbage can. Almost as soon as we have heard the story of Jesus’ birth, it becomes a fairy tale, a story of long ago and far away. We put away the Nativity scenes alongside the decorative Santas, leaving both behind until the same time next year, when we will dust them off and put them out, and the world will be magical once again.

We rush right past Mary, nine months pregnant, riding on a donkey for 100 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem. We rush right past Joseph, arguing with the innkeeper as they try to find a place to stay, pointing at Mary, who is holding her belly in pain. We rush right past the sleepy shepherds, woken up by the heavenly host: the first to hear the good news that the Messiah has been born. We rush right past God-with-us, an infant expression of infinite might.

But tonight, for just a little while, let’s slow down.

Because when we move too fast, it’s easy to forget that God, who hung the stars in the heavens, who made the earth and trees and skies and seas, chose to come to dwell among us as a helpless infant and was laid in a feeding trough. Why?

Maybe God knew we would need a way to remember that his coming to earth wasn’t magic. The reality of childbirth, of beauty and pain inextricably linked, speaks to the reality of God-with-us in this world of great beauty, of mountains and hills and rivers and seas and of great pain, of wars, of hurricanes, of tornadoes, of fertilizer explosions. It is not to some other reality that God comes, but to ours.

They had traveled to Joseph’s hometown. He probably still had family there, but he was a stranger. The innkeeper didn’t even recognize him. “There’s no room.” “But Mary, she’s…” as Mary screams in childbirth. They nudge the cows away from the feeding trough, their drool still glistening in the crib of our Lord. Didn’t God know it was supposed to go differently than that? Didn’t God know that they would need a place to be? Didn’t God know what sort of place Bethlehem was? Doesn’t God know what sort of world this is? Yes. God knew exactly what God was doing.

Everything was not in place. Everything was not perfect. It was not a birth fit for a king. It was far more earthy and far more real than that. It wasn’t magic because God isn’t magical. All-powerful and all-knowing, yes, but magical, no. God knew that we would need something to get our attention, as we rush around here and there trying to make the magic of the season look effortless. Everything is not in place. Everything is not perfect. And yet, God gets our attention by coming to us – as we are – and the world – as it is. God doesn’t come when we’re ready, and God doesn’t come when we have finished all of our errands. God comes right in the midst of it, breaking into our reality, and setting it a little off kilter. God invites you to look at the world a little differently, where a feeding trough makes a crib and shepherds evangelists and a newborn baby the Savior of the world.

The magic of the season isn’t really magic at all. It’s the realization that the whole world is a little off kilter, set spinning by its Creator who isn’t content to remain in the heavens but determines to dwell with you. The world that seems to be spinning so quickly stopped with baited breath as Christ took his first breath, God-with-us. The creation that seems to be careening off its course paused for a moment to sing a lullaby for the Christ-child. At that moment, everything slowed for just a second, as the heavens proclaimed “to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord...”

It isn’t magic that makes the season bright, or that brings hope into this hopeless world. It is your God, Christ, the child wrapped in cloth lying in a manger. Infinite wisdom, infinite might, sleeping in a feeding trough so that you might hear the Good News: this is not magic, this is your Savior.