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Advent Devotional for Friday, December 25, the Nativity of Jesus Christ
• Luke 2:1-14
“And [Mary] gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”
This is the sentence from Luke’s version of the Christmas story that leaps out at me this year. And I’m taken specifically with these words, “no place.” There was no place for them in the inn. No Place.
When God decided to come down and be born into the world, and thus give us a clear picture of what Godness looks like, God got it all started by making a place out of what was essentially No Place. Or at least No Place Special. God got it all started by coming to people who were “displaced.” God bypassed all the expected points of entry and came instead to a truly forgotten corner of the world, and thus turned No Place into My Place.
This may be why Madeline L’Engle once wrote that her biggest problem with Christmas is God. “Cribb’d, cabined, and confined within the contours of a human infant. The infinite defined by the finite? The Creator of all life thirsty and abandoned? Why would God do such a thing?” she asked.
Why indeed, if not because of God’s outrageous, irrational, holy preoccupation with this place? This place— Bethlehem, a barn, a manger, some peasants—which is no place special … unless there is a God! This place—your town, your street, your living room, your tree, your family, your joys, your passions, your sorrows—not at all special or important … unless there is a God, who delights in making a dwelling there with you.
Once, years ago now, very close to Christmas Day, a plane crashed in the Andes mountains near Cali, Colombia. It had veered off course and had struck the top of a mountain and had burst into flames. It was assumed that nobody could have survived the crash. But one man there at the airport, waiting for his nineteen-year-old brother who was arriving on that flight, managed to hitch a ride with rescue workers traveling the forty miles to the crash site. Once there, he told the workers, “Look for a man who looks like me.” Moments later, they found the brother—banged up pretty badly, but alive, one of the few who survived.
I think of that story here at Christmas. “Look for someone who looks like me.” At Christmas, we celebrate what happens when God goes looking for a host of someones who bear a divine resemblance. Which is all of us, of course.
And what God finds—in a place that is no place, really—is Mary singing lullabies to none other than the Son of God, none other than the Resurrection and the Life. Until a whole lot of nobodies in a whole bunch of nowheres become placed in the mind and heart of God.
So Merry Christmas to you, in your place. For God has business there. Today we kneel at the manger and offer our worship, because our salvation has come. The hope of all the world lies wrapped in bands of cloth, in No Place Special. Rejoice and be glad, for God dwells here, too—in this terrible, wonderful, hair-raising, frightening, miraculous, tragic, painful, glorious, risky, redemptive Place.
O little Child of Bethlehem, dwell with and within us today and always. Make us useful in joining your holy purposes to ours in this very place. Amen.
Theodore J. Wardlaw
President, and Professor of Homilitics
For the glory of God and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary is a seminary in the Presbyterian-Reformed tradition whose mission is to educate and equip individuals for the ordained Christian ministry and other forms of Christian service and leadership; to employ its resources in the service of the church; to promote and engage in critical theological thought and research; and to be a winsome and exemplary community of God's people.
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