From the UCC Network: Devotional for 12/22 "The Season of Showing"

The Season of Showing

Excerpt from Luke 2: 1-11

“While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child.”

Reflection by Donna Schaper

God is starting to show.  Usually that doesn’t happen for at least three months, at the end of the first trimester, when the fetus is so small that it creates no bulges.  Then comes the bulge, the ballooning, the sense of no longer being one’s own person, the sense that something important is happening, within our own wombs. 

Advent is the season of the showing.  We light one candle to indicate the coming of a new kind of light.

Christianity is as strange a religion as any other.  Our core is the Holy Spirit having mysterious relations with the girl, Mary, all of which results in a child who is understood to be the salvation of the world.  Advent is the time when we get on the path of understanding how these things can be.  How come God comes down?  How come God gets small?  How come God, the eternal, becomes the temporal? 

As I said, Christianity is as strange a religion as any other.  At its core, power is vulnerability, heavenly is earthly, flesh involves spirit, divinity caresses the ordinary.  Our version of God is one that is very hard to understand in a world that is deeply concerned about whether the stores will sell a lot during the gift-buying season.  Our version has a quarrel with the world as we know it and sings its song in a different key, the key of incarnation, of spirit becoming flesh and dwelling among us.  Not above us, but among us.  Not outside us, but in us.  Not robed in kingly crimson, but in swaddling clothes in the manger next door.

During Advent we piece together the meaning of God’s starting to show us God’s path.  Pieces are all we get, given the messaging strategy of the divine.  A girl.  A manger.  A small town named Bethlehem.  Can you imagine launching your message in Topeka when New York is so close by?  Can you imagine launching your message in Bangladesh when Egypt is so close by?  These little questions are a piece of the mystery and magnificence of the Christian version of God. 

Prayer 

Why you have to be such a different kind of God, O God, I will never understand.  But with Mary, you have more than piqued my interest.  Thank-you. Amen.

About the Author Donna Schaper is the Senior Minister of Judson Memorial Church in New York City.  Her most recent book is Sacred Chow: a Guide to Holy Eating.