Mud and Mess

I was reading through an article by Nadia Boltz-Weber the other day on the Antiphons (the Advent “O” titles we sing in Oh Come Oh Come Emmanuel). I was struck by her description of the “O Lord” antiphon:

O come, O come Lord. Come and again break open our hearts like only a baby can do. Come and again be born in straw and mud and show us God’s preferential option for the ordinary, the small, the unnoticeable among us. Come and again show us what we always seem to forget - that the divine is so often concealed within the common.

I couldn’t help but think back to my internship year of college when I was writing some articles around Advent and Christmas, and reflecting on how…messily…God chose to enter the world.

The incarnation was not sweet, no matter what the children’s hymns say. Human birth is painful, messy, and a bit scary - and that’s even with modern medicine. Imagine that, but with a teenage girl (let’s be honest, Mary probably wasn’t more than 14-16 years old when she was with child back in the day) in a cave where animals ate, slept, and defecated.

Messy.

Our God saw a broken world, a shattered humanity, and instead of parting the clouds and floating down from above (or just obliterating it all and starting over) he decided to join us. The hard way. The messy way.

And as I reflected on THAT, in addition to Nadia’s aforementioned words, I was struck by how big of a deal with make Christmas. The concerts, the pageantry, the gifts, the lights, the food - it’s all so over-the-top.

Don’t get me wrong, I love it. I’m a huge fan of Christmas lights and music and the over-the-top-ness of the season. And I think it’s a marker of what a BIG DEAL the incarnation is (GOD IN THE FLESH??!).

But in reality, the entire point of Christmas is how ordinary it all is. I mean, it’s all so very every-day human, isn’t it? Two individuals just following some government orders (however inconvenient they were) traveling, having a baby, trying to get through their human existence. Not wealthy, not all that significant by human standards.

And yet, this is how God chose to enter our world. To break into our lives and show us how to be a part of His Kingdom. To ultimately give up his ordinary human life to save our ordinary human lives. Because ordinary is not mundane or useless or something to be ignored - to God, ordinary is beautiful and perfect and the point.

So while I enjoy everything this Christmas season has to offer, and I’ll definitely be indulging my deep love of Christmas lights, I’m going to remember that it’s all in celebration of an ordinary Grace, an every-day healing, and a divine attention on even the smallest considerations according to our human attentions.

That is worth celebrating indeed.