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Christmas 2020

Thoughts from a Messy Christmas 2020

Note from Janel: This week I’m vacating with my family–or soon attempting to, after the errands are finished and we sink into full-on celebration mode. 

So I’m sliding in these thoughts, most originally published three years ago, which have followed me around like a pet pig.

I don’t know where Christmas 2020 finds you. But in the mess and fear and loss, may you also find our approachable, welcoming, God-in-the-Mess.

Or as he calls himself, God with Us.

The Organic God

I grew up amidst a small, tidy farm in central Illinois. The colors that primarily swirl around this are the rustling greenness that stretched in acres of corn or soybeans on every side, or the grass that could only be truly experienced through one’s toes.

The affectionately flaking bright red of the barn stands tall in my mind, along with the mottled red of the apple trees, the streaked pink of rhubarb stems, the buttery yellow (and a peeping cacophony) of baby chicks.

And there’s the white of our ancient farmhouse trimmed neatly with black shutters.

Everything in my mind weaves its own earthy, wholesome texture. There’s a nearness to lifecycles and struggle, rain and drought, soil and organic wholeness.

Farms have their own wholesome, simple beauty. Though I doubt my parents would see it as simple, right?

Seven days a week there were animals to be fed. If you go on vacation, you’re hiring someone to do it for you. And the smells.

My mom, one of whose love languages is cleanliness, had a specific plan for my dad and his rank clothing and rubber boots when he tromped in from chores for the day, manure threatening to clump on the same rug her toddlers would crawl over.

A God for Christmas 2020: Born in a Barn

As I picture entering our barn, I think of steaming winter breath. Stamping and milling restlessness. Crusted fur. The earthy smell of hay. And of course, the other smells we all know are there. I could tell you with my eyes closed whether I was smelling a cow, sheep, horse, pig, or chicken.

So I find rich (-smelling?) metaphor in a Jesus born in a stable, laid in a feed trough.

As a mother of four, I will vouch the birth process itself probably didn’t help the milieu. (One pastor and dad pointed out that he expected that whole thing to be more calm, more clean, perhaps less like a horror film.)

But here is what I gather from a God entering the world from a screaming, sweating, grunting woman’s body, into a barn: He came into our mess.

“Sorry. Too gross for me.”

As the same pastor phrased it, our God is not aloof. Not, “Sorry. You happen to be too disgusting for me.”

He didn’t even glide into the idyllic farm with the velvety chicks and the crunchy carrots that taste best right out of the ground.

God chose the dirty place.

But maybe you know by now: Any pile of manure can be scraped or hosed away. But it’s much harder to reconcile abject fear or loss or separation like the kind we’re facing around Christmas 2020.

Also impossible to squeegee out: the damage we do to each other, our “active inclination to break stuff, ‘stuff’ here including…promises, relationships we care about and our own well-being and other people’s”.*

Like a true marriage, God was saying, Your mess is our mess. You needed me, so I came all the way into this.

He’s not the kind of God who’s like, I’ll just stay out here.

Does God prefer “clean” people?

Maybe this post, here in Gosh-this-stinks-and-I-think-some-got-on-me Christmas 2020, finds you feeling distant from God. Could be the profound degree to which you suffer. Or the dirtiness you feel. Or the idea you’ve picked up from somewhere that God likes “clean” people.

I’d like to introduce you to The God in the Mess. The God Who Relates to Every Rank Bit of It.

Or as he called himself, God with Us.

I was reminded by bestselling author Dane Ortlund yesterday that in the four Gospels, Jesus only describes his own heart once. There, he uses two adjectives: I am gentle and lowly in heart (Matthew 11:28-30).

Ortlund, looking at the Greek meanings of each, elaborates this kind of humility refers not to humility as a characteristic but “in the sense of destitution or being thrust downward by life circumstance.” He continues,

The point in saying that Jesus is lowly is that he is accessible…no one in human history has ever been more approachable than Jesus Christ.

…Your very burden is what qualifies you to come. He says, “I will give you rest.” His rest is a gift, not a transaction.

…This is who he is. Tender, Open. Welcoming. Accomodating. Understanding. Willing.

This Christmas, lean in. I promise he’s there, ready for your mess.

We don’t have a priest who is out of touch with our reality.

He’s been through weakness and testing, experienced it all–all but the sin.

So let’s walk right up to him and get what he is so ready to give. Take the mercy, accept the help. 

Hebrews 4:15, The Message

 

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*Spufford, Francis, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. New York: Harper One (2013), p. 27. As quoted in Keller, Timothy. Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God. New York: Dutton (2014), p. 100.