From the Associate Pastor - Winter 2025/26

“… ‘You will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” (Luke 2:12b-14).

In this season of twinkling lights and cold evenings, these words from Luke’s gospel are heard in shops, malls, and our own living rooms as we begin listening to Christmas carols. The words ring so familiarly in our North American culture that it’s hard to remember they are strange words, and even radical words. A child is born, wrapped in bands of cloth, lying in a manger and it is through this child that “God in the highest heaven” enfolds creation with heaven into one single piece to bring peace. 

As we enter the season of Advent, we are given some time (though we need much more than four weeks!) to consider the utter surprise that is God’s entrance into creation. If God’s mere entrance was not enough on its own, can you believe that God enters creation as a child? God enters the way all of us do, as a small, helpless, and totally vulnerable child. Close your eyes and just imagine God being swaddled on the hip of Mary, fed at her breast and crying to alert human hearers to the humanly needs of a baby.    

It’s radical news to proclaim that “God in the highest heaven” takes on the form and situation of a human baby. It’s perhaps even jarring for some to consider this child as Emanuel (God-with-us) swaddled and totally vulnerable to the whims of the world’s joys and cruelties. God, after all, is omniscient, almighty, powerful, creator and ruler of all creation! 

We may think that it must only be God’s spirit dwelling within this child, right? We may think, what in all of creation is God doing?!

The tri-unity of God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) tells us that God the Father is of one being with Jesus Christ as is God the Spirit who were at the beginning, are now, and will be for ever and ever. In other words, the expression of God as Son is fully united with God’s expression as Father and Spirit. So, on Christmas morning, we acknowledge this little baby boy as God-Made-Flesh. We proclaim this radical decision that God made in order to redeem all of creation and we rejoice and lift our songs of praise to this mysterious unity of Son with Father and Spirit - the Trinitarian God.

At this time of year, we are gifted with worship experiences at church that particularly focus our attention on God the Son - a child who will experience the world as we experience the world in need of mother’s milk, of cuddles, of playtime, and of bedtime when crankiness sets in. I invite you to ponder the ways God knows the world intimately because God experienced the world just like us. 

It’s a defining feature of our Christian faith that we see God’s power most perfectly at work in the total vulnerability of a child. It is God showing us that God desires such closeness to creation that God becomes a real, 100% flesh and blood part of creation where God the Holy Spirit, God the Father, and God the Son “move mysteriously from the realm of invisibility and of eternal reality into the realm of fleshy, timebound life.” In Jesus’s birth, “God is an event that happens to the world. God is the event of the world’s final transformation by Jesus’s love.”[1]

The very birth of this child is our hope for peace and our joy that love reigns. Notice how power - God’s power - is expressed through hope, peace, joy and love. Beautiful nouns which help us to describe how the Triune God reigns through Jesus Christ Our Savior and Lord.

So, let us place all our hope in this little child born in Bethlehem. Gloria in excelsis Deo!

+Rev. Ryan 

[1] “The Being of God” in Christian Dogmatics, Vol. 1 by Robert W. Jensen.