What an exciting time December is! 'Tis the season of the Living Creche, the Christmas cantata, and our wonderful candlelight Christmas eve services - not to mention invitations too numerous to accept every one. It's total immersion joy.
Lest we throw out (figuratively if not literally) the baby with the spent manger straw of party garbage and present wrapping trash, let us remember the reason for the season - Incarnation.
The Incarnation
* Emmanuel - God with us (Matthew 1:22–23)
* The Word became flesh and lived among us (John 1:14)
* In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Colossians 1:19)
* Jesus is the exact imprint of God's very being (Hebrews 1:3)
God became human for us and for our salvation because God loves us and is not about to let us go. Our relationship to God and God's ways is "bent" as C. S. Lewis so well describes it. God became human - incarnate - to straighten our "bent" relationship.
* In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them (2 Corinthians 5:19)
Jesus' cousin, the baptizer, John, himself called to "straighten" out the way to God, exhorted people to "repent" - unbend their lives. When Jesus came to be baptized, John recognized human limitations.
* "I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit." (Mark 1:7b-8)
No human mere "good" being can unbend herself, let alone the world. That's God's doing, who did it by becoming a human being exactly as God created human being to be.
* Jesus in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15)
Christmas is prelude
At Christmas we tend to focus on the peripherals - the angels, the shepherds, the baby in the manger. Christmas is the prelude - the part we can walk in on late, talk through, even pray through - and not miss the "why" of God's choosing to live, eat, sleep, sweat, and die among us. No one wants to do without it, but we could - theologically, if we had to.
* Only two gospels devote any space to Jesus' birth. The rest of the Bible ignores it.
The joy of Christmas comes not so much from Jesus' birth - as joyful as that is - as from the rest of the story: Jesus' life as a human being living God's way; his death on a cross in forgiving agony; his triumph over the grave in resurrection serendipity; his fulfilled promise of the gift of the empowering comforter, the Holy Spirit.
Our joy is not based on a transitory moment of birth. Our joy comes from a transcendent God who "so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." (John 3:16-17)