Advent Day 3: Christmas Homecoming...

I have to admit that today I found it difficult to write. There are myriad reasons as to why. I find I have a bit of the Christmas Blues right now. My daughter is going to be with her mom in Tennessee this year. She almost never misses Christmas with me and my side of the family. She loves the traditions, especially “Feast of Seven Fishes” with my Uncle Franny and my cousins and family. She loves being with Mom C and Bob on Christmas night. But she hasn’t seen her mom since last March and her mom bought her a ticket. I never protest…it’s her mom. But I wish she was going to be with me.

I find myself thinking more and more about when she was a child. I miss my little girl. I know she’ll always be my little girl, but not in the same ways. I miss how it felt when she’d sit on the couch next to me and we’d watch our “official” list of Christmas movies. Charlie Brown Christmas, The Grinch, Scrooge, (the 1951 version with Alistair Sim) and Santa Claus is Coming to Town.

This year we only managed to watch two of them together. She spends her evenings chatting with her boyfriend and leaving me to watch my movies alone. I understand…but it still makes me sad.

I was thinking today about the Nativity, and especially about the little figure of Jesus.

Today I was at lunch, sitting there thinking, as I often do, and I was thinking about Jesus as a baby…as a tiny child, only a few hours old. I remembered one afternoon in 2011. My “adopted dad” Poppa John Iorizzo had been in the hospital and his wife Jewell and I had ridden together to see him. As we rode the elevator to his floor, there was a young mother with a stroller and an infant baby asleep in its fold. Instinctively, we both peered over her shoulder and looked at her baby. When the doors opened and we stepped out, I looked at Jewell and said; “You see that, momma,” (I always called her that) “there is something about a baby. I think that’s why Jesus came as a baby…because everyone would drop their guard and look at Him and find God.” I had only recently released my first Christmas book and it was based heavily on this one fact: that Jesus was a baby on that one scandalous night…and babies touch our hearts in ways no one else can.

Pop and Jewell are both gone now. I found myself blinking back tears today as I thought about this story, because I miss them so. And I found myself thinking more about Jesus the child.

There are people who struggle with Christmas each year. They struggle because they struggle with the idea of God. Something, or someone, in their lives had wounded them and soured them on God. God gets a bad rap far too often. I think he knows this and I also think –unsubstantiated as this idea might be—that He chose to enter history as a newborn baby for exactly that reason. People are often afraid of God the Father. They find the idea of God the Holy Spirit as a mystical notion that they can’t easily comprehend. But Jesus, as a baby…well that’s safe. That’s disarming. That calls to me when my heart aches and my soul is vexed from the pain this world feels.

Jesus, the child of Mary, lays still in his manger and all but begs me to take Him in my arms and love him…and let Him love me in return. A baby can’t judge me, He won’t attack me for my sin. A tiny child has no idea of my sordid history or my failures or my sorrows. He only sees me in the current moment, as I am.

On the night my daughter was born, I was transformed. I held that tiny form to my chest and I cried and I told her probably a thousand times “I love you, Morgan.” And every time I said it, I was hearing it ringing back in my own ears, from God the Father, “This is how I feel about you, my son. I love you too.”

What if you could go back there? What if you could lay aside your fear, or your doubts, or your anger with God because things haven’t turned out the way you wanted them to? What if you could set aside your shame, and your hurts, and your self-loathing over the person you think you were supposed to have become by now, but haven’t yet. What if you could stop shifting that heavy suitcase from one hand to the other, and just set it down, and pick up the infant son of God instead.

And what if He nudged His tiny face in close against your chest, to the place where your heart is, and He let out a tiny little baby sigh, and you felt God pouring out His immeasurable love on you through the sound that His son –God Himself in tiny human form—made in response to your overture of love.

Would you believe in Him again…or for the first time? Would you drop your guard, if only for a few minutes, for the safety of a child in your arms?

That’s really what Christmas is all about, you know. Brennan Manning once said, “The only thing more incredible than the fact that Jesus would die for me is the fact that he would even come here for me in the first place.” But he did. He came here to this damp, dark cave. He was born among animals, He was murdered on a cross, on display in a garbage dump, and I call Him Lord. He was the son of God, born to poverty, destined for death, and I have entrusted my soul to Him.

And on this night, 2017 years ago, He made His entrance into the world, unheralded, unrecognized, ignored by humanity. He was illegitimate, a scandal, the subject of rumor and innuendo. He came from Nazareth, which was known as the “City of Trash.” He was from the wrong side of the tracks.

None of those things mattered on that first Christmas night. All anyone knew was a baby was born out in the barn, and He was sleeping in a sheep-trough, when He should have been sitting on a throne.

He is here again. Every year, no matter what we think of Jesus, or God the Father, or the Holy Spirit, we think of the baby. We enter into the safety of the Advent season. When God seems to call a “truce” with our hearts and beckon us to the stable in Bethlehem once more. “Come see my son,” He says, “Come take Him in your arms, and let this love He has…this love I have for you, erase those silly things you think are keeping us apart. I did this for you. I sent Him here as a baby for you. To tear down the walls between us, and make a way for you to reconcile with me. I love you.”

This Advent season, as the world seems to be spinning more out-of-center than ever before, the baby still calls to us. He calls to you. Come to this manger. Come to this baby. Come home…