The real Christmas story is contrary to the typical innkeeper version.

The real act of love is contrary to the way the world typically works.

Mary and Joseph were not turned away from the inn.  They were welcomed in, to the family home, given food, shelter, and a bed.  What is love, if it’s not welcoming?  What is love, if it’s not a mystery?

In Jesus, Love became flesh.

“Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous.  And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…..God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings……..God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.”

– Bonhoeffer

The intangible reality of the Old Testament became ultimate reality in their midst.

What does it mean for us to continue to embody this reality, centuries after the resurrection?

What does it mean for us to be as hospitable as Joseph’s relatives, to be as welcoming as Jesus?

Love enters in.  It welcomes to our own little lives, Jesus, and all made in his image.

The feeling of Christmas, even of Advent, is of Christ coming to all.

“It was a mystery because God became poor, low, lowly, and weak out of love for humankind, because God became a human being like us, so that we would become divine, and because he came to us so that we would come to him.  God as the one who becomes low for our sakes….That is the depth of the Deity, whom we worship as mystery and comprehend as mystery.”

– Bonhoeffer

His orientation was outward.  To continue in love as he did, requires that we look beyond ourselves.

If the incarnation means anything, then it means something for us now, today.

Mainly, that we give it a go, and, like Mary, birth love out of ourselves.

May our own little world, all the Bethlehems that we live in be just as welcoming, just as life giving and just as sacred as that little town once was.

“Surely it takes no more creative concentration to make a galaxy than a baby.  And surely the greatest strength of all is this loving willingness to be weak, to share, to give utterly……We can, if we will, recognize him as he is manifested in love, total, giving love.  And I believe that in one way or another we are all meant to receive him as Mary did.” – L’Engle

This is the irrational season

When love blooms bright and wild.

Had Mary been filled with reason

There’d have been no room for the child. – L’Engle

This is part of an Advent Syncroblog, with Emily Miller, Katie Axelson, and Brenna D.  Join us as we talk about the Bethlehem candle, the candle of Love this week.

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