Retold: Your Christmas Act.

King Jesus, It's a stunning and shutting thought, the reality of Your birth. We cannot conceive that You would come as an infant, lowly and childish, immature and undeveloped. So when You said You confined Your sovereign Self to an infant boy, we made You cute, white, and cliche. Your deity wrapped in flesh, we could not imagine. So we formed You with plastic instead, making You easy to display and pack away. See Your manger? It's as clean as we could hope. And that stable? It's tidy and smells like cloves. We cleaned it all up, You see. Because we cannot bear the reality of cold winds and dirty barnyard floors for the Messiah we forgot we were waiting for. We've recreated Your birth. Because the way You did it was too radical, too scandalous, too riveting for our comfortable traditions. We bustle around and make conversation and sing about silent nights because we could not tolerate Yours; the silent and the night enduring forty years. Your presumed absence, we filled. We stopped waiting for Your voice. Stopped listening. Stopped watching the skies for a hint of Your affection, presence, movement, vernacular. And then You came. Not as we expected. Not as we had hoped. Silent, but wailing because You were hungry and needed the nursing of the young teenage Mary. Beautiful, but only in ways we could not see. Serene, but only because Your Father's sees the days for which "The End" were inscribed. With these words we are aware, again, that the end is drawing nearer. And You have promised to come. And we forgot we were waiting. Rebirth us this Christmas day. Do Your Christmas act in us once again. Be Emmanuel now, and in Your doing so, birth in us the ache for Your final Emmanuel day. As we lay our heads down to sleep this Christmas night, would You stoke our weariness again. Because we are wanderers, Lord. We grow faint, even as we fight to ignore our fatigue. And we need You. In Your Incarnated glory. You. We pray in the name of the Christmas One. Even Jesus. Amen