Drawn to the Story

At churches all over the country, everything is almost ready for the special services tomorrow evening. Choirs are set to sing. Boxes of candles are ready. Special music has been prepared. And big crowds will come, even if the weather isn't great.

People come for a variety of reasons. For some, it may be their only visit to a church this year. Perhaps it's just a matter of tradition or nostalgia. Perhaps it's something more. Maybe people want to be reminded, need to be reminded, that there is another possibility, another way besides that of the world we live in.

Some of those ways are on vivid display of late. Whether the issue is normalizing relations with Cuba or the tragic murder of police officers in New York City, it somehow always ends up about sides and polarities and power. Almost any event can be mined for partisan advantage in an attempt to gain the upper hand. Some attempts are more brazen and unseemly than others. (Rudy Giuliani and the Baltimore TV station that edited protest footage to make it seem a crowd chanted for police to be killed come particularly to mind.) But amassing power and advantage is the way of our world. If we have power we seek to maintain and increase it. If we don't, we covet it. In our world, if you don't have power you get taken advantage of.

Yet our world is still enamored by an ancient story with a very different take on power. In the story that will be rehearsed and retold tomorrow evening, God's power takes on the most vulnerable pose imaginable. God comes as a helpless baby, dependent on the kindness of strangers even for a place to be born.

And it isn't just a humble beginnings for a great man sort of story. It is the way the story ends as well. God confronts God's enemies, those who resist the ways of God, by suffering and dying, by being vulnerable even when it leads to death. It is a sort of power that makes no sense to us, this power "made perfect in weakness," as Paul calls it. The idea is totally illogical, yet still we can't turn away from its story.

But we're drawn to the world's notions of power, too. And so we keep trying to adapt Jesus to our ways. We enlist him on our "side" in attempts to gain advantage over those we disagree with. In our more brazen and unseemly moments, we implore him to help our side win, even to defeat those who are our enemies, viewing him as an implement of worldly power. But the story we tell tomorrow night is hard to enlist in such schemes.

Maybe that explains part of the Christmas story's enduring appeal. It is difficult to appropriate for my side. Babies don't take sides.

We do, of course. It's no wonder that religions of all stripes are forever getting off track and messed up. We keep trying to get God to conform to our ways. But then the story reminds us that it doesn't work like that. And we sense, deep in our bones, that the story knows something we long for, something the ways of our world don't understand.

Too bad the story's pull is so fleeting for most of us. If only we could fully embrace the ways this baby longs to show us. But we keep coming back to hear the story. Maybe some day we will.