Is entering a new culture and community a bit like incarnation—coming in the flesh? We are invited to humble ourselves and become like those we want to join. We are challenged to leave behind the role, status, and identity we've developed where we're from and start from the beginning. If you'll bear with me this Christmas season, I'd like to take this in two different directions.
First, I'm realizing a bit more as I grow older that I can't be someone else, so I'm only tasked with being the best Steve I can be where God puts me today (but never quite arriving.) In some ways this is releasing. I'm not going to be Jesus, or even my namesakes—Steven Paul, thank you, mom and dad. And while I'm going to suffer, it won't be just because I'm God's ambassador, but also because of my own faults, flaws, and failures. That's okay. Wherever I am, each day that I have, I am only tasked with being Steve (me!) as unto my Lord and master. Of course, I can't pull that off, but it's a lot more doable than all the other people I have tried to do and be. I'm not a saint or a messiah. I can't rescue people. I can only come alongside as God gives me grace, sympathizing and empathizing, and loving as I have been first loved. This is the joy of Christmas present.
Second, I can understand a bit of what it meant for Jesus to come into this human world, humbling himself and becoming personal, because of the opportunities I've had to enter worlds and communities other than the ones from which I've come. The challenge of communicating, the search for the one right word or story that might make a lasting impact on this person, family, or group, the difficulty of living well in systems that overlap, intersect, and ultimately conflict, with values like truth and love that always seem to be in tension. As I watch the delight with which our granddaughter Evangeline engages our world, I can only imagine the joy and excitement with which Jesus, entering a specific family, culture, community, and era, began as a baby and stamped his unique identity and style on what it meant to redeem our world—to the surprise of almost everyone, except maybe the Father God and Holy Spirit, who must have felt it all more intensely than we can conceive. This is the joy of Christmas past.
And as we celebrate the incarnation again, whether spiritually or profanely, and most likely both, I hope and long for the joy yet to come…the joy of Christmas forever.
Merry Christmas! May the Lord's peace be with you!
<spinella@alumni.rice.edu> <lauraspinella@gmail.com>
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