Finding God Where We Least Expect Him

     

   

     The Christmas story, in spite of all of our contemporary church pageantry complete with camels, elephants, full-scale choirs and televised broadcasts, is a story of silent desperation.  A young couple on a cold winter night, with nowhere else to turn.   The Christmas story, if you read it carefully, raises questions, that perhaps we don’t have the answers for.  

     It is a story of preposterous implications that asks us to believe in that which we can not understand. It demands that we remove our shoes of rationalism at the doorway of the miraculous and walk barefoot in recognition that we are standing on Holy Ground.  For who’s to say which is a greater miracle:  angels singing in a field to shepherds, or the power of a life that has been transformed by the presence of God? 

     In today's politically toxic culture, where even the church is divided left from right, I find myself wishing I could be transported back to that night. I wish I could be sitting in that field, trying to keep warm by a lone fire as sheep slept nearby. I wish I could feel the goosebumps on my neck as suddenly the stars are outshone by heavenly beings singing a melody never heard before. 

      I love that the angels sang to shepherds.  Shepherds!  God didn't send this angelic choir into the middle of the synagogue.  He didn't send them into the center of the Roman courts.  God doesn't usually show up where we think He should, the way we think He should.  Neither politics, nor organized religion held the hope for humanity that night. The entire Christmas story is an incredible tale of the divine coming into the middle of the dust, dirt and desperation of our lives.  

     When I think back on my own experiences of a sense of God's presence that is so overpoweringly real, they have become milemarkers for me in the journey of my life - more often than not, those experiences were not in a church.  That's not to say that God's presence is not found in organized worship however, the personal, intimate sense of God wanting to communicate something to me, oftentimes caught me when I wasn't looking for it - like the shepherds, when I was simply doing what I had to do:  in a cafeteria, watching three girls dance to worship music from a $79 boombox, in a kayak in the middle of a remote lake in the hills of Vermont.

   So, perhaps the best way to celebrate Christmas is simply to stop from our politically biased rhetoric and arguments over who has it right. Perhaps it is simply to be silent long enough to listen for God's voice in the most unlikely of places.  We just might be surprised...we just might hear the rustling of angel's wings in a cold, dark field...we just may hear a newborn's cry of life, of hope, in a place deep within our own souls where we had denied him room.