The Tribune

By BISHOP SIMEON B HALL

Pastor Emeritus, New Covenant Baptist Church

George Buttrick, the English-born American preacher, in one of his books noted that, “Human history has been punctuated by a divine presence.” The birth of the God-man meant that the transcendent God, the Creator, took up residence among the created.

For a brief 33 years God lived on the human level. His short life showed us not only how to live, but how to die. He placed both living and dying on another perspective. Over and over, He gave Heaven and Hell a different meaning.

Let those who wish to cheapen the veracity of the fact that He was indeed born, with their specific emphasis on dates and customs, do so.

But the Bible says He was born in humble conditions. Divinity visited our humanity and He did it in the garb of our mortality.

And the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary and she conceived and was found with child. That’s an incredible story! It is even more incredible to raise Bible mysteries in a day of secularism and atheistic modernity.

The God who spoke life into a virgin, is the same God, who at the dawn of creation, reached up into nothingness, called something out of the abyss, flipped it into existence and told it to stay there.

We celebrate not a date, nor even a place; we celebrate the person… Immanuel – God with us. The God of our Christian faith is a God who takes up residence in our neighbourhood. Before Christ came, God was “the transcendent other”. But now we can know God with familial intimacy. Indeed, we can now call Him “our Father”.

The birth of the Christ-child – free from the commercial trappings – is clearly the visitation of a person. Since we could not reach Him, He came to us.

The Protestant reformer Martin Luther, in a moment of anger, once said: “If I were God, I would smash this wicked world into a million pieces.” But the God of sacred scriptures “so loved the world, He gave His only Son” to make its redemption possible.

On every level you can hear the lament of modern life as we reflect on the birth of the Christ child. It’s a fundamental lesson of God’s presence. Light and love is in our midst. Though imperceptible at times, the darkness shall not put it out.

Ours is a visited planet. God, our Creator, has not left us to meander in the drudgery of our guilt and despair. He comes to us dressed in “swaddling clothes”. No longer is God, a transcendent, ineffable deity – but He comes to us.

James Cone, in his theology of “Black Liberation”, notes that God’s incarnational presence in the Christ event changes our theology and our anthropology.

God no longer participates in human history by long distance, but concretely, directly and on the spot. He no longer “was” or “shall be”. “God is,” says Brother Cone and it is the “isness” of God that compels us to look differently at truth, justice and righteousness.

The birth of the Christ child means that God will not give up on the world he created until its redemption is complete. The birth of Christ, tells us the depth to which God will go…

The great tragedy of modern life is we are too busy to hear the announcement of Angels. Modernity makes no accommodation for lowly shepherds with a fresh experience about the holy child. The wisest among us are drowning in the ocean of their secular wisdom because they are stuck at Herod’s palace and are lost to the Christ of history.