Christmas in a barn

Second Sunday of Advent, December 4, 2022

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Christmas in a barn

Welcome one another, then, as Christ welcomes you, for the glory of God. May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to think in harmony with one another.

Promise, our Compassion-sponsored child in Uganda, became a handsome teenager since we “met” him via Compassion in 2019. Although we could communicate much more than we do, we send letters to each other now and then. He will be fifteen years old on March 31 next year. I wonder how Promise is spending this weekend, where he goes to church, what he does in the afternoons, who he hangs out with. I suppose he has some school homework, maybe math? I’m guessing he likes some kind of sports, maybe basketball? Is he a runner, like some of his famous countrymen?

Financial support is a small way of expressing our love for Promise. Often I forget to write, even when he writes us first. I don’t think about him very often, or pray for him. Clearly, God’s love for Promise cannot depend on me. God’s love is different in so many ways from what shred of it we share with Promise or, really, with anyone. From an article with the wonderful title, “A Gospel of the Ground” by Daniel Stulac in Plough Magazine, here is an interesting thought:

The Bible is clear: God loved the world in such a way that he gave to us his only Son (John 3:6). God loves the world with a passion that exceeds our own. God loves this planet and all its many inhabitants. When we fail to appreciate that God is human with us, that he made himself nothing and is the dust of the earth with us, the gospel comes to be more about psychology, more about feelings and fantasies, more about escaping, and less about God and God’s deep and abiding love for his material creation.

Most of the folks I spend time with at church think of Jesus mostly as God, and only occasionally, as man. I fall into that trap too. If I were a social-activist Christian I’d think of God as mostly man, and only occasionally, as God. Either way, we know better. I know better. But I forget, and it affects my prayer and my side of the relationship with God. Here’s another part of Daniel’s article:

The gospel begins with a birth. Christians claim that the God of the universe has made a remarkable intrusion into the human predicament. The God of the Precambrian soup, the God of the Carboniferous forests, the God of the Cretaceous and the Pleistocene, the God of the triceratops and the wooly mammoth: that same God, Christians say, was born in a barn.

Margaret Wise Brown wrote children’s books, sometimes lived like a jetsetter, gave up much of her life to care for her angry friend with leukemia, and kept finding her way back to the God-man who was born in a barn. In her own book about Jesus’ birth, Christmas in the Barn, here are her words:

In a big warm barn in an ancient field

The oxen lowed, the donkey squealed.

The horses stomped, the cattle sighed.

And quietly the daylight died

 in the sunset of the west.

And a star rose brighter than all stars in the sky.

 

The field mice scampered in the hay

And two people who had lost their way

Walked into the barn at the end of the day

And they were allowed to sleep in the hay

“Because there was no room in the inn.”

 

The little mice rustled in the sweet dry grass

Near the lambs and the kine and the ox and the ass.

The horses pawed the golden straw,

The little donkey brayed, “Hee Haw.”

And there they were all safe and warm

All together in that ancient barn.

 

When hail – the first wail of a newborn babe reached the night

Where one great star was burning bright

And shepherds with their sheep

Are come to watch him sleep.

What child is this who is born here

Where the oxen stomp and peer,

Away in a manger, no crib for his bed,

What is child is this who lays down his sweet head?

 

In the big barn in the ancient field

The little child sleeps, the donkey squeals

The star goes down

Yet the wise men stay to see the dawning Christmas Day.

The child was sleeping in the hay

And there they were

All safe and warm

All together in that ancient barn.

My memories of Dad’s dairy barn in the bleak mid-winter come alive. The cows’ breath warms the air as we turn on the nighttime lights. Our fly specked radio plays Christmas music and broadcasts news from Lowell Thomas. All safe and warm, yes we are.

On this day a shoot will sprout from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a bud shall blossom. The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, and his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

(Isaiah 11, Psalm 72, Romans 15, Luke 3, Matthew 3)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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