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Three Cheers | A Christmas Eve Reflection

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From Robert Farrar Capon:

Advent is the church’s annual celebration of the silliness (from selig, which is German for “blessed”) of salvation. The whole thing really is a divine lark. God has fudged everything in our favour: without shame or fear we rejoice to behold his appearing. Yes, there is dirt under the divine Deliverer’s fingernails. But no, it isn’t any different from all the other dirt of history. The main thing is, he’s got the package and we’ve got the trust: Lo, he comes with clouds descending. Alleluia, and three cheers.

What we are watching for is a party. And that party is not just down the street making up its mind when to come to us. It is already hiding in our basement, banging on our steam pipes, and laughing its way up our cellar stairs. The unknown day and hour of its finally bursting into the kitchen and roistering its way through the whole house is not dreadful; it is all part of the divine lark of grace.

God is not our mother-in-law, coming to see whether her wedding-present china has been chipped. He is funny Old Uncle with a salami under one arm and a bottle of wine under the other. We do indeed need to watch for him; but only because it would be such a pity to miss all the fun.

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One Comment

  1. Alyce Dunnewold says:

    ….and one of the funniest things of all about our Christmas story is that we find God through a teen girl, unmarried and pregnant by who knows, and with a boyfriend who had to be mightily convinced to stay with her. Furthermore, she may have ended up giving birth without the support of her female relatives around her, with the first people who happen upon the birth a scruffy group of men with crude and rough ways. Not at all a socially respectable scenario, is it?. Ha, ha, God’s like that.

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