God So Loved the World

You could more easily catch a hurricane in a shrimp net that you can understand the wild, relentless, passionate, uncompromising, pursuing the love of God made present in the manger.

- Brennan Manning

We talk a lot about the omnipotence of the nativity; God’s amazing plan coming together under the bright twinkling light of that Bethlehem star. But do we recognize the love God poured out to make all these things take place?

Some of the most-memorized verses in the Bible, John 3:16-17, say,

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

He gave up Himself. For us. For you. For me.

And in order for us to be saved through Him, God chose that Jesus would died a human death. But first, He needed to have a human life. Jesus needed to be one of us, in order to show us the way. Like the allegory of the birds stuck out in the snow (see post from December 22, 2011), God loved us so much that he could not leave us alone in our own flailing. This is the Gospel 101, yet during Advent, it is easy to focus on the details of the Christmas story rather than the reason that it happened at all.

We will never understand the mystery of the Incarnation; nor will we ever understand the mind of God. But what we can grasp is the narrative. God shaped the Wisdom of cosmos into a tiny babe. It is His story we can know. It is His story we should know.

If, like me, God’s love sometimes feels distant, take this Advent season to recount the way God showed His love and faithfulness to His people recorded in Scripture. Before too long, you will see yourself in the faces of God’s beloved.

The manger didn’t have to happen. But that’s what the Lord of all Creation chose. And that was love.

The New Redeeming Song

When I was younger, I was introduced to the writings of Calvin Miller through a little red Advent devotional we would read each evening. Later, I read The Singer trilogy, and my appreciation for his perspective on faith and the mystery of Christ grew deeper.

Below is a quote from the first installment of the allegorical and poetic narrative about the Earthmaker (God) and his Son, the Singer/Troubadour. I have reprinted the lines just as they are in the book so you can get a little idea of its poetry cadence.

And He said, "Give me your vast
infinity
My son; I'll wrap it in a bit
of clay.
Then enter Terra microscop
-ically
To love the little souls who
weep away
Their lives." "I will," I said,
"set Terra free."

And then I fell asleep and all
awareness fled.
I felt my very being shrinking
down.
My vastness ebbed away. In dwind-

ling dread,
All size decayed. The universe

around
Drew back. I woke upon a tiny
bed
Of straw in one of Terra's
smaller towns.

And now the great reduction
has begun:
Earthmaker and his Troubadour
are one.
And here's the new redeeming
melody--
The only song that can set
Terra free.

- Calvin Miller, from The Singer

A few years ago, I included the following verse from on my Christmas card. It occurs later in the narrative, and it seemed like an odd choice, at the time. But I had just finished reading The Singer, and I was swept up in the beautiful imagery of Jesus as the One whose very being brought forth the song of redemption--in just the way we would understand it.