As any little child will tell you, God is big. Bigger than big and bigger than all bigness. God is all powerful and all knowing. He made us and everything and everyone we have ever known. He even made you.
And he made you out of love. A love so boundless that, in the fullness of time, he came to live among us, to feel our pains and know our joys, to become a man like us, in all things but sin.
He let go of all the glory and the power and the bigness of being God, and became little out of love for us.
Little—like a baby in the arms of its mother, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. Is there any more helpless than a baby? Too little to speak, to walk or even to feed himself. But is there anything more powerful?
I remember watching seeing a clip from this new dystopian movie a while back in which the world has become infertile and babies are no longer born. Everything falls apart, because there is no future, just an authoritarian jungle in which everyone fights to preserve their advantage in endless war.
But then, for the first time in years, a single child emerges from her mother’s womb and begins to cry, at the sound of which soldiers lay down their guns and a broken world grows silent in the presence of innocent life. The child does nothing but cry, but she changes everything in the process.
That’s what babies do. It’s why you watch endless cute baby videos on Youtube and why a baby entering in a room immediately becomes the center of attention.
Which is why the Son of the Living God through whom all things were made, chooses to empty himself of all power and glory and take the form of a puking little baby in a manger of straw: that he might hach us to love one another as he has loved us.
And where does that baby sleep? “Away in a manger, no crib for his bed, the little Lord Jesus lies down his sweet head.”
The English word manger, by the way, is found only in Saint Luke’s Gospel. In Greek it is phatnē, and it means a feeding trough for animals.
A feed box which baby Jesus uses as his throne, from , from which the Son of God receives the worship of shepherds and wise men.
But it’s still a feed box, a feed box from which we are fed…for the little body which rests in the hay is the same Body which will be offered for our salvation on the Cross and which we will
receive in Holy Communion, that he might live in us and we might live in him.
And all this happened because there was no room for them in the inn. Did you ever wonder why there was a big no occupancy sign out in front of the Bethlehem inn? Maybe there was a big party going on or a convention coming into town or a big dinner at which they would celebrate until late in the night.
No room in the Bethlehem Inn. But what about tonight? Is there room in your heart to receive that little baby? Is there room for him, amidst all your cares and your needs and preoccupations or does the fear, the anger and the aching needs for success crowd him out?
Well, you’re here, and that’s a start…You gaze on him, you sing the old songs and you hear the old stories, but do you make room for him in your heart?
But I want to warn you, this is very dangerous business, this opening of our hearts. For if you make room for this this God of ours, who is very very big, he will make you little like himself, and utterly transform you to be loving and holy, and innocent and pure, serving him in this life, and happily living with him in heaven in the next.
It’s as simple as that. And how Blessed are we who are called to this night!
