Sights and Insights
Devotion for Dec. 21, 2021
Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. – Ephesians 5:1-2 (NRSV)
Is there a moment that makes you feel like Christmas has truly arrived? Perhaps it is hearing Christmas music, or maybe the smell of cookies baking. For some it may be the feel of getting the corners just right in their gift wrapping. What about seeing houses decorated? On the other hand, perhaps you are more of a traditionalist and want to wait for the liturgical season of Christmas, and so the poinsettias, choir, and candle lighting of Christmas Eve is the moment for you when it truly feels like Christmas. On the other hand, maybe it is not a single moment, but the collection of all of these sensations that tells you that Christmas has arrived.
There are so many different traditions that we follow around Christmas time. We use these traditions to help us feel the sense of the season. Having external signs of the holiday helps us to feel the festival internally. We immerse ourselves in the many traditions, and through doing that it shapes our sense of the season and brings it alive for us. One of the things that strikes me about the various traditions is how, when added together, the form such a multi-sensory experience. Touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound all have their own traditions that mix together richly to give us the layered sense of immersion into the Christmas season.
Such an immersion seems appropriate. After all, Christmas is the Feast of the Incarnation, the celebration of God deeply embedded with us in the multi-sensory experience of being human. God’s embeddedness in the fullness of the world is precisely the claim that gives the Christian message spiritual depth. While Easter is the primary holiday of the Christian faith, the message of resurrection can become a disembodied abstraction of the mythic working of a God distanced from the world. It is the celebration of God’s incarnation that grounds that message in the depths of everyday experience. We are not talking about a distant God who brings resurrected life, but rather the embedded God who is present in the sights, sounds, tastes, textures, and scents of this world. As you immerse yourself in the Christmas atmosphere this year, it is worth taking this immersion as a reminder of God’s rich immersion in the world in the incarnation.