in flesh

Eventually, we stopped buying gifts for the foster kids.  Sometime around Thanksgiving the ads would pop up on the radio, the Giving Trees would show up in the grocery stores, and church groups would hold their annual toy drives.  By Christmas Eve, my parents would have received a few industrial-sized garbage sacks full of brightly wrapped gifts to put under the waiting tree, all marked with paper tags such as:  Girl, 2 yrs, doll; or Boy, mittens, small.    We always held back a few things for the children’s birthdays or other special occasions, but still, the generosity of a kind community filled our Christmas celebration with an embarrassment of riches.

That day, after a late breakfast , mom would bag up the mountain of paper and bows and dad would make bottles and change diapers and they’d send over-stimulated little ones off to naps.   Over the next weeks and months my parents would see those same children through countless bottles, boxes of diapers, doctor’s appointments, therapy appointments, visits with family, adoption proceedings and sometimes, a return to their birth homes.  Every day for over 20 years, my parents gave their presence to a succession of small, wounded children who had nowhere else to go.

Christmas is the time of year we rehearse the Incarnation, a word that literally means “in flesh.”  A word that tells us God didn’t deny Himself a couple of mochas and drop a festively wrapped doll in the toy drive barrel.  Rather, the God of Heaven stripped down, slid from Mary’s womb into the dank, cold air of earth, and found a home in the waiting arms of a tired, scared man and woman; consenting to partake of the everyday substance of the people He loves.

The Incarnation relentlessly forces us to make room in our lives for Christ.  Jesus is not just an idea, He is a living, breathing Person who takes up real space.  When He enters the world lives are interrupted and rearranged: first Mary, then Joseph, then the disciples, then Israel, then the world.  As Christ indwells us, we learn to practice living the Incarnation with others.  We must make space, move around our priorities, open doors, shuffle time and even disrupt the most intimate structures of our lives in order to become the in flesh representation of Christ on earth.

This season, every trip to the grocery store, every turn of the radio dial, every Salvation Army bell ringer reminds us that there are good people in the world willing to give something, to make the world a bit brighter for others.  But the Incarnation demands that we ask ourselves if we are as willing as Mary and Joseph to disrupt our whole lives and welcome the work of Christ.  How many of us are willing to live the day to day Incarnation as people like my parents have done?  That ceaseless, grinding reality that comes after the gift is unwrapped and the toys are put away?

During Christmas, while the images of Jesus’ presence and mission are on full display, we can make this more than just another celebration or a once-a-year giving fest.  We can allow it to become a yearly reorienting, a chance to assess whether or not we have truly lived the Incarnation in our own space and time as Christ modeled for us in His coming and His living.

Some ideas for incarnational living:

Become a foster parent.

Adopt a foster child.

Rethink hospitality.

Commit to working with the homeless.

Build a house.

Make new friends.

Adopt a brother or sister.

Adopt a grandparent.

Adopt a family.

Bring a meal.

Grow one.

Teach someone to read.

Get radical with giving.