A Christmas meditation: The Bottom-Up Kingdom

A favorite pastor of mine once said that Christmas is the most material of Christian holy days. At the time, this rankled me, because the Mennonite faith tradition emphasizes simplicity and non-materialistic ways of life.

Yes, I thought: Christmas in America is hugely materialistic! And that is a problem.

But she was getting at something different from expensive toys, plastic and ribbons.

The Christmas story itself is earthy. It grounds us in the material realities of human life—male and female, young and old—and in the natural world of animals. No one ascends to heaven in this story. Heaven descends to earth. Matter matters.

Spirituality can sometimes become an excuse to look away from our material lives. Surely things are better over there or up there or at some other time in history.

But the nativity story draws our attention back to the ordinary people, animals and physical matter around us—from straw to stars—and invites us to look closely at the ways they say yes to the here and now.

• Mary says yes to a pregnancy.
• Joseph could have turned his back on Mary but instead he stays with her and marries her.
• The young Mary seeks out her older cousin Elizabeth and finds a surprisingly pregnant confidante.
• Joseph and Mary search for housing in a town not their own and an innkeeper offers them shelter.
• The web of relationships expands to include nomadic shepherds, learned astronomers from far away and farm animals.

These are not easy relationships. Families are strained by pregnancies outside social norms. Relationships are stretched across barriers of class, religion, culture, distance and the threat of jealous kings. This is a story of relationships being stretched—and being held.

I identify with all the stretching and straining in this story: the stretching of hearts, minds and bellies. We feel similar strains today in our relationships across economic class, cultures, religions and nations. At times, the strain can feel like too much.

We long for God to show up—in might and power and salvation. Now. Please.

I would like a top-down God.

What Christmas offers us instead is a bottom-up God.

The angel Gabriel appears not to the powerful but to a small-town girl named Mary and says, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.”

Here and now—in our vulnerability and material realities—is where God appears.

When the angel Gabriel came, he announced a pregnancy. A baby. This feels incredibly fragile. And it is. What was God thinking?

Human babies are utterly dependent on care and relationship. And so Mary and her fiancé Joseph, Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Zechariah, an innkeeper in a distant town, animals with their warm bodies and breath, shepherds keeping watch in the fields and curious, adventuresome astronomers—maybe from Persia—all rally around. They offer faithfulness, friendship, mentorship, music, dancing, sustenance, warmth, worship, gifts and guidance for the safest route home, knowing that danger lay ahead.

They each play their part in this fragile unfolding of a new way of love that will turn the world upside down.

Mary becomes the model of the faith to which God calls all of us: to play our small part in a larger and longer story by saying yes to bringing new life into the world—here and now. Love embodied.

It is now our turn to say yes to God’s invitation to be present in and to the world through us—here and now.

Our ordinary lives matter—old and young, male and female, rich and poor, you and me. God longs to be revealed through us, here and now. Let’s say yes.

— Rebecca Stoltzfus