Hurtling Heavenly Meteorite

Christmas is a glorious season. I don’t mean the warm and romantic idea of having the family round and curling up with presents opened to eat some more gorgeous food a few hours after a huge meal, with the lights on the tree and a few candles gently lighting the sense of rest and pamperedness. I am thinking of the depth of the Biblical story itself. It is simply mind blowing in the significance of the vastness of God almighty confined to a bundle of helpless skin and bones in the edge of a town, deep in the heart of nowhere. A teenage girl is in labour with the Creator of the Universe! It is a moment of great yearning ended as the promised Messiah finally appears. It is a hurtling heavenly meteorite that crashes into the ways of the world and knocks them on their head. A king emptied of glory for manure. A most adored girl becoming tainted with illegitimacy. A humble carpenter having to get his head around his connection with God and village slut. It is beyond imagining.

The first thing that the hurtling heavenly meteorite does when it hits the earth is to upset the equilibrium of love and the earning thereof. In a world where the first are first this collision knocks that idea on its head. Here is a picture of the Primate of the entire Universe becoming the most impoverished and insignificant wee nobody in the whole world. Hidden away from news papers, riches and safety the first becomes last. Why? To show us a new regime where love is not earned in either status or accurately correct belief systems. The first to find themselves embracing a new relationship between finite humanity and a Holy God are a few country bumpkin shepherds and mystical stargazers from a foreign culture and religion. Suddenly the God whose name could not up until this point even be uttered can be approached without orthodoxy, liturgy or passing holy tests. When it lands on its head we find a world where you can be loved as you are. It will take a long time to come to terms with such a bizarre and unnatural concept. The hurtling heavenly meteorite brings the need for a whole new way of thinking and responding to God.

That is in many ways the caress of the meteorite. We can stand tall and fall in behind the shepherds to know that God is now approachable. When the baby grows to manhood and dies on a cross we will find that the curtain in the temple is torn in two and we can now boldly approach the throne of grace with boldness and confidence. The message of the Calvary cross is embedded in the shunt of the hurtling heavenly meteorite some thirty three years earlier. As Bruce Cockburn sang in Cry Of A Tiny Babe:

“Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Sending the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe.”

But there is a more crashing impact. Not only do we have to reassess our connections with God in the light of this cosmic collision. Everything about who we are and how we live gets tossed to the ground and lands head over heels. As we would find those traces of the truth of the cross in Christ’s birth so we find the hints and rumours and clues to everything he would teach about God’s alternative way to live. A provocative question to ask this Christmas is how we are now living in the light of the hurtling heavenly meteorite. Where do we see in our lives as we try to live with friends and family and society how the day to day decisions and actions are upside down because of the cry of a tiny babe?

Let us see how our world is before it gets smashed into by the baby of this revolution. In a recent interview with the Observer Music Magazine Jack White from The White Stripes made an astute indictment of the spirit of his age. ““It’s pathetic in America. Everyone thinks they can have whatever they want. They’re really spoiled and gluttonous; they always want more and bigger and better and all that jazz, and the fastest and the newest toy – and it’s not necessary. People in America, especially don’t want anyone to tell them that there’s any sort of rules, or limitations. They don’t want, “You can’t do that,” or “You can only have this”. Everyone wants to eat their dessert first.”

One of my former students and good friend, Rosie Cowan, wrote a book on a Black political thinker, with a theological soul, called Cornell West. She quotes West’s analysis of America which is remarkably close to the less academic White. West suggests that “America is a hotel civilization…obsessed with comfort and convenience and contentment.” This generation is constantly attempting to ignore its pain and the reality of the world to live away from the streets in a place where rock band Radiohead would suggest has no alarms and no surprises. Rosie says what West realized America needed were “truth tellers…who will force difficult issues into the American consciousness and force the nation to confront pain.”

This is the generation that we live in. Paul got pretty close to it in his second letter to Timothy (2 Tim 3 v 1-5): But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God– having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.

We need to get out of our hotels and demands for what we think are our rights. It is time to break the chain that everyone treats everyone else as their waiter bringing room service. We are to be the truth tellers not just in calling the world to the travesty of I, me, mine but in living a revolutionary alternative of truth. There is a deep rooted imbalance and bias towards selfishness that Timothy could see would come. If we want to live a life worthy of our calling and if we have any desire to really and truly a disciple of Christ by taking up our crosses daily and following him then we will have to bring the hurtling heavenly meteorite on and invite it to smash to pieces how it is and make us into who we can be.

The way it can now be, a vision of the future Kingdom, is laid out for us in that Christmas story. The characters in the nativity scene, the peculiar treasures that adorn our Christmas cards are all visual prophecies of how we should now live to be an antithesis of our peers and an antidote to the diseased self-centred natures raging around us.

The baby Jesus of course seem the obvious example and Paul will later spell it out in his letter to the Philippians 2 v 5-8:“Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death - even death on a cross!”

As Max Lucado so poetically expresses it in God Came Near: “The Omnipotent, in one instant, made himself breakable. He who had been spirit became pierceable. He who was larger than the universe became an embryo. And he who sustains the world with a word chose to be dependent upon the nourishment of a young girl. God as a fetus. Holiness sleeping in a womb. The creator of life being created. God was given eyebrows, elbows, two kidneys, and a spleen. He stretched against the walls and floated in the amniotic fluids of his mother. God had come near.”

For Christ this is the ultimate sacrificing. He was in heaven where all was golden and glorious and then he is in a teenagers womb and born to a life of limitations and danger and vulnerability. It would be a wonderfully inspiring little story if it wasn’t that it is not a story to read and feel good about. This is the model for our living. Jesus himself said to his followers, “As the Father has sent me so I am sending you.” As Christ gave up all that he had a right to in order to share God’s love and salvation with those who had no right to it so we must seek the same sacrificial lifestyle that we might reach out to the world that needs love and salvation.

Mary and Joseph are immediate examples of how humans need the same attitude as that of Christ. Mary has to be prepared for the loss of reputation, for the sneers and the malicious misunderstandings about her pregnancy. Here is a life with plans for marriage and suddenly she is asked to let go of her dreams and her rights in order that other people might be served through her obedience. In the end it is all people everywhere that the forgoing of her selfish rights effects.

Joseph too has to let go of what he wanted, what he wished for. He has to do deal with a lot of confusion inside his own soul. Around him people are wondering had he gone mad. First of all why had he not got rid of this girl of ill repute and disgrace? Secondly what was he doing standing by her and loving her no matter what? He went from a secure carpenter’s job in Nazareth to Bethlehem and then on to a foreign land. The heavenly meteorite hurtling knocked Joseph as well as Mary off their feet, threw their lives into disarray as they took up their crosses daily to follow Christ ironically be nurturing him, teaching him to walk and talk and being parents to God!

And so it comes back to us. The heavenly meteorite hurtles towards us this Christmas. This story should be crashing into our souls and jarring and jolting our lives out of the comfort and complacency into a life that gives itself up for the benefit of others, lays down its rights to redeem society and our neighbours, even knocking us so far off kilter that we will be mad enough to love enemies. There is no easy or comfortable way. Ask Jesus, ask Mary, ask Joseph. When the heavenly meteorite hurtles into us it leaves carnage and from that carnage is born a whole new world. Maybe the prayer that we need to pray is the prayer at the end of U2’s How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb an album that has is packed full of prayerful intent:

“Take this heart
Take this heart
Take this heart
And make it break.”

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