It seemed a strange paradox yesterday morning in Jonsson Room 315 at Baylor Hospital. Bruce [McIver] and I were talking about Christmas and death all in one breath. Minutes later, the paradox would be resolved … for him. That we should lose him right at this season, right at this time of great joy is not really so hard as you might think. He was a man of great joy, Bruce, albeit with more than his share of sorrows, too. He would have appreciated our predicament today, trying to figure out how to celebrate and commiserate at the same time. That’s life, he would say; and that’s the point. You don’t get one thing without the other. None of us does.

Bruce had a colorful bruise on his forehead when I got to him a few minutes after he died. He had fallen and hit the bedside table after his heart failed. I’ll always think of it as an “end table” from now on. As he lay lifeless in the bed and I imagined him full of life with God, I remembered him asking me just moments before, What are you preaching on tomorrow? It’s about the paradox of Christmas, I told him. Shepherds and angels both there. I’m calling it “The Gory and the Glory.” He smiled and nodded. We don’t think of it that way much, do we? he said. No, we don’t. Little did I know how much we’d be thinking about it soon enough.

The paradoxes of Christmas are all ‘round us. This Christmas, we wonder why Bruce couldn’t go to glory without that gory bruise? This is the way of things, I guess— indignity coupled with dignity.

Think of Mary, though. Why would the glorious God of heaven choose to burst into the world from within a young girl’s body instead of bursting forth from the skies? In one of his holy sonnets, the poet John Donne speaks to Mary of the paradox that the Creator of the world should be enclosed within her: “[Y]ea thou art now/ Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Fathers mother;/ Thou’hast light in darke; and shutst in little room,/ Immensity cloystered in thy deare wombe.” [Annunciation, in “La Corona,” The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne (The Modern Library, 1994), p. 231.] The immensity of all being—cloistered in the womb of a young girl from a hick town in Palestine. Is there no depth to which God will not stoop?

And then there’s the stable. It’s probably a house more than a stable. The way such houses were constructed, the ground floor was where the family would bring their animals in for the night to protect them from the cold and keep them safe. The heat from their bodies and excrement would rise upstairs to where the family slept. Since there was no room for Mary and Joseph to sleep in anyone’s upstairs room, they stayed downstairs with the animals. A fitting place for the Son of God to be born, don’t you think? Sure.

When we lived in Mobile, Kim actually changed obstetricians so that Princess Jillian could be born in Providence Hospital instead of Mobile Infirmary. Not that it was so much better a hospital, but it was newer, nicer, and nearer. Understand, this is a woman who owns four vacuum cleaners! She’d have had that stable smelling of ammonia before baby Jesus came along.

God chose to be born in the most scandalous place among us. How very gauche of God! How very unworthy of the glory of God to be found among the gory mess of a stable. As poet Luci Shaw puts it: Small-folded in a warm dim female space/ the Word stern-sentenced to be nine months dumb/ infinity walled in a womb until the next enormity/ the Mighty, after submission to a woman’s pain/ helpless on a barn-bare floor/ first-tasting bitter earth.

Distasteful. And then there’s our text today, the contrast between angels and shepherds. Now the angels I get. A choir of the heavenly host praising God and singing, Gloria in excelsis Deo! Nice touch there, don’t you know?! Not a sour note, all of them on key, four-part harmony, nothing false or falsetto about it. But consider the audience. Shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night. Now these are not the kind of people who could have fully appreciated the glory of it. They wouldn’t have known Handel from Hank Williams. Angels serving up a choral Gloria for them would be like putting Chateaubriand in front of someone who thinks chicken-fried steak is a gourmet dish. Shepherds were social outcasts. Nobody ever took the time to read their mothers’ family Christmas brag letters. They were more comfortable with sheep than people. They slipped into town by night when people didn’t have to smell them coming. And yet these are the first who get the word from on high that the Child Savior is born to them. Unto you is born this day…. Unto them! What was God thinking?

Maybe this: maybe that we have to rethink our notion of divinity altogether to account for a God who leaves no one out of his loving work. From the highest heavens to the lowest earth, God is at work to redeem the world and win it back from its darkness and death by the power of his light and life.

But to do that, God has to get right in the middle of things. Like a New York City firefighter plunging into the buildings of the World Trade Center and putting himself at mortal risk, God enters into the very human predicament and holds nothing back. God will redeem the world from the inside out. God will come to know you and me in our struggles of the flesh by putting on flesh and wrestling it to the death.

The Feast of the Incarnation is one of our names for Christmas. Incarnation is one of those big-church words worth knowing. Here’s how you remember it. Ready? Carno is the Latin for “meat.” Sort of like the Spanish chile con carne, a spicy stew with meat. We use the word carnivores for certain kinds of dinosaurs and teenage boys. Meat-eaters, consumers of flesh. On the lighter side is the lovely carnation, so called because it is the color of flesh. So Christmas is all about God con carne, God with meat on. [David J. Lose, “Preaching the Scandal and the Glory of the Incarnation,” in Journal for Preachers (Advent 2001): 31.] It’s the enfleshing of what was pure spirit. We are talking here about a carnal God. Which is scandalous, really.

I mean, do you really want to think of God down on your level, subject to all the aches and pains and temptations and urges you go through? Many have rejected Christianity for just this reason. The early church heretic, Marcion, believed in a sanitized version of Christ that wouldn’t have him tainted by the kinds of feelings and thoughts people like him had. Jesus was merely the bearer of the pure divine Word that would lift us up to the seventh heaven and help us leave behind this earthly life if we would simply hear him and free ourselves from the flesh.

But a wild and wily theologian named Tertullian took him on and minced no words. In his treatise called “On the Flesh of Christ,” he dared Marcion this way: Start with the birth itself, the object of aversion, and run through your catalogue: the filth of the generative seeds within the womb, of the bodily fluid and blood; the loathsome, curdled lump of flesh which has to be fed for nine months off the same muck. Describe the womb—expanding daily, heavy, troubled, uneasy even in sleep …. Undoubtedly, he says, you are also horrified at the infant, the infant which has been brought into the world together with its after birth. And here’s where he gets him and us both: You repudiate such a veneration of nature, do you…? But how were you born? [Lose: 31-32.]

What Tertullian is saying is that what’s behind our inability to love and embrace the gory glory of the God-man born in the stable—the screaming Child with bodily urges that we call the Wonderful Counselor, the mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace—what’s behind all that is not that we don’t want to love and embrace God, but that we don’t want to love and embrace ourselves. We can’t love a carnal God because we hate or are afraid of the carnal being of beings made in the image of God.

In the brilliant French film Amelie, all the characters are one step removed from personal engagement with life. They carry on routines that keep them from putting themselves into real relationships. Amelie’s parents seldom touch her or each other. A painter, who never leaves his apartment, only copies Renoirs. A woman landlord pines away for her late husband who left her for another, leaving her an illegitimate widow. A young man collects and treasures discarded photographs of people and keeps them in a family album. Another woman uses hypochondria to keep people away. A man is insanely jealous of any woman he has gotten close to. And the lead character, Amelie, loves to skim stones on the water. And just that way she tries to stay on the surface of things. She is a kind of God figure, Amelie, the way we are prone to think of God anyway. She gets her kicks by anonymously interfering in people’s lives— sometimes to bless them and bring them surprising gifts, sometimes to frustrate them and disorder their world. Everyone in the world of the movie seems allergic to intimacy, until finally in one astonishing moment, Amelie allows herself to risk love in the flesh. And the instant she does, everything and everyone change. They find life original and new. They find the power to live with open hearts.

This is what God has done in the Incarnation, in the coming to be among us in Jesus. God has ruined all our safe definitions of Godness, has taken on flesh and risked it all for the sake of love. But God had to take the initiative if we were to be reached. God had to come to us as one of us if we were to be healed.

Robert Fulghum is the best-selling author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. In another of his books, though, he tells the tender story of his own family secret. Forty-three years ago he was in love, and his passions got the better of him before the appointed time. Growing up in Waco, Texas, in those days did not leave you feeling you had many choices of what to do with a premature pregnancy. Remarkably, they hid the four-month-old pregnancy until after the wedding and headed together for graduate school on the West Coast. She had a baby girl, and they immediately put her up for adoption. Robert and his wife had two boys of their own before adopting a little girl. Not hard to figure out why. For years they suffered secretly the shame and loss of the child they let go. They would celebrate her birthday together, and then after they divorced years later, Robert would continue to remember her with tender rituals. He longed to know what happened to her, wondered how she was doing, marked the dates she would be starting school, reaching puberty, getting her driver’s license, graduating from high school. Even as time and social theory opened adoption reconciliation, he knew he could not reach out to her. She would have to find him.

When his book put him in the headlines, his daughter’s adoptive parents recognized the name and asked her if she would like to meet her father. The day they finally met was the closing of old wounds with a band-aid of love. In the awkwardness of the moments before they parted, his grown-up little girl took a piece of paper and put his hand on it. She traced the outline of his fingers, and then she gave him the pen to trace her hand over his. The two hands overlapping on the paper, they wrote their initials on the thumbs together, as if to tie them together. She left the paper with him. [From Beginning to End: The Rituals of Our Lives (Villard Books: 1995), pp 70-78.]

My friends, only the Christ Child can save and heal whatever in you is lost or wounded. He has come in the flesh and placed his hand on top of yours. Your destinies are forever tied. He has written his name next to yours forever.