Right on Time

The Latecomer’s Guide to Advent: Week 3

Every nativity scene I’ve ever seen is a lie.

Not theologically, exactly. The basic elements are there, baby, manger, Mary, Joseph, shepherds, maybe some wise men even though they showed up way later. But the vibe is completely wrong. The nativity sets on our mantles are clean, they’re peaceful, and they’re glowing. Mary looks serene, not like a teenager who just pushed a human out of her body in a barn. The animals are decorative. The straw is arranged nice and neat. Nobody is covered in afterbirth or animal waste. There’s no blood, no screaming, no panic about what to do when the baby comes and you’re surrounded by livestock instead of midwives.

We’ve turned the incarnation into some sort of Thomas Kinkade painting. Soft lighting. Warm tones. Everything in its place. The kind of scene you’d want on a Christmas card, not the kind of scene that would get you reported to child protective services.

The real story is so much messier than we’ve made it, and I think that’s the point.

The Scandal We’ve Sanitized

Here’s what actually happened…an unwed teenage girl got pregnant under circumstances that would have gotten her stoned to death in her community. Her fiancé almost left her. Then the Roman Empire demanded she travel while nine months pregnant for a census that existed purely to count bodies for taxation. When she and Joseph finally arrived in Bethlehem, there was no room for them. No family willing to take them in. No inn with space. So they ended up in a stable, which is a nice word for a cave or shed where animals were kept.

That’s where Jesus was born. In a place that smelled like manure. Mary probably gave birth on dirt or straw that had been soiled by oxen and sheep. She wrapped her newborn in whatever cloth they had and laid him in a feeding trough because that’s what you do when you have literally nowhere else to put a baby.

The first people to visit weren’t religious leaders or wealthy benefactors. They were shepherds, men who were ritually unclean according to Jewish purity laws because they worked with animals all day and couldn’t participate in regular temple worship. They were the social outcasts. The working poor. And God sent angels to them first.

This is the story we’ve turned into porcelain figurines.

God Commits to the Mess

God didn’t wait for ideal conditions. God didn’t show up in the temple or the palace or even a nice middle-class home. God showed up in the mess. On purpose.

The incarnation is God’s refusal to wait for us to get our act together before showing up. Mary was a teenager. Joseph wasn’t ready. He almost divorced her quietly. Bethlehem wasn’t ready, they literally had no room. The shepherds definitely weren’t ready. They were just doing their job when angels showed up and wrecked their night shift. Nobody was ready, and God came anyway.

This is the gift I’m learning to receive after years in evangelicalism that taught me I had to be ready, had to be right, had to have my theology sorted and my life presentable before God could use me. The incarnation says no. God doesn’t wait for you to be ready. God meets you in the mess. In the animal waste. In the scandal. In the places where there’s no room and no preparation and everything is falling apart.

Emmanuel means “God with us.” Not “God waiting for us to get it together.” Not “God available once we’re clean enough.” God with us. In the mess. Right now.

Permission to Celebrate Messily

A lot of people don’t know what to do with Christmas anymore. The old traditions feel tainted. You want to honor something sacred about this season, but you’re not sure what that looks like when you’ve deconstructed most of what you were taught.

Here’s what I’m learning…you don’t have to have it figured out. You don’t have to attend the Christmas Eve service if that space doesn’t feel safe yet. You don’t have to pretend everything is neat and resolved when it’s not.

God showed up in a stable. God chose an unwed teenager and poor shepherds. God bypassed every religious and political power structure and went straight to the margins. If that’s where God chose to arrive, then maybe that’s where God still shows up most clearly, not in the sanitized, respectable versions of faith, but in the messy, uncertain, still-figuring-it-out spaces.

Maybe the most honest way to celebrate the incarnation is to stop pretending we have it all together. To admit that we’re unprepared and uncertain and still healing. To acknowledge that we’re not in the clean nativity scene, we’re in the actual stable, surrounded by mess, trying to make sense of what it means that God would choose to show up here.

The incarnation doesn’t ask you to be ready. It invites you to notice that God is already here. In the uncertainty about what comes next. In the stable, not the palace.

Christmas Eve Eve

It’s December 23rd. Christmas Eve eve. Tomorrow night might mean gathering with family and navigating theological land mines. It might mean a church service that could feel meaningful or could reopen old wounds. It might mean staying home and trying to figure out what’s sacred when you’re not doing the traditional thing.

Whatever you’re doing, wherever you are, prepared or unprepared, healing or hurting, certain or completely lost, you don’t need to be cleaned up for God to show up with you. That’s what the stable teaches us. That’s what the scandal of an unwed teenage mother teaches us. That’s what smelly shepherds as the first witnesses teach us.

God didn’t show up when everything was ready. God showed up in the mess. And that’s where God still is, not waiting for you to get your act together, but already present in whatever messy, uncertain, beautiful chaos you’re living in right now.

The nativity scenes lie. The real story is so much better. Because the real story says you don’t have to be perfect or prepared or even particularly religious for God to meet you right where you are.

Emmanuel. God with us. In the stable. In the mess.

Right on time.

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