Thursday, December 5, 2013

An Advent Devotional - Your Invitation to Unwrap the Gift


Your Invitation to Unwrap the Gift
Big and glossy and loud and fast--that’s how this bent-up world turns.
But God, when He comes--He shows up in this fetal ball.


He who carved the edges of the cosmos curved Himself into a fetal ball in the dark, tethered Himself to the uterine wall of a virgin, and lets His cells divide, light splitting all white.
He gave up the heavens that were not even large enough to contain Him and lets Himself be held in a hand.


The mystery so large becomes the Baby so small, and infinite God becomes infant.
The Giver becomes the Gift, this quiet offering.

This heart beating in the chest cavity of a held child, a thrumming heart beating hope, beating change, beating love, beating the singular song you’ve been waiting for--that the whole dizzy planet’s been spinning round waiting for.

Waiting.
Advent.
It comes from the Latin.
It means “coming.”
When you open the pages of Scripture to read of His coming, of this first Advent, before you ever read of the birth of Jesus, you always have the genealogy of Jesus.

It’s the way the Gift unwraps: you have Christ’s family tree...before you have a Christmas tree. If you don’t come to Christmas through Christ’s family tree and you come into the Christmas story just at the Christmas tree—this is hard, to understand the meaning of His coming.

Because without the genealogy of Christ, the limbs of His past, the branches of His family, the love story of His heart that has been coming for you since before the beginning--how does Christmas and its tree stand? Its roots would be sheared. Its meaning would be stunted. The arresting pause of the miracle would be lost.

Because in the time of prophets and kings, the time of Mary and Joseph, it wasn’t your line of credit, line of work, or line of accomplishments that explained who you were. It was your family line. It was family that mattered. Family gives you context, and origin gives you understanding, and the family tree of Christ always gives you hope.
The coming of Christ was right through families of messed-up monarchs and battling brothers, through affairs and adultery and more than a feud or two, through skeletons in closets and cheaters at tables. It was in that time of prophets and kings, the time of Mary and Joseph, that men were in genealogies and women were invisible. But for Jesus, women had names and stories and lives that mattered.

The family tree of Christ startlingly notes not one woman but four. Four broken women--women who felt like outsiders, like has-beens, like never-beens. Women who were weary of being taken advantage of, of being unnoticed and uncherished and unappreciated; women who didn’t fit in, who didn’t know how to keep going, what to believe, where to go--women who had thought about giving up. And Jesus claims exactly these who are wandering and wondering and wounded and worn out as His. He grafts you into His line and His story and His heart, and He gives you His name, His lineage, His righteousness. He graces you with plain grace...
...In this day, this season, miracles will grow within, unfurl, bear fruit.
And the heart that makes time and space for Him to come will be a glorious place.
A place of sheer, radiant defiance in the face of a world careening mad and stressed.
Because each day of Advent, we will actively wait.

We will wait knowing that the remaking of everything has already begun.
We will linger over the lines of the Old Testament stories, tracing the branches of the family tree of Christ, the spreading pageantry of humankind, from Adam to the Messiah--each historical truth pointing to the coming, the already relief, the incarnation of God.
We’ll still and slow and trace each exquisite ornament pictured with these twenty-five Advent narratives, each ornament cut slow out of paper.

And there He is--the exquisite Gift cut and given for us, broken.
The Gift who hung on a Tree for us, cut off.
The Gift who was pierced for you, wounded--your wounded, willing God, who unfolds Himself on the Tree as your endless, greatest Gift.     

 -Ann Voskamp

 
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