So, the day is nearly here, and though you had dreams of picture perfect scenes of peace and goodwill, once again things haven’t quite panned out the way that you planned.
Right now, instead of resting in the comfort and joy that you’ve always heard this season is supposed to bring, you’re neck-deep in conflict and anxiety, stuck in a suffocating sadness that has shown up again like an unwelcome visitor; barging in at a bad time and staying for way too long.
The spaces in your heart and your home lately, are not the stuff of Norman Rockwell paintings or Jimmy Stewart movies or Charlie Brown cartoons.
Things in your world are a flat-out, full-on, all-out mess.
You’re a mess.
But that’s OK.
You’re in some really good company.
The Biblical story of Christmas has never been the sugar-coated, sanitized, Hallmark card one that the consumer culture has sold you since you could remember.
That one moves lots of knickknacks and needle-points and blow-up Nativity scenes.
That one tricks you into believing that love is most clearly expressed through shopping mall gift cards and mail order cheese logs.
That one bombards you every 20 minutes dressed-up as faultless TV commercial families with perfect teeth, great hair, obedient children, and ribbon-wrapped cars in the driveway.
That is not this story.
No, the real Christmas Story is far grittier than that.
It is the story of an illegitimate baby, born in the straw and the mud of a stranger’s kennel.
It is the tale of Divinity, not coming comfortably with power or fanfare or privilege, but harshly spit out into a cold, damp night, thick with the smell of lamp oil and animal dung.
The MESSiah.
You see, God could have come anyway that He pleased, and frankly deserved.
He could have descended on clouds or stepped from spectacular starbursts or thundered from the night sky upon angels’ shoulders, but instead chose to enter through the birth canal of a scared, scandalized teenage girl; delivered into the wooden trough where farm animals had breakfast.
Jesus enters into the MESS.
And for his entire life and ministry, he would remain there in the mess; touching the sore-covered hands of lepers, eating with outcast sinners and disgraceful prostitutes, mixing spit and dirt, washing filthy feet, and bringing healing to the most broken and damaged people on the planet.
With the diseased and the demon-possessed and the poor and the lost he lived, he lingered, and he loved confoundingly.
Wherever MESS was, so was Jesus.
And when his life would end, it would end in such an ugly spectacle; not quietly and clean like a Broadway show death. Jesus would leave battered and bloodied, nailed to a tree, body riddled with thorns and spears and the taunts of the crowd.
Jesus would die in the MESS.
So many holidays (but particularly Christmas), have been hijacked by Hollywood, made into some unattainable image of family perfection and inner well-being; setting-up for all of us some ideal, filtered, glossy Instagram of who we’re supposed to be and what we’re supposed to feel.
For most of us, it seems we never even get close to it.
As the holiday approaches, you may be hopelessly mired in mess; divorce, grief, illness, addiction, fractured relationships, bitterness, depression, and all kinds of junk that simply doesn’t feel like the stuff of the season—but don’t believe it for a second.
Christmas is so very near.
It, or rather He, is closer than you think.
Jesus steps into those places of hurt and dysfunction and damage, and works miracles.
Our mess, is the filthy canvas upon which God paints masterpieces.
Have hope today.
Be encouraged.
MESSiah is here.
Merry ChristMESS.
