Journey Toward Christmas, Part 1: ‘Glory to God in the Highest’

I want to tell you about a vision I've had during the season of Advent. This is not a thunder-and-lightning vision; it's more like musing, where I go to the real stable. I walk up to where the manger is, where the baby lies in the manger, and I want to just sit down, take the infant's hand and just sit there.

Grasping Eternity

I don't want to leave. I want to just stop and ponder what I am beholding. If you've ever held a peaceful baby, you know what calming it can bring to the soul. It's like solace is being communicated to you through that baby's flesh. It's quite a remarkable experience.

As a new father, this was certainly not something I was prepared for: that when they actually handed that baby to me, something miraculous happened. And in my vision, to hold the hand of the infant Jesus, and to know as the poet said, "heaven in little space abides there," was a profoundly moving moment.

In the simplest of acts, taking the hand of the infant Christ is in some ways a reminder that if I am, in fact, who I say I am as a Christian, just as surely in my soul as it takes place in my mind's eye, I'm holding the hand of that baby even more surely than that. There is a union in my soul between my own humanity at its worst – and at its best, in and connected to God. And that is a decision that God made first, long before I ever could, to call me as his own and to take me and to literally unite me spirit to Spirit with the Godhead. That is more unfathomable than anything I can even begin to imagine.

But even that is dwarfed by the fact that somehow, I'm invited to come to the humility of a stable and there ponder "Glory to God in the Highest." It shakes my internal logic to be invited to do such a thing. Angels, yes. Glory, yes. Stable? Maybe if you're a horseman. But no, it's not the place where I would go to "veiled in flesh the Godhead see."

Embracing New Life

But that is where God has invited you and me to go. Because you see, there's a challenge in this tableau. Not only does it say, in a way that brings extraordinary comfort, that in the hand of an infant, I'm grasping eternity. But just as Jesus, as it says in Philippians, laid aside all that was rightfully his, and took on the form of a slave to come in the body of an infant (see Phil. 2:6-7), so too, if I am to take the hand of that infant, I am invited to say no to the things I would want and find new solace in a path I would not have chosen for myself.

And yet that is, in fact, the path that leads to eternal life. The humility of the stable is that Jesus comes, God in the flesh, to invite us to follow him in the most unlikely places. In taking his hand, I say yes to a life no longer on my own terms. This means the humility of God that we see in the stable is in fact meant to be incorporated into us, so that what is true now in us is a kind of profound humility.

Because I was allowed to take the hand of that infant through no qualification of my own, I'm invited to keep that hand in my hand and be taken, guided, sometimes driven, sometimes even against my will, taken to places that I would not normally even want to go, to experience both glory and grief that I never would have expected, life no longer on my terms.

And so long as I can take that hand, or better yet, so long as I can know that hand is grasping mine and chooses not to let me go, what does the scripture say? "I will never leave you or forsake you" (Heb. 13:5b). "No one will snatch [you] out of my hand" (John 10:28b).

We'll explore more about what happens after that in my next post.

How does having the opportunity to take the hand of the Savior impact your life? Share this blog and your response on Twitter. Please include my username, @revgregbrewer.

(This post is an adaption of Bishop Brewer's sermon on Dec. 24, 2019, at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida.)

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.