Advent is for weirdos (like me).

Advent. At the least, it’s a chance to open little windows on a giant card to discover if you’re the first to get the chocolate. And at its most religious, it is the season in which Christians anticipate the arrival of Jesus. At the centre of Christian faith is a rather weird claim… that in some way, the divine God became uniquely present in the experience of humanness, in a baby born to a young Jewish woman named Mary in the first century.  

In the Christian scriptures this idea is grounded in the Jewish story. A nation waiting for rescue and deliverance. But the ongoing surprise of this story is the movement toward not only the deliverance of a particular people, but toward ‘making all things new’. 

Often Christians use the word ‘incarnation’ to talk about the Jesus story. The idea that God is present to us in this 1st century Jewish man named Jesus. Now in one sense the idea of incarnation sounds pretty wild. And if you find yourself trying to comprehend how a God ‘out there somewhere’ in heaven, above the earth, could ‘come down’ and be born on earth as a baby… well, you can end up in some weird places.

But perhaps if we approach things differently, we might find that things make more sense to us. Still mysterious? Yes. Still not likely to find its way into the latest scientific journal? Probably…

For many people – Christian or not – the idea of God often invokes an image of the old man in the sky. So if we get to the Christmas story and we try to imagine an old man in the sky, but it turns out he’s got a son around here somewhere, and his son is going to jump down from heaven, and be born as a baby to save the world… to be honest, that’s getting hard to make any sense of.

Maybe it worked in an ancient worldview when they believed that if you got out past the dome of the sky, you’d find the realm of the gods, or of God. But that’s not really the story that’s being told in the Jesus event. Nor does it make sense in light of what we now know about the world and universe we live in.

But for the ancient Hebrew people, God was the one whose name could not be spoken. God was the one for whom an idol could not be made, because God had no form. God was not an old man in the sky, whose image could be carved out of stone. The closest thing that represented the divine image in the world, was real living breathing human beings in relationship with one another. 

And the divine Spirit was spoken about as the breath that gave life to all living things. The divine who is the source of all life.

This God who is present in and through all things.

Not just out there somewhere.

But here. Present. Creating. Sustaining. Guiding.

This idea of the incarnation of God as the human Jesus, is not about some old man’s grown son, eternally stuck in his mid-20’s, who decides to jump into the body of a baby.

In fact, if God is the one present in and through all things as the source of life, then all of reality is incarnation. This is not God coming from out there somewhere far away and distant, who we have to convince to come and be present by performing the proper rites and rituals. In Jesus, it is more like this incarnation of God in all of reality becomes particularly known to us; we can see it and name it and explore what it looks like when God is known to us as self-giving, non-violent, liberating love. And so this is an invitation to consider all of the ways in which God is actually at work in the world. To think about all of the ways in which the divine and the human come together.

For some of the people in Jesus’ day, this is partly why they missed what was going on. They were waiting for something spectacular to come and when they saw Jesus, they simply said, “Who, this guy? This is just the carpenter from Nazareth. I’m waiting for divine intervention, not this random guy wandering around who has gone through a career change at 30 and started talking in confusing parables.”

My own spirituality has undergone its own transformation in light of thinking about God differently. I used to think a lot about trying to convince God to act, to convince God to ‘turn up’ and if I did experience something of God’s action or presence, I felt good. It had worked.

But if it didn’t… well that became more problematic. That created anxiety.

But the more I have embraced the idea of divine incarnation in all things – even if I haven’t always named it that – the more it has invited me to consider a spirituality that is grounded in the idea that God is already present. God is in the here and now. And God is good.

That doesn’t fix everything, or explain everything, but it does allow me to reflect on how the divine might be unfolding things in my life that do not look like fire descending from heaven… but instead they look like incarnation.

And so perhaps we can recognise that what the divine Spirit does emerges and unfolds from within. From within our own hearts. From within the friendships and relationships we build with family and with friends, and as communities and societies. And from within the heartbeat of the cosmos itself.

So this Advent, after a year that has been extraordinary in its challenges and pain, there is still an opportunity to tune in, pay attention, and participate in the unfolding of this divine kind of life. It still makes me a weirdo, but this is the kind of weird I can get behind.