the messiness...

"The world is a mess; that's hardly deniable. The world fell from its innocence when we disobeyed the law of love in Eden, and ever since then the world (our home) has been marked by misery and mess - war broken relationships, poverty, disease, greed, crime, injustice, hatred, loneliness, hunger, ignorance and death, to name just a few of the common messes that ruin our human living. And we know the particular messes of our own individual lives and of our own society and time. Just think of the messes that have been in the news of late: runaway debt, joblessness and economic anxiety, sexual abuse and terrorism, and on. And on.

God considered it well, we may trust; if he was to incarnate himself and become fully human, he would have to come into all the messiness of our world and at least for a time, be not only immersed in it but actually undone by it - drowned in it, so to speak. Bu that is the grace of Christmas, that God was willing to do that, for love's sake. Christ Jesus came into the messy world to save sinners.... Christ came into the world as a baby to save me, to rescue me, not only from the just wrath of the living God, but also from all the messes I've created, or inherited, or aggravated... The messes are precisely what he came to redeem by subjecting himself to them, all the way to death!" - Ron Lutjens, "Advent 2011"