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The Stable Full 

   Written by on December 22, 2016 at 11:10 am

logo-crotts-stephenThe hinge of history is on a stable in Bethlehem. It opens the door for us to Jesus Christ.

I confess: Great is the mystery of the Incarnation. As Augustine put it 1,700 years ago, “He was created of a mother whom he formed. He cried in the manger in wordless infancy. He was the Word without whom all human eloquence is mute.”

Yet do not miss the amazing practicality of his birth. For there in the stable gathered men and women to worship Christ. The Jew came. So, too, the gentiles. Rustic shepherd, learned kings. The rich. The poor. Even ox and lamb, camel, and star. Indeed, all creation paid him homage as one.

Christ Jesus is the only religious leader tall enough to see over all the fences we humans have built to divide ourselves. And still today when we worship the savior Jesus at Christmas all our cussedness and differences can melt away. For Christ has bridged a path to God and a path to our neighbors.

Oh, I know the fluff and banality of Christmas. I tire of the commercialism, shallow so-called Christmas carols on the radio, and tepid theological homilies. Yet at the bottom of it all is a reality so divine it must never be lost. It must be shouted from the housetops till all the world knows.

C. S. Lewis in his Narnia tale The Last Battle, has Queen Lucy remark, “Yes, in our world, too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”

Indeed.

The Reverend Stephen Crotts is the director of the Carolina Study Center, Inc., a campus ministry, located in Chapel Hill, NC. Pastor Crotts may be reached at carolinastudycenter@msn.com

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