Meditation for the Fourth Sunday of Advent: Love

[NB: I presented the following as the Call to Worship this morning for Crestview Church of Christ, so when you read it keep that context in mind] One of the most heralded verses in all of Scripture - from pulpits to sports stadiums throughout the ages - is John 3:16: "For God loved the world in this way: He gave his uniquely special son so that those who trust in him may not die but have eternal life." On this fourth and final Sunday before the Church around the world joyously celebrates the birth of Christ as one body, we are confronted by the gift of God in the Incarnation that expresses God's love. God elects to come among His Creatures as an infant - an actual, real, dependent, helpless baby - demonstrating that God's love is vulnerable. In contrast to the fortresses we have built around our hearts as a form of protection against the years - sometimes decades - of pain and grief we have suffered, we encounter the God of the universe this morning open, exposed, seemingly powerless, laying in swaddling cloths in a makeshift bassinet made from a feeding trough. God's vulnerability manifest in the stable and evident throughout the ministry of Jesus Christ surprises, overwhelms and sometimes even frightens us because this kind of self-surrendering love cuts against the grain of our everyday experience - "the way things are." Such love is impossible and impractical - "foolish" and "weak," as some in history have said. Yet, when we open our hearts to the love of God experienced in the Christ child, we find that our fortresses crumble and we, too, become vulnerable. It is the feeling that a father or mother experiences when they carefully cradle their newborn child. It is the reality that compelled the contemporary prophet Bono to confess, "freedom has a scent like the top of a newborn baby's head." Something about the encounter of an infant, and particularly God as an infant, completely unravels us, transforming our perspective on what is truly important; what is truly valuable. When we are willing and able to receive the Christ child - the God who loves vulnerably - we find ourselves on the terrain of God's grace and are compelled to humbly and openly receive and embrace others both near and far. This morning the love of God in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ calls us together. And the experience of God's love cannot help but call out of us thanksgiving and praise from the depth of our being.