Two years ago I sent a letter to friends of PathLight, and it was so well received that I reposted it last Christmas. It seems to still strike a chord, so I’m posting it again. Consider it as my Christmas wish to you. I hope you enjoy it.
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David L. Fleming writes, “The son of God became poor by becoming incarnate. He embraced poverty in the circumstances of his earthly life. God was born in a stable manger and was given the name Jesus. His parents fled with him as refugees to escape a murderous tyrant. Later he lived a simple workman’s life in Nazareth. He became an itinerant preacher and teacher, without wife or children, without a home. He died utterly poor — stripped of even his clothing, an executed criminal and outcast, buried in another man’s tomb. He had nothing of his own.”
Jesus understood poverty. In recent years we have heard many complaints about a loss of wealth, from home prices to the stock market to retirement accounts. But Jesus knew better than anybody what it meant to lose it all. From the throne of the all-powerful God to the stable manger. That’s true economic disaster.
The Apostle Paul writes in Philippians 2:6-8, “Though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.”
It is hard for me to fathom a God who becomes human. And stranger still, the human life chosen by God is not that of an emperor or king, but of a poor workman from a backwater part of the world.
Why? What possible reason is there for the King of Kings to do this? Couldn’t the whole Easter story, the cross, the resurrection, and all that happen even to a rich man? Why be born in a manger and almost immediately become a refugee, fleeing for your life, and then live a life of utter poverty?
I know the answer. It’s because God loves the poor more than you and I can ever imagine. So yes, I know the answer…but I don’t understand the answer. I don’t understand the answer because I don’t understand God. I love God, worship God, and I am deeply thankful for God. But I do not understand God.
That’s the beautiful mystery of Christmas. To willingly choose poverty over heaven is not for us to understand. But it is for us to model. We, too, are to love the poor. We, too, are to be obedient even in the midst of our own spiritual poverty. And we, too, are to give to those less fortunate. There really is no better way to celebrate this Season of Advent.
This, then, is what drives PathLight. We work with the poor, the oppressed, the forgotten. We work with the children and grandchildren of refugees, driven from their homes by the threat of war. We work to help them see the world through the eyes of the Creator, and to sense the impossible love of a Holy God.
And so, with hope in an everlasting God that I cannot understand, with faith in an obedient Christ that models an incomprehensible love, and with a desire to learn about the mystery of Immanuel, or God With Us … I wish you a very Merry Christmas.
