In the middle of a cold winter night, a small child’s voice penetrates the darkness from the bedroom across the hall: “Mommy, I’m scared!” Half asleep, the mother responds: “Don’t be afraid, honey. Mommy’s right across the hall.” After a brief pause, the child replies: “Mommy I’m still scared.” Hoping to salvage a good night’s rest with a theological reassurance, the mother calls back: “You don’t need to be afraid. God loves you and God is with you right now.” This time the pause is longer…, but then the little voice returns: “I can’t see God, Mommy. I want someone with skin on!”

Out of the mouths of babes and infants! That little child’s logic is the best answer we could give to the Christmas question: “What is the real meaning of Christmas?” Christians are those people who make the incredible, preposterous, absurd claim that the infinite reality which creates, sustains, and renews the universe has come among us “with skin on.” But the very moment we say that, we are still face to face with mystery, aren’t we? Why did it happen? What does it mean to you and to me?

Part of the answer must be that God came into human life then and God comes into human life now to give us a new perspective. I have always thought that one of the strangest claims we human beings make about God is that God is “unchanging.” We even put it in one of our familiar and beloved hymns “O thou who changes not, abide with me.” Actually, so far as I can see, it is we who too often are the unchanging ones, going round and round in circles, getting nowhere. God is always changing, always creating, always becoming.

Let me risk an analogy: when we are in love, we are at our most creative. Our minds and hearts simply teem with ideas. We are willing to try almost anything to show the one we love just how much we care. Now if God is love itself (which is what we say and believe), doesn’t it make sense to believe that God would constantly be trying new and different ways to show us how much God cares about us?

As I read the long storybook that is our Bible, I see God trying to communicate to us again and again just how much God loves us. Sometimes, God tries to reach us with that message through nature and all its wonderful gifts. Sometimes, God tries to reach us at moments of crisis or tragedy. Sometimes, God touches the lives of special people – matriarchs and patriarchs of the faith, people of prophetic vision – and inspires them with messages of love for the rest of us. Sometimes, God becomes real in moments of great creativity – wonderful music, glorious art, moving drama.

But somehow, as helpful as all these ways may be, it just doesn’t seem quite enough. It still seems to be “outside” us. We need something more. And so it is that the Creator of the Universe makes the most audacious experiment of all. Some years after Bethlehem, the author of the Gospel of John tried to put it into words; and this is my paraphrase:

“From the beginning of time existed the active, creative, self-expression of God which we call Love. Every aspect of creation, including human life, came into being because of that Love. At one point in human history that Love became particularly evident and obvious in one human life, Jesus of Nazareth. And what we recognize in him, we can now see in ourselves and in all people – the Light and Love of God.”

(David Brown’s paraphrase of John 1:1-4)

When you and I recognize that it gives a whole new perspective to human life; we can never be the same again.

If we have a new perspective on life, then the coming of God into human life also gives you and me and the whole human family a new sense of possibility. Let’s face it: many of us have reached the point in life when Christmas brings regrets as much as rejoicing. As we look back over the years, we think of all the things we did which we wish we had avoided and we remember all the things we might have done which we let slip by. That old-fashioned notion of being a “sinner” is simply another generation’s way of saying the same thing: you and I are incomplete, imperfect, finite people.

Sometimes we get tired of trying, don’t we? Sometimes we give up on ourselves and other people. We decide we are like one of those slightly defective pieces of merchandise all of us have bought from time to time. The thing just doesn’t work the way it should and we have to go through the bother of taking it back to be repaired or replaced. The problem is that there is no place to take ourselves back for repair or replacement!

The good news of Christmas is that we don’t have to live with those feelings of frustration. Again and again in the pages of the Bible God makes clear that a new beginning is always possible for you and me. John’s Gospel says this in a dramatic way when he affirms that a “new birth” is possible for each one of us no matter how old we may be. In the Prologue to the Gospel which was read to us a moment ago we find the same affirmation:  “To all those people who recognize, receive, and affirm the presence of God in their lives, God gives the possibility of a new beginning.”             (David Brown’s paraphrase of John 1:12)

That is why God comes into human life “with skin on” in the form of a baby. Who could have more hopes and dreams and possibilities than a baby with its whole life ahead of it? The Christmas good news is that God is willing to come into your life and mine and give us just as many new hopes and new dreams and new possibilities. When you and I believe that we can never be the same again.

When we have that new perspective and believe in those new possibilities, then the coming of God into human life finally gives to you and me and the whole human family a new purpose for living.

A wise man several  ago commented to me that, so far as he could tell, the greatest problem of our times is that too many people are living almost entirely for themselves. He used a technical term from psychology to describe this behavior: narcissism. That’s just a fancy way of saying that we are so centered on ourselves – our own needs, our own concerns, our own desires – that we have little or no time left over to think of anyone else. When that happens, strange as it may seem, our lives are not fuller, happier or more contented. Instead they become smaller and narrower and meaner. The One whose birth we celebrate at Christmas once observed: “The more energy, time, and attention you give to keeping your own life together, the more it will come apart.”        (David Brown’s paraphrase of Matthew 16:25)

Think about it for a moment. The Creator of the Universe doesn’t have needs that you and I could meet. God didn’t come into human life because God needed something the human family could supply. But since God is Love – perfect Love – God came into human life to meet our needs. Love doesn’t think of itself  but of the other.

That is the real meaning of Christmas, isn’t it? To give of ourselves to others. That is what we symbolize in our Christmas gifts: the perfect gift that God gave to us in the Christ child. Christmas teaches us that we are not put here on earth to receive, but to give. We are born to give love to all those around us.

When we understand the real meaning of Christmas then we know that it is not only Jesus Christ, but we, too, who can have Christmas as our birthday. Yes, for everyone who believes, Christmas is our birthday. Then the wonderful old words that you and I have sung all our lives suddenly come true:

“O holy child of Bethlehem! Descend to us, we pray.

Cast out our sin and enter in; be born in us today.

We hear the Christmas angels. The great glad tidings tell;

O come to us, abide with us, Our Lord Immanuel!”

May that be true for you and for me this Christmas! May it be true!