What I Really Want for Christmas . . .
A Reflection on Messy and Embodied Incarnation
As we come to the end of the Advent season—the final week—and lean toward the manger of Christ’s birth once again, I’ve been sitting with a simple but honest question: What do I really want? I’ve come to find that my heart’s deepest desire is for God to show up in other people’s lives.
I know—that can sound a little highfalutin, like the kind of thing a priest is supposed to say. But it’s not about being pious or polished, I promise. It’s about truth. The whole truth—the kind that has starts and stops and calls out intermittently through the mess and chaos of real life.
I could do the work of priesthood—celebrate the sacraments, preach the Gospel, visit the sick, teach the faith—and quietly protect the job security of being the “expert” in the room, the one people need to come back to. I could hope that everyone stays a little bit off-kilter and therefore always needy of me and my wisdom. But that’s not what I want.
What I want is the kind of transformation that happened to me nearly seventeen years ago.
God showed up for me on the DC Metro. God showed up for me again, five years later, behind the altar on All Saints’ Day in 2014, when I was seriously considering renouncing my collar altogether and leaving theology, the Church, and my vocation in the rearview mirror. God showed up through divorce and learning to be a single dad, and again through the resurrection of remarriage to Mallory and the gaining of four more precious children.
God showed up in the NICU three years ago when Judah couldn’t breathe on his own. Mallory needed me to show up simply to hold him through those first hours of tender, fragile life, while she recovered and was ultimately healed from the rare and life-threatening complication of his birth. God showed up when our precious daughter Layla was missing for more than a week, and through the long and painful road that led her through treatment facilities, jails, and rehabs to the place of stunning wholeness she is rooted in today.
God has shown up again and again in the lives of my alcoholic brothers and sisters as they have found sobriety, healing, and purpose where there once seemed to be only despair. Over and over—unexpectedly, insistently, mercifully—God shows up in church basements, clubhouses, and meeting rooms.
And what I long for now is to see that same holy interruption in the lives of others.
I want Christ Church to be a place where people can bring their whole truth—not the curated version, not the cleaned-up story, but the real one—and discover that God is already there, waiting to show up in the middle of their lives, meeting them in it. I want Christ Church to be a place where eternal truth collides with lived experience, and grace does what only grace can do.
And if the Gospel is true—and I believe with my whole heart that it is—then it matters that the angel of God commanded them to name Jesus Emmanuel, which means God with us. Not God watching from a distance. Not God waiting for us to get it right. But God choosing, again and again, to be with us. With us in our joy and in our sorrow. With us in our victories and in our longings. With us in moments of clarity and in the long nights of confusion. Emmanuel means that God is always showing up, even when we are not yet sure how to name it.
As Advent draws to a close, I’m reminded that this is exactly how God has always worked. God showed up first to the shepherds—disinherited, overlooked, untrusted. God showed up in the lives of Mary and Joseph, faithful but bewildered. God showed up among the people of ancient Israel, suffering under occupation and fear, to bring about a new kingdom. God showed up not in control, but in vulnerability—a child, a refugee, and a Savior.
It is into that world that Christ was born.
And this Christmas, more than anything else, I want to hear and see that again: God showing up—quietly, powerfully, unexpectedly—in the lives of God’s people.
Pax et Bonum!
Fr. Ben +
