Aliens Among Us

Oh here we go again! The thing I keep coming up against in the Christmas season is this whole CB DeMille view of the star and the pristine manger and cutsie lambs and shepherds all stunned into silence by the choirs of heavenly beings singing "Glory to God."

But in my mind I imagine a good man with a (somehow, but by his doing) pregnant teenager as lost and homeless aliens in a foreign territory where even the language was so different they didn't recognize what people were saying. So they found, as so many homeless do, the only shelter they could, a barn, ripe with manure, probably crouching in the back so none of the "real people" of that territory could see them. And to this alien, homeless, scandalous couple, was born a child - not a king, not a floating avatar of divinity - a baby. Little. Helpless. Undocumented alien. Perhaps unwanted, at least for now.

God, the all-powerful, supreme all, the incomprehensible source of all, chose a homeless, undocumented, unmarried alien couple to host this divine coming out party! Crossing the threshold from divine to incarnate/human might be easy if you happen to be the Almighty, so why cross over in such an enemy, foreign, and hostile place? Unless... unless there is some reason, some message that these inhabitants of the third rock from Sol needed to learn. So I go there and follow the Christmas story.

And the lessons abound, none the least of which is that entry. So if it was purposeful, then perhaps I am called to see Christ in the homeless, see God in the most desperate situations, and hear my calling as a beckoning to cross the many arbitrary thresholds (boundaries and barriers we erect to keep us in and the "other" out). I am recently inspired by Jerry Gill's Borderland Theology (2003) and the analogies he finds in the life of Jesus as a "border crosser." It fits with my understanding of this God-like message. (Oh I love God's twisted sense of humor!)

It seems to me that the reason God speaks through the poor and infirmed, that the reason God chose a child of an undocumented homeless couple as an entry portal, that the reason Jesus continually worked through the unwanted and outcast is simply that any other way might have seemed magical. In my work life I have seen companies so cash rich that they literally could do anything. But when times got tough they faltered. It is those who with little who do much that really set the standard of excellence. Had Jesus been a rich man, or apparated as an adult in full glory, we would be left with an awe of his grandeur but just as clearly with a sense that none of that was within our grasp.

But when we walk among the poor, when we cross over the boundary from our station into the realm of just being human - with not even a single trapping of civilized and pampered existence - then we have access to understanding the true human experience. Then and perhaps only then can we begin to feel true compassion. And when we give of ourselves from that (presumed) nothingness, we are capable of divine love.

Two millennia ago, love passed through the portal and smiled up through the darkness. And it just may have been quite alien for anyone who noticed it.