Desert Stream 2013 Year-End Newsletter
In ‘The Gift’ I write:
‘Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing of water through the word, and to present her to Himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.’ (Eph. 5: 25-27)
God became an infant to make us holy men and women. A baby becomes the basis for our full stature as saints! Let us marvel this season in the Child-King whose gift of divine life enables us to become more than we thought possible.
‘How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given…’ In the haste of holidays, Jesus invites us to simply consider what He has done, how He has offered Himself to us as a babe. He could not have become more vulnerable. He gave Himself up for us. He could have come like a fire or flood, a thunderous Presence who shook the sin right out of us.
Instead He spoke to us in a still small voice, a babe who cooed in His mother’s arms and cried when hungry. He waits in luminous quiet for us to cry out for Him. His whole life was a continuous offering to poor ones like us: advocating for prostitutes and moral lepers, raising a dead son for his mother’s sake, stopping decades of bleeding for women under the boot of boorish men.
His life ended when He offered Himself to false witnesses and murderers. There on the cross He gifted us with the flood of blood and water which is our cleansing, our healing, and our deliverance.
How blessed are we who know our filthiness: He cleanses us! How beautiful are the broken who welcome His healing! And how privileged are the poor who know we are bound and set free only by His delivering hand. Hail the gift, at once Infant-King and Crucified-Lord. May we welcome Him afresh as the gift that opens the riches of heaven to our impoverished humanity.
.jpg)