Kind of like the angel surprised Mary with the birth announcement of all history, it seems that every year something unique happens to crystallize and personalize the meaning of God’s coming in Christ for me.  Something unique happens to remind me of what God is up to in history in and through us living in this very moment.  If I go looking for it or try to force it, nothing much happens.  As a rule, God surprises me by coming to me when I least expect it to make his announcement that what he was up to in Mary he is still up to in you and me and the whole world.  As with Mary, it catches me off guard. 

Kind of like when Greg Evetts surprised us all last week with Go Tell It On The Mountain on his harmonica.  Or, when Craig Biondi trumpeted O, Holy Night .  His trumpet’s soulful sound recalled from memory that incredible line, Long lay the world in sin and error pining ‘til he appeared and the soul felt its worth, as though it’d been written just for me.  Or last year when a five-year-old boy sat in Santa’s lap at our Christ in Christmas party for neighborhood children and, when asked what he wanted for Christmas said, “Love.”  Santa asked who from.  He said, “Anybody.”  Then, he just disappeared into the crowd as though he had been an ambassador for the thousands like him everywhere we turn.  God usually surprises me, catches me off guard.  This year was no exception.

One night, not long ago, right in the middle of Advent, Nancy was cleaning and came across this little box my father passed along to me some years ago after my mother died.  Inside are the first shoes I ever wore.  It was a truly spiritual moment.  The moment I saw them it occurred to me that God once became small enough to wear shoes just like that.  In Mary’s womb, the eternal God of all creation, the God who has no beginning or end, was sealed inside human flesh to be birthed nine months later just like one of us. “‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.  And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son.’”  Out of Mary a very human child would be born.  He was to be “the Son of the Most High . . . (of whose) kingdom there will be no end.”  But, first, he would be a baby with hands and feet.  Go figure!  God, with feet!  God, in our shoes.

This is one of those stories that’s impossible to understand if human reason and logic are our only avenues of discovering truth.  It’s a story that can only be believed if we accept it for what it is by faith, or not at all.  There is no other way to get to this truth accept by accepting it as a gift that came to us.  But, when we marry what we can only accept by faith, God becoming human like us, with what we now understand about how humans form in their mother’s womb, the story is all the more – well, I started to say unbelievable.  Actually, that’s all it is, believable, believable, by faith. 

Remarkable progress within just the last few years has been made in deciphering the development of the human fetus in the womb.  The latest high-tech imaging processes make it possible to observe fetal development almost from conception.  It’s even been discovered that “long before a child is born its genes engage the environment of the womb in an elaborate conversation, a two-way dialogue that involves not only the air its mother breathes and the water she drinks but also what drugs she takes, what diseases she contracts and what hardships she suffers (J. Madeline Nash, “Inside the Womb,” Time, November 11, 2002).”

If we take this information that God has made available to us through the gift of our minds and our ability to use them to discover knowledge and we marry it to truth that can only be received by faith, then the story of God’s incarnation in Christ becomes all the more beautiful. 

This is what the incarnation of Christ means.  When the angel Gabriel told Mary, “‘you will conceive in your womb,’” he was revealing to her, and us, that God, through Jesus, would expose himself to everything human.  God’s seed, the very seed that would become his Son Jesus, entered into the human experience on the lowest and most complex level possible.  I’ve always loved John’s version of this story the most, “the Word became flesh and lived among us (John 1:14).”  It’s never been hard for me to get the image of Jesus as a full-grown man, or even as a baby in a manger.  But, when Gabriel said, “‘conceive in your womb’” to Mary, he meant that God, would begin his human conversation with us in a two-way dialogue at the genetic level, a dialogue that ultimately would involve the air we breathe, the water we drink, the diseases we contract and whatever hardships we suffer.  In Christ, God entered the human experience as fully and completely as you and I.  He started where we did so that we could eventually be where he is.  There is no level of human life, of suffering, of joy, of hope or despair he has not personally experienced on some level.  Jesus is God in our shoes.

Since I first saw it three and one-half years ago, it has become one of my favorite Advent parables.  Driving through downtown Rockwall one July Saturday, I saw a young lady standing on the courthouse square holding up a sign.  I thought she was advertising a car wash or something.  But, as I got closer, I was not only able to read the words on her poster but also see the embarrassed smile on her face.  It read, “I am only fifteen.  My parents caught me smoking.  This is my punishment.”  That’s a pretty good story in its own right for all kinds of reasons.  But, what turned it into an Advent parable for me was when I drove closer and was able to see her parents standing not far away under a shade tree. 

It’s all but unbearable to watch your children suffer.  And, those two parents had to be suffering that day more than their daughter even though there is no way she would have believed that.  But, there they stood with her.  She’d made a bad choice.  There were painful consequences.  But, what makes that family’s story remarkable is that her parents moved in close to suffer with her.  They stood there that hot summer day and endured her shame and embarrassment with her.  God has not, will not, remove from us the power to choose and therefore the power to sin.  Neither has he stood at a distance while we suffered.  Closer than any human parent could, in Christ, God has moved into our suffering and shame with us; he still does.

The writer of Hebrews, as Foy Valentine likes to say, “Whoever she was,” put it this way.  “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are – yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15, NIV).”  Too quickly we rush to the last chapter of that book entitled “Yet Without Sin.” We don’t spend enough time reading the introductory chapters, the ones about the God who is able to “sympathize with our weaknesses” and “who has been tempted in every way, just as we are.”  It’s so easy to image in our minds God as high priest, high and lifted up, as though insulated from our experience.  But, the part of the story that leads to Jesus high and lifted up starts with him low and bent down; God in our shoes. 

Here is what this means for me and, I hope, for you.  There is no place in your heart or mine that hurts or fears or is tempted or cries or leans toward sin unspeakable, deep shameful horrible sin, that Jesus cannot sympathize with us.  He has walked in our shoes.

One of the most common phrases tossed around in the dialogue between teens and parents is, “You just don’t understand!”  At least that’s what I read in a book somewhere.  “You just don’t understand!”  It’s hard for children, teens, to believe that their parents were ever their age and told their parents they didn’t understand – that we, through some freak of nature, must have been born 48 years old and could never conceive what it feels like to be, let’s say, 14.  We can even show them the pictures and, after they stop laughing at the double-knit polyester, they say it again, “You just don’t understand!”  (Actually, I don’t understand double-knit polyester, never hope to.)  Sometimes I think that our children must believe that if we could see the world from their perspective that we’d lose our perspective to their advantage.  Giving them the benefit of the doubt, the least our children want from us is sympathy.  What they need is our understanding and our perspective. 

Jesus was the only one who ever pulled that off perfectly.  Tempted like us, yet without sin.  Able to sympathize with our weaknesses because he made himself weak, vulnerable, just like, exactly like a baby growing in its mothers womb and being born to cry and be hungry and suffer shame and humiliation, and finally, a horrible, torturous beating and death at the hands of violent people.  There is no shame, no fear, no pain, no loss, no fear of loss, no illness, there is nothing in our lives where we could honestly say to God, “You don’t understand.”  We may or may not ever get the answer we seek to our prayers.  But, if we listen closely, God will always be able to say in response to any cry of ours, “I understand, I’ve been where you are.”  Jesus is God in our shoes.  There is nothing he was not willing to do to be able to say he walked where we walked, live where lived, died where we died so that we could someday live where he lives. 

A parent who wanted his to explain that kind of parental love to his little girl in a way that she would understand once read her the story of the Runaway Bunny.  “There was a little bunny who wanted to run away.  So he said to his mother, “I am running away.”  “If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you.  For you’re my little bunny.”  “If you run after me,” said the little bunny, “I’ll become a fish in a trout stream and swim away from you.”  “If you become a fish in a trout stream,” said his mother, “I’ll become a fisherman and fish for you.”  “If you become a fisherman,” said the little bunny, “I’ll become a rock on the mountain high above you.”  “If you become a rock on a mountain high above me,” said his mother, “I’ll become a mountain climber, and climb to where you are.”  “If you become a mountain climber,” said the little bunny, “I’ll become a crocus in a hidden garden.”  “If you become a crocus in a hidden garden, I’ll be a gardener and find you.”  Then, the bunny says he’ll become a bird, and she says she’ll be “the tree he comes

home to.”  Then, he says he’ll become a sailboat; and she says she’ll be the wind.  Then, he’ll be a trapeze artist; and she says she’ll be a tightrope walker.  Finally, the bunny says, “I’ll be a little boy running into a house.”  And she says, “I’ll be your mother catching you in my arms.”  (Thanks to Kenny Wood, Runaway Rosenblatt, December 20, 2002)

There was nothing God was not willing to do or become in order to make the journey from where he is to where you are.  Some of us are running from God today.  But, there is no place we can go, nothing we can become, that God won’t come looking for us.  Wherever we are, wherever we’re running, if we hear steps catching up fast from behind, well, those steps we hear are holy steps. 

They are the steps of God in our shoes.