We speak a great deal of love these days. But the sort of love that endures, the kind of love that enables the care the world needs, or the salvation through sacrifice that Jesus accomplished, is one that dwells in the particular. As Willie James Jennings writes in The Christian imagination, the problem lies in how we’ve viewed the the world; the kinds of words and images we’ve used to understand and describe it. Jennings writes that “A Christian doctrine of creation is first a doctrine of place and people, of divine love and divine touch, of human presence and embrace, and of divine and human interaction.” He goes on to say that “Christianity is in need of a place to be fully Christian,” and that our “segregated mentality” is bound to “the loss of a world where people were bound to the land.”

Jesus came to throw a counter weight against the erratic spin of our off balance world, offering a liberation that returns us to the truly human form—limited, dependent, living fully only in the restful reality of God’s enough. To accomplish this return he came to make a sacrifice, an offering of himself, that would become a pattern for all those seeking the way toward freedom.

Our art is to be human, to cultivate fully human lives against all of the death dealing alternatives that make us both more and less than creatures. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury once wrote that, “being a creature is in danger of becoming a lost art.” It is not lost for trees, or flowers, nor is it lost for the soil microbes teaming beneath the ground or the birds now migrating their ancient paths. It is lost for us, it is humanity that has forgotten the art of being creatures before God. And it is only in obedience that we can recover that art and live again into our fullness.

This week, my writing shed far too cold and the roads a snowy challenge, I spent most of my working day at my daughter’s desk watching birds out the window. I did work, of course. I had meetings on Zoom, I prepared for classes, answered emails, edited webpages, and wrote this sermon. But all the while, I watched the White-throated Sparrows, Orange-crowned Warblers, Red-winged Blackbirds, Northern Cardinals, Carolina Chickadees and the myriad of other feathered creatures at our feeders, hungrily gathered around seed and suet as the snow fell. And as I watched, I thought about the time that God was a bird and Jesus was with the wild animals.

Jesus is here living into what had long been understood as the role of the prophet in Israel. The prophet was not to be someone bound to any lineage or program of training in the way that priests were. Instead, the prophet was someone chosen by God to communicate the ongoing work of God’s faithful relationship, the free and loving dynamic of God’s covenant.

This experience of a different tongue can also affect how we view our own language. To move between words, like moving between worlds, can alter ones perception of the options. We need this from time to time in order to renew our language and free it from the ossified expressions of the familiar. There is a need, as theologian John Milbank has put it, to make the word strange. Today we have a perfect opportunity for that work in our Gospel reading.

Signs of wonder and hope. We need them in any season, but on days that could only be described as dreary, when the normal comforts of restaurants and coffee shops and the embodied closeness of friends is unavailable, we need them now more than ever. And if we look, wonder and hope are ready enough to find. Ours is no static world, no meaningless accident of cosmic forces. All that exists was born from the life of a God who made it all in love, a God who is endlessly fascinated and fascinating.

So this Christmas season, to which we now turn, when so much is unsettled and nothing seems normal, let us lean into the strangeness. Now is our chance to leave behind the sentimentalities that have insulated us from accepting the radical gift of the Incarnation; now is the time to embrace the unexpected wonder of the new world God is making. Let us leave behind Mary of the soft glow and look instead to the bold teenager who challenged the world with the goodness of God’s justice.