Christmas, the actual event of Christ’s coming into the world in flesh and blood, offers a different story. In a world categorized and calculated, manipulated and exploited, God came to be with us and alongside us. And in that coming Christ did not simply arrive to offer us some new thing to look forward to, an ultimate expectation in the heavenly realm. No, Christ came into a world objectified by power and greed and said “you.” Not the “you” of Francis Crick in which every subject is made an object. What Christ brings, Auden reminds us in his poem, is that moment in “the stable where for once in our lives/ Everything became a You and nothing was an It.”

John the Baptist is the voice of one crying out in the wilderness. He is strange, an outsider, and as such his invitation is away from the safe confines of the familiar. He does not go into the cities or villages to proclaim his message of repentance. Instead, he stays at the margins and invites all those who see the need for renewal to come out to him. It is from the wilderness that he makes way for the coming of the Kingdom, it is through a fast from the familiar that he prepares the people for the coming of the Messiah.

Today we celebrate All Saints. Over history it has become a time when we remember those we have lost, those we hope to see again in the Resurrection life of God’s renewal of all things. But that word saint refers to something more than simply the Christian dead. It is rooted in the word holy, connected to the words health and wholeness.

The passage we heard from Job this morning is only a fraction of God’s response. Verse after verse, God recounts the wild wonders of the world that are beyond Job’s knowledge, control, and benefit. From rain in the deserts where no people live to the speed of an Ostrich, cliff dwelling vultures to clods of clay, or my personal favorite, the wild donkey who “laughs at the clamor of the town”—we witness a montage of the created order from the celestial to the mundane, the animal to the atmospheric—all of it a manifestation of God’s creative and loving power. Like an Inuit elder quelling the anger of a child, God reorients Job’s sense of his place in the world with a vision of awe. And though the book of Job is considered by many to be among the most ancient literature in our scriptures, a work first performed as a drama, few books are as relevant to our time or as contemporary in their wisdom.

The world of earthly power has no room for children. Jesus knows this well, for his birth came when Ceasar demanded a census, a tool for taxes and building armies, and there was no room in the inn. The world that has no room for children is one that has no room for life. As Thomas Merton writes, “We live in the time of no room…The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power and acceleration.” This is a world that has no room for children and their play.