Daily Faith Walk

You've probably heard this story read aloud every December since before you could read it yourself. That familiarity is worth pausing on, because it can make us stop looking at the text and start looking at the tinsel around it. The Christmas story is not one passage but four, a promise in Isaiah, a forgotten town in Micah, two different infancy accounts in Luke and Matthew, and John's own theological summary of what it all meant. Read slowly and in order, it's stranger, and more dangerous, than the cards suggest. Quick answer The Christmas story tells how God kept an old promise by entering human history as a specific, vulnerable person, in a specific unremarkable place, at a specific inconvenient time. Isaiah had said God would be with his people; Micah said it would happen in a minor town; Luke and Matthew show that promise landing on two ordinary people, then on shepherds nobody would have believed, then on foreign astrologers, and finally on a jealous king who tried t...