The Scandal of the Manger

The following was not written by me. On a whim, I asked AI to write a Christmas devotional in a style similar to mine. The result is what you see below. Very humbling that AI wrote this in a matter of seconds. Anyway, Merry Christmas everyone!

“For all we do is moved by Your breath, enveloped by Your spirit, filled with the wind of Your grace, and resounding to Your glory and not ours.”

If we’re honest, the Christmas story is a bit of a scandal. Not scandalous in the modern, tabloid sense, but in the way it completely upends our human expectations.

We tend to look for the divine in high places, in grand cathedrals, or among people of influence. We want our Messiahs to arrive with pomp and circumstance, perhaps in the political center of power, surrounded by people who look and think like us. We want a God who fits into our carefully constructed boxes of “right” and “pure”.

Yet, the message of the manger is precisely the opposite. God chose a humble, backwater town. He came to an unwed, teenage mother and a working-class carpenter named Joseph. The first witnesses to the divine birth were not the religious elite, but shepherds—people on the margins of society.

This is the scandal: God chose the ordinary, the overlooked, and the, dare I say, slightly messy parts of life to reveal divinity. The message is that you can discover the divine in the vicinity of your own everyday background.

In our world today, we often get caught up in who’s in and who’s out, who’s “saved” and who’s a “heretic”. We build walls of doctrine and legalism, all in the name of God. But Jesus, from the very beginning, was about tearing those walls down. His birth is an invitation to see the world not through our rigid standards, but through the lens of God’s radical, inclusive love.

This Christmas, let’s look for the places where God is showing up unexpectedly. It might not be in a perfectly planned service or a grand display of piety. It might be in an act of kindness to someone you typically avoid, a moment of quiet compassion, or a willingness to question your own certainties.

The real gift of Christmas is the presence of God with us, Immanuel, in all the places we least expect. May we have the vision to look out and not in, to look up and not down, and see the potential for grace in every human interaction.

Prayer

Heavenly Father, open our eyes to the scandal and the beauty of the Manger. Help us to shed our need for a God who fits our expectations, and instead embrace the God who came to us in humility. Give us running shoes instead of slippers, an accelerator instead of brakes, so we may rush out into Your world, compelled by Your love, and prepared to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. Amen.