Mary’s son was not the first time God dwelt with humans.

Centuries before the Incarnation, the Tabernacle housed God. With its tapestries, incense, golden cherubim, altar, and priests, the Tabernacle served as a portable palace befitting a God roaming the wilderness with his people. Later, amid the Temple’s stately marble columns, God settled down, committing to the particularity of a single place as he dwelt in the home Solomon built him. The stories of both the Tabernacle and Temple center on rituals that acknowledge God’s power and protect God’s people from his dangerous otherness. For God to dwell with humans sacrifices must be made, burnt offerings must be placed upon the altar, prayers and music must be offered. Only then could the thick darkness of fire and smoke descend. Only then could God fill the sanctuary with his glory.

But this is not a story of gods and men and temples fit for sacrifice and ceremony. This night is different. This is a birth story.

On this night Mary sweated and pushed and squeezed God into the world. And with her last guttural roar and the baby’s shoulder finally out, Jesus slipped into the world like a fish, slimy with vernix and amniotic fluid, and likely a bit of blood and feces. The only music was the counterpoint of exhausted panting, afterbirth, and little lungs looking for comfort. The only fire and smoke were a campfire fit to light a stall or warm shepherds. And the glory of God’s presence? It was bound up in the unfocused eyes and tiny mouth rooting and finally latching (perhaps somewhat uncomfortably) to nurse.

Tonight we remember the Word became flesh. The arms that flung the stars into the heavens barely encircling the globe of a young mother’s breast. The mouth that spoke light into the darkness sucking contentedly away in the stillness of the night. The face that no one could see and live, resting on the warm pillow of Mary’s chest. The Ancient of Days an impossibly small, happy, wobbly, relaxed little thing in a milk-drunk daze, now (finally) lying in a manger.

And so we celebrate God entering our world, no longer separated by grandeur and protected by curtains, but with us in the darkness and muck, with us in the vulnerability of our human lives.