The God who plays... and saves

     Just pondering the words from, who else, my hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
          "'Mighty God' (Isa.9:6) is the name of this child.  The child in the manger is none other than God Himself.  Nothing greater can be said: God became a child.  In the Jesus child of Mary lives the Almighty God.  Wait a minute!  Don't speak; stop thinking!  Stand still before this statement!  God became a child!  Here He is, poor like us, miserable and helpless like us, a person of flesh and blood like us, our brother.  And yet He is God; He is might.  Where is divinity, where is the might of the child?  In the divine love in which He became like us.  His poverty in the manger is His might.  In the might of love He overcomes the chasm between God and humankind, He overcomes sin and death, He forgives sin and awakens from the dead.  Kneel down before this miserable manger, before this child of poor people, and repeat in faith the stammering words of the prophet: 'Mighty God!' and He will be your God and your might."
     I just can't seem to get over this... but then we should never ever get over the astounding, history-altering wonder of this: God and man.  But no, not just man--tiny, helpless infant.  And not just infant--but born in poverty, obscurity and filth.  I wonder,  as heaven peered over the this dusty blue ball spinning in space, what shock must have registered?   Angelic beings witnessed the Mighty One, the Alpha and Omega,  the omnipotent Creator and Sustainer Whom they had worshipped for millennia, being born as a human--a limited, finite, weak human.  Creator became creature.  To go to such unimaginable depths... for those He had created.  Who could comprehend?
     And yet this frail, dependent, poverty-stricken, tiny baby is the One before Whom we kneel and declare, "Mighty God, Savior, Redeemer!"  As Bonhoeffer declares, we daily need to stop, cease from our endless doing and rushing, to hush--and then kneel--before this "miserable" but glorious manger that housed our Mighty God-Infant.  Just like us... but so infinitely much more.  Fully Man to understand all our struggles and temptations and sorrows and dreams.  Yet fully God to take upon Himself our sins and redeem and save us.
     The other day, I came up on our porch where we have a beautiful, old nativity and this is what I saw:

I had to laugh--our boys' basketball, fresh from a rousing game, I'm sure--resting at the feet of the little Boy-Savior.  How appropriate.  And Mary looks as if she is pointing at the ball as if to say, "That is what He will be--a regular Boy who plays with balls.  But also a Redeemer who came to save all those boys and girls who play."
      And all I could do was say, "Thank You for Father for sending us boys and girls.  But most of all, thank You for giving us the perfect God-Baby-Boy-Man-Savior."  Help us to kneel in grateful wonder.
     To God be the glory.