I was literally dumfounded when watching our friends David & Carrie Grants BBC TV show about the meaning of Advent that interviewed a guy named Steve Legg who has made an animated version of the Nativity. When asked by the Grants what had prompted him to make the DVD he replied that he had been shocked to the core when some six years earlier he had heard the story of a school child whose response to hearing the story of the baby Jesus was Why would a baby s mummy and daddy name their baby after a swear word?    

If ever I had doubted that we were living in the Post Modern-Post-Christian era that one statement put me straight. A couple of evenings ago I had been watching the late night news and had listened to the newspaper reporter who reviewing the Daily Mail s headline Away with the Manger  told us that WH Smiths reported that of the 1,000 or more Christmas cards only 67 depict the Nativity scene.    How sad that we have lost sight of the fact that it is CHRIST en-MASse that we are celebrating at this time of year.   It was therefore with all the more delight that I received this delightful note from Dee Dee Winter, Norman Grubb s biographer. Its called The Glory of the Unlikely, for all of us who know that wise men still worship Him because they have seen that the miracle of Christmas is JesUS it will warm your heart.

     THE GLORY OF THE UNLIKELY

Perhaps the great glory of Christmas is that in the birth of His only Begotten, the Lord revealed to us that He is the God of the "unlikely"...

For how unlikely is it that the King of the universe should be born in a stable normally reserved for animals which children's tales tell us were the only witnesses to His arrival. How unlikely that nation which had so long awaited her Messiah should completely miss the fulfillment of her dreams and reject her only salvation. How unlikely that this Messiah should live the great majority of His life in obscurity without the pomp and circumstance befitting Royalty, and indeed without "form or comliness that we should desire Him". And perhaps most of all, how unlikely that such a One should die in shame and degradation, apparently discarded upon the trash-heap of history, a just another well-intentioned zealot without the means to accomplish His desired end.

This is the glory of Christmas, a glory which fills the present as well as the past. For how unlikely that the humiliated is now is now the Glorified, and the possessor of that Name at which one day all will bow. How unlikely that the Satan who apparently destroyed Him was and is the unwitting servant of the God who "works ALL thing after His own will". How unlikely indeed that tragedy should eternally breed triumph in the purposes of that One in whom all wisdom resides. And perhaps most of all, how incredibly unlikely that Wisdom Herself should deign to fill the seemingly marred, broken and useless vessels that we appear to be that He might live His perfect, complete and loving life in and as us. How unlikely and how unspeakably wonderful that in our weakness, His strength is made perfect and that He actually NEEDS us to be AS WE ARE that the glory of His Person alone might be revealed by us.

He is the God of the unlikely, the God who requires stables in which to birth His Beloved rather than the pristine palaces we might anticipate. So let us expect to find Him there, in the stables of our lives and worlds - the circumstances, situations and people where we least expect him to be. Indeed let us see that the glory of His presence is most often in direct proportion to the appearance of His absence, and let us rejoice that Christmas above all proclaims that we have found the King of the universe in the most unlikely place of all...

        "IT PLEASED GOD...TO REVEAL HIS SON IN ME"

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