The Day After Christmas

Monday, December 26

Today is Monday, December 26.

Good morning to you.

Perhaps some of you are waking up to drink your morning coffee and head into work. Maybe others are enjoying a few more days vacation, turning eyes toward cleaning up the mess and disorder from yesterday’s celebration, loading up into cars or airplanes to return home, or looking forward to making plans to ring in the new year.

Today, for so many of us, is an ordinary day. In Christmases past, I had a sort of sadness settle over me my December 26… so much lead up and anticipation, to fly by in a flash with a few gifts and blurry iPhone photos to take with you.

But on this Monday morning (maybe because it’s a Monday), I found myself thinking of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. Mary’s labor-worn body resting and healing from a long journey followed by one of the most intense physical experiences a woman goes through. Baby Jesus, snuggling into his mother and searching for milk–crying, cooing, sleeping. Joseph looking around to take it all in, finding food or perhaps more adequate shelter for his bride and the infant son of God. Registering in Caesar Augustus’s census.

A simple read of the Bible often gives us highlights–the flashes of revelation, the bursting forth of heavenly hosts and far away kings coming to worship. We see resurrection from the dead, ascension into heaven, tongues of fire coming to rest on mere men.

And we long for this. Those mountain top spiritual experiences have significance and weight. The moments where we literally and figuratively rise above reality and connect to a greater purpose, a truer reality can awaken us, inspire us, and spur us forward.

But there’s always the descent, and the beauty of the incarnation is that Jesus comes with us there, too. The God-child didn’t just come in a flurry of glory, accomplishing his task in an instant, and leaving us to seek after single mountain top experiences to tap into his presence. There was a slowness to the kingdom-come. As much significance in the ordinary days, as in the flashes of revelation peppered throughout.

Maybe this day-after-Christmas Monday you’re feeling the tension of this slowness. The descent from yesterday’s feast and celebration leave you reminded of the ways in which you still embody the kingdom of the world rather than the kingdom of our Lord. You’re wondering how long before you’re free from the burden of your sin, living in the very real “already-not-yet” truth of redemption and sanctification. You think more days filled with “a thrill of hope” will do the trick to motivate your change, and you’re seeking to rise to the mountaintop once again.

Let the remembrance of Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus be your reminder–God goes with you in the in-between moments, too. There were the days after Jesus’s birth, the twelve years between that and his moment in the temple. Days after his death, and almost two weeks between his ascension and Pentecost.

He is not expecting kingdom to come into our hearts in a flash, eradicating the darkness with a harsh spotlight. He is comfortable with a slow rise of the sun, with darkness giving way to dawn almost imperceptibly before at once we look around and find that we can see more than mere shadows as before.

I don’t know what you’re walking into on this ordinary Monday-after-Christmas morning. But I know that the likes of Mary, Jesus, Joseph, Moses, Peter, Paul, Joshua, and Abraham have all descended from mountains as we do today. May we welcome his presence today as much as we celebrated it yesterday. May we find him to be lurking near the coffee pot, in our peanut butter and jelly sandwich lunches, in toddler-tantrums, work-emails, and whatever else is ordinary today and in all of the days that follow.

Happy Monday, dear reader. May it be full of ordinary glory.