Walking the Risky Road to the Manger 12.18.2025

    Just about everyone regardless of their faith commitment—whether secular or Christian—thinks of Christmas as a safe time of year. Whether you are more focused on the Biblical nativity stories and their descriptions of Jesus’ birth, or on your Christmas tree and fancy wrapping paper, you likely consider it joyful or at least happy. 

    It is true that some will enter this festive time of year with heavy hearts weighed down by loss or general sadness. Even for them the expectation of happiness, albeit violated, forms part of their angst. No one associates this time of year nor the Child whom we celebrate with any real, tangible, noteworthy risk. In this thinking virtually everyone is wrong. Let me explain why.

    If Jesus is who He claims to be, if these stories are God’s word for us as the historic Church has claimed, if in them we encounter a revelation of God unlike any that we could have imagined or expected, if Jesus is—in fact God in Flesh—then accepting or rejecting, believing or disbelieving, celebrating or dismissing the Christ Child is a very grave matter indeed. 

    Before the Great Church began to celebrate the feast of Christmas it observed the fast of Advent. In the structured anticipation of the coming of Christ there is a tangible recognition that His Advent changes everything. And when everything is being challenged, changed, and chosen anew there is risk. Real risk that we acknowledge every year at Christmas by making this perilous, risky, winding walk to the manger. 

    It has become a cultural expectation. Thanks to Chuck Dickens and a few other hearty souls who recognized the benefits of risky faith it has become embedded in our broader culture in such a way that virtually all unbelievers of any stripe feel oddly comfortable singing Joy to the World, the Lord is come, let earth receive her King!  I’m pretty sure our adversary never saw that one coming. Yet, in his sniveling, conniving way he has managed to twist this beautiful story into a silly caricature of the humble self-giving of the Word. 

    John did not include a nativity story in his Gospel. His story concerns the entry—invasion really of God’s own indomitable Word into human history, our muddled mess of time and space, of evil, worry, and disgrace. He did, in another place, tell the same story in a graphic, symbolic, terrifying fashion. In Revelation 12 the nativity of our memories is envisioned as a vicious dragon stalking a pregnant woman, seeking to destroy the child she carried. When Christians who already knew the story of Jesus’ birth read what John wrote in Revelation 12, it was not very hard to identify the characters. They knew the woman as Mary. They knew the dragon under many names, Rome, Caesar, Herod. And they had long worshipped the Child, the little Lord Jesus—not asleep on the hay but fleeing for His life. 

    God risked everything. Ev-er-y thing. Every single thing, to rescue us from our sin. If you think that you can sidle up to the cradle of the Christ Child and not even risk a splinter, you have not been following the story very closely. 

    Now we’re all in that wilderness. Either we pledge our allegiance to Jesus, or we pledge it to something or someone else. Each of us makes that choice. We either follow and suffer with Him, or we are a part of the dragon horde that began to hound Him in infancy, rejected Him in adulthood, cried for His crucifixion, and then maligned His body the Church. Risk? The term works, but it hardly covers the complexity, the depth, the pathos that faces the contemporary Christian. We are called to sacrificial discipleship. We are called to follow the crucified and risen Christ. Truthfully, there are many who are perfectly satisfied to bow their heads and shed their tears at the manger who will forget all about this Jesus in a few short weeks. So why even brave this walk to the manger if you choose not to follow the one who lay there? 

    The risk is not Santa Claus, the grinch, commercialism, secularism, or even sheer greed. The real risk is apathy. If you care enough to come to Bethlehem and see, if you are brave enough to traverse field and fountain, moor, and mountain—if you ring the bells and join the angels in singing Joy to the World…then for pity’s sake risk a faithful life. The snow’s going to melt. The seasons will change. The manger will be stowed away for another year. Jesus will still be Lord. And you are still going to have to decide. Will you take the risk of faith and continue to walk with the one who was in that Manger? Merry Ho, Ho, Ho, and all that.