One of the most important and central themes and messages of this great Feast of Christmas, perhaps THE central message, is just how far God is willing to go, the lengths he will go to, in order to reach us.  Christmas shows that he will stop at nothing.  In that context, there’s a good reason the Church gives us that long list of names to listen to on Christmas Eve…on the surface of things, it’s surprising that we would find a lengthy family tree embedded like that into an otherwise rather thrilling, dramatic, and fast-moving narrative.  The action really grinds to a halt there for a minute.  But there are several reasons why, and St. Matthew definitely knew what he was doing.  Listening to that genealogy reminds us that the birth of Christ fits into the great story of salvation that goes all the way back to creation and to the fall of Adam and Eve: he’s in the lineage; he is connected to the activity of God before.  While what happens on Christmas is totally new and totally earth-shaking, it’s still part of the broader plan God has had for our salvation: it’s the culmination of that plan.  These 42 generations…42 specific people with specific lives and roles to play: specific, indispensable links in the chain from which our salvation hangs: this shows just how intentional God is being, with what he is doing for us and for the world.  This is premeditated on God’s part.  He’s been working on this since Adam ate the apple.  He cares enough about our salvation, cares enough about being with us here in the world, cares enough about us realizing how profound his love for us truly is: that he is willing to spend millennia, step by step, deliberately and slowly preparing the world for this.  The prophet Isaiah spoke of a Virgin who would conceive and bear a child, and it took 800 years for everything to be ready for that to come to fruition. 

Isaiah also spoke about how God binding himself to us is like a bridegroom marrying his bride.  The love imagery is not an accident.  This is a love story.  Not in a sordid or inappropriate way of course, but in an intense and pure way, a love story.  It’s not for nothing that we refer to what the Lord does on the cross, as his “passion.”  What goes on at Christmas, what goes on on Good Friday and Easter Morning: these are chapters of a great love story whose authorship began millennia ago, and in which new chapters are still being written even today, as his love is made real and tangible in each one of our lives.  It’s a universal characteristic of passionate love, to look pretty reckless.  For example, when a man and woman make those beautiful promises to each other in marriage: for better OR for worse, for richer OR for poorer, for ever NOT just for as long as I feel like it: those are beautifully reckless, risky promises: they make you vulnerable.  But they also make you loveable, and they manifest a complete giving over of self in trust and in confidence.  Think about how reckless God is, taking on the weakness of the human nature.  Now he’s vulnerable.  God, who is being itself, life itself and the source of all life, completely omnipotent, immortal, and eternal, somehow finds a way to be vulnerable to us: somehow finds a way to give himself to us with a recklessness and a vulnerability that is necessary for this to actually be a love that we can see and understand.  So he comes to us, not only with the weakness of a human nature subject to the possibility of suffering and death: he comes to us as an infant.  And he didn’t just seem to be a little baby…he really was.  In the tiniest, most vulnerable, humble circumstances: a baby, whose parents don’t even have a room to give birth in, or a crib in which to lay their child: so they’re in the cold, under the elements: they have to put the baby in a feeding trough.  Every detail in this story is about fragile vulnerability.  Every detail in this story is about love.  This feast is a reminder of how completely, passionately, recklessly God loves us; and how completely, passionately, recklessly he loves you, specifically and personally.  And what can our response possibly be, besides profound gratitude, as in the beautiful words of the psalmist which we all sang just a few moments ago: For ever I will sing the goodness of the Lord.  O come let us adore him, Christ the Lord.