This post was written by Matthew Beck, staff chaplain, Parkview Health.
When I was a child, nothing filled me with wonder as much as the flickering of Christmas lights at night viewed from the backseat window on a drive. I would stretch as far as my seatbelt would allow, close enough to see my breath on the window as we took the long way home after some holiday gathering into a neighborhood, park or stretch of brightly-lit businesses. I was always curious to see what would be illuminated (Santa and his reindeer, “peace on earth,” or to my great satisfaction, a dinosaur) and if the bulbs would be a bright white, a warm inviting glow, or even synchronized in colorful motion.
As I got older and began to reflect on the “meaning of Christmas,” a phrase I often heard grumpily repeated (ironic, it strikes me now) by adults and pastors in the weeks leading up to the “Day of Presents,” as I thought of it, I paid attention to and even looked for signs of the baby Jesus. One that I came to often recognize was the life-size nativity set aglow on a country road not far from our home.
There was nothing special about the scene. The stable was put together with imperfectly cut two-by-fours and plywood. Mary and Joseph were each made of a single plastic mold, crudely painted. There were no bright Christmas lights, just a spotlight aimed at the holy couple sitting in the hay with an empty manger.
And it was that empty manger that caused me pause each time we passed by. Until sometime late Christmas Eve night or before anyone else was awake when the owner would carefully place the baby Jesus in his spot, the manger would remain bare.
Over the years, I would look forward to this expected, yet surprise act. And I think that was the point: building anticipation. The delay that births joy. The gift of advent waiting. But now that I’m older, I see that there may be another theological purpose. As the manger sat empty for weeks, missing something, indeed the most important something, that image of a Jesus-less nativity has become for me a holding space, a holy space, for the areas and seasons of our lives in which we feel the absence of God.
And, perhaps, that is where you find yourself this year, in a long advent waiting. A season of loss, loneliness, or longing, as if you’re looking at an empty manger. I hope that you find that there is room for those feelings and that you are not alone.
And yet, I encourage you to hold fast, for as the carol reminds us, “the hopes and fears of all the years” are met in the One who is not absent, but arrives. That is the excepted, yet surprise act I’ve come to anticipate. That somehow God shows up in the empty spaces, perhaps especially there. May you look again at the empty manger and see this time that Immanuel, “God is with us.”
