The Greatest Gift: Unwrapping the Full Love Story of Christmas (2 page)

Or you may use a small evergreen tree in an urn, a cluster of red dogwood branches in a vase, or a pot of hemlock, pine, spruce, sticks, or holly.

The ornaments can be downloaded from my website (using the code JESSE) and then printed out to hang on any tree of your imagining or envisioning. Just whatever you do . . .

Anticipate Christ . . . and Celebrate Christmas, His Coming

All this Jesse Tree making? It’s a bit like making your own family tree —a family tree with its arching branches of grandfathers and grandmothers, its sheltering leaves of aunts and uncles. To make a Jesse Tree is to trace the family line and heritage of your own forever family —the family of God.

Out of the stump of David’s family will grow a shoot.

ISAIAH 11:1

     Out of the stump of David’s family will grow a shoot —

          yes, a new Branch bearing fruit from the old root.

     And the Spirit of the LORD will rest on him —

          the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,

     the Spirit of counsel and might,

          the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. . . .

     In that day the heir to David’s throne

          will be a banner of salvation to all the world.

     The nations will rally to him,

          and the land where he lives will be a glorious place.

ISAIAH 11:1-2, 10

The mattering part is never what isn’t.

The mattering part is never the chopped-off stump.

It isn’t what dream has been cut down, what hope has been cut off, what part of the heart has been cut out.

The tender mattering part is —
you have a Tree
.

Out of the last and forgotten son of Jesse comes forth one tender branch that will grow into a crown of thorns . . . a rugged cross . . . your ladder back to God. Jesus will go to
impossible
lengths to rescue you.

Out of the stump of that fallen tree, watered with the living waters that flow from the depths of His grace, a twig sprouts. That twig will be the scepter that defeats your sin . . . and lets you grow again.

Out of that stump and the sheared impossible there springs a singular shoot —tender and vulnerable.

There, here, in the midst of the inconceivable, the loud claims, the hard sells, the big spectacles, Christ comes small, the micro- macro-miracle who comes in the whisper and says,
Seek Me
. Just where you are, look for the small glimpses of God-glory breaking in, breaking out, sprouting, shooting, unfurling, bearing fruit, making a Kingdom, remaking the world. Slow and still. And seek the shoot that bears witness to God —the hardly noticed child, the hymn hummed over the sink, the unassuming
woman bent at the register, the dog-eared Word of God beckoning from the shelf.

Gaze on shoots of glory to grow deep roots in God.

The theology of the Tree, of the Cross, always seeks the presence of God in the belittled gifts of the world.

The small Babe of Bethlehem, the dismissed Son of God, the stripped and beaten Messiah hanging exposed on the Tree —He begs us to spend the attention of Advent on the little, the least, the lonely, the lost.

Because in the rush, in the hurry, in our addiction to speed —it might just be a bit like stepping on the shoot that sprouts from the stump.

Advent, it is made of the moments.

This slow unfurling of grace.

Plant wheat or grass seeds for every act of love and kindness you do today. Continue planting seeds for kindnesses throughout the Jesse Tree journey. Keep watering the sprouts until Christmas Eve. You’re growing straw for the manger of the coming King! Love and new life are coming!

In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second you catch a whiff in the air of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you’ve never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart. The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.

FREDERICK BUECHNER

In what ways do you feel like a lifeless stump, longing for a tender shoot of hope?

What are you waiting for, yearning for this season?

Where can you see new life coming in what you may have considered dead?

So God created human beings in his own image.

GENESIS 1:27

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.

Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day” and the darkness “night.” . . .

God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.”

So God created human beings in his own image.

          In the image of God he created them;

          male and female he created them.

GENESIS 1:1-5, 26-27

This Christmas story —it begins in the beginning, this love story that’s been coming for you since the beginning.

It begins with the always coming of Christ.

Christ, who is there in the beginning, the voice calling out of darkness, an echo in cosmic emptiness, speaks it by the commanding word of His mouth:
Let there be . . .

Let there be light and land and living beasts. . . .

But you? You alone were formed by a huddle of hearts:

Let us make human beings.

The authority of God made all of creation. But it was the
affection
of God that made all His children.

The three persons of the Trinity —Father God, Jesus Christ, and Holy Spirit —gathered close together to imagine you. And God in three persons, uncontainable affection, knelt down and kissed warm life into you with the breath of His love.

You are made of the dust of this earth, and you are made of the happiness of heaven, and you are flesh and you are spirit, and you are of two worlds longing for the home of forever and Him.

No matter your story before, this is your beginning now: you were formed by Love . . . for love.

John Calvin, he wrote it like a reviving breath —that
every human being is “formed to be a spectator of the created world and given eyes that he might be led to its author . . . first [to] cast our eyes upon the very beautiful fabric of the world in which [God] wishes to be seen by us. . . . As soon as we acknowledge God to be the supreme architect, who has erected the beauteous fabric of the universe, our minds must necessarily be ravished with wonder at His infinite goodness, wisdom and power.”
[1]

Ravished with wonder.

That the earth outside your window is tilted right now at just twenty-three degrees. So there are seasons and the vapors of oceans don’t simply amass continents of ice, so the planet’s bulk of six sextillion tons (that’s twenty-one zeros) spins perfectly balanced on an invisible axis, spinning you around at one thousand miles an hour, nine million miles a year. Hurtling you through space even right now in this sun orbit at nineteen miles per second, 600 million miles a year. You, held in this moment by this unseen belt of gravity and turning these pages slowly while the miracle happens all around you: “He . . . poised the earth on nothingness” (Job 26:7, NJB).