Christmas Eve: thoughts from the colonial side

This morning my plan was to finish tomorrow's sermon at Aromas and then take a walk down Duke of Gloucester Street. This, as it turned out, was also the plan of everyone else in Williamsburg and their dog. It was crowded, and that annoyed me a little. I had wanted to be alone with my thoughts to ponder lofty and holy things like Incarnation and the True Meaning of Christmas.

Luckily (inspired by this article I shared recently on Facebook), it didn't take me long to realize how silly it was to want to be alone to ponder the incarnation. So instead, I noticed the people around me, and that became my prayer. I noticed the woman walking her two sweater-clad, antlered greyhounds; the toddler jumping on a wooden stage saying, "Jump! Jump! Jump!"; the Russian tourists figuring out where they were; the boy pretending to shoot passersby with his fake rifle; the fifers, and the drummers; the young woman hugging Santa in Merchant's Square; the group of maybe eight Occupy Williamsburg protesters huddled around a Christmas tree with a sign at the top that proclaimed, "A better world is possible."

This is the life God enters. All of it.

Colonial Williamsburg has always been a place where the past meshes with the present so that it's sometimes hard to tell the difference. Kids with light-up shoes wait in line to stick their heads in the stocks; a man in 18th century garb is in line ahead of you at Wawa. And today that seemed especially true as I remembered that the God who entered this world in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago walks with us still--us, in all our latte-drinking, dog-walking, tourist-shooting, Santa-hugging, corporate-personhood-protesting glory...or lack thereof.

What I saw was ordinary people caught in ordinary moments, just like me. And that's the life the incarnate God makes holy. That's the un-lofty life God infuses with eternity.