This is a more organized, slightly better explained version of what I talked about Monday at the Christmas Eve service:

One of the most striking things about the incarnation - at least from my perspective - is that it’s a story. That’s not to say that it’s just a story, however, it wasn’t given to us in the form of a theology textbook with diagrams and bullet points. I’ve got to assume this is intentional - God could have given us a textbook if He had wanted to. For a theology geek like me, that seems like it would have been a better idea, really. It would have eliminated a lot of confusion. In any case, though, He didn’t, and what we have is a narrative.

It’s not just a narrative, though - if what Christianity says is true, it’s the central event in history, the most important thing that’s ever happened. It’s the most important story that we’ll ever hear. If that’s true, then we would expect this to be the story that resonates in the deepest way with our souls. If God is both a designer and a storyteller - and if He’s good at both - this story and our souls were made for each other.

Francis Schaeffer once famously said that all truth is God’s truth. That is to say - although what Christianity claims about the world is true, what Christianity claims is not exhaustive truth. We’ll run into profound insights about life, claims about the physical world, and all sorts of truth outside of the church that is still true. For some reason, this scares many Christians, but it shouldn’t. All of this stuff - if it really is true - is truth that’s about God or has been created by Him - and it all has the ability to point us in His general direction, if we let it.

There have been some discussions here recently about extending this idea into concepts of beauty in art and nature. All beauty, no matter where it comes from, is beautiful because something in it, even in a small way, is a reflection of the glory of God. That’s why it’s beautiful. That’s what being beautiful actually means. There’s no way that we can come up with anything that is beautiful that doesn’t fit this description.

Maybe this can be applied to stories, as well: the extent to which a story resonates with our souls is directly proportional to the extent to which that story is a shadow of the story of the incarnation. Obviously, this is easy to see with an overt example like Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, but I think it’s also true in other stories, as well: take something like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, for example. There aren’t any characters that you would say correspond to, well, anyone in the story of the incarnation, but you still see characters that behave with sacrificial love, and groups that show us what true friendship and fellowship actually look like, lived out. Even more overtly, in a movie like The Matrix, you’ve got a hero that’s something of a Messiah figure. This concept of a Messiah figure shows up on a fairly regular basis: everything from the latest Superman movie to Frank Herbert’s Dune, to Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land … the list goes on and on. Maybe this shows up so frequently because these are all attempts to tell the best story. They’re all approximations of the best story, which we can find written on our hearts, if we just know where to look.

The beginning of the incarnation, though, isn’t the whole story. C.S. Lewis put it best, as he frequently does, in Miracles:

“God descends to re-ascend. He comes down to the very roots and sea bed of the nature he has created. But he goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world with Him.”

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- garrett (golfsierra.org/blog)