By now, most of you have either opened up some presents are going to as soon as you get home today.  Giving and receiving the gifts. The wrapping paper is torn and useless, the boxes are opened. And it’s all headed to garbage. We keep the gift and throw away the packaging as if it were nothing important. But we dare not do that in regards to Jesus.

God in a box.  The infant Jesus in a manger. That’s what we celebrate today. So that we might know God, that we might believe in Him, that we might live with Him, He boxes Himself up as the Christmas gift to the whole world.  He wraps Himself up in swaddling cloths, being laid in a wooden feed trough as the Christmas present to the world. 

But the real miracle of Christmas isn’t that God placed Himself inside a manger, but that God places Himself in a box that is a human body.  “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  In the womb of Mary. In a manger.  In the Jordan River.  Teaching, preaching, healing in Galilee. And then upon a cross. In the grave. In heaven, at the right hand of God the Father.

Now you might think, “Wait a minute here. Who are we put God in a box?  He is too big to be limited by our understanding or our ideas or our doctrines or our buildings or any other box we create.  There’s an old philosophical saying that goes, “the infinite cannot be contained by the finite.”  Sometimes we Lutherans are charged with limiting what God can do and how He goes about doing it.  How can the infinite God, the creator of the universe, ever be contained when the very earth is His footstool?

No, we cannot limit God, nor box Him up into things of our own making. When it comes to the created universe, God alone is holy, which is to say, God alone is “set apart” from all that exists in creation. So, if we are to know God or have a relationship with Him, He must locate Himself for us within creation. Another pastor once put it this way, that in the same way we could never have a relationship with the architect of a building by talking to the walls or getting close to the carpet, we will never have a relationship with God by searching for Him in creation.  We can learn about the Creator by looking at what He has made, but we cannot know Him this way. He remains separate from all things, apart from all things, holy. If we are to truly know God, He must come to us so that we may know for a certainty that He is with us — which is exactly what God has done at Christmas – And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

At the incarnation, God literally located Himself for us within created matter. Put another way, God placed Himself “in a box.” He humbled Himself and delivered Himself for us in the “box” of flesh and blood.  From the beginning, Jesus was appointed for the cross and tomb by which He would reconcile us to Himself by paying the price for our sin. Indeed, in this infant dwelt all the fullness of the godhead bodily — the God of God and Light of Light who came for us, died for us, and rose again for us within creation so that we might know His love and receive His salvation in the gifts He gives to this day (Rev. James Holowach). He delivers that present to the world, not with a sleigh and reindeer, but through much more ordinary and mundane ways. In words upon pages of His Book. In water in a bowl. In bread upon a plate, in wine within a cup.

In the end, God can certainly come to us any way He chooses. He has chosen these lowly means, just as in His lowly birth. These means of grace are the way by which we may see the glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:14) boxed up in the flesh, and delivered to us personally.  If we desire to have life in relationship with God, then we are well advised to receive it in the gifts He gives in the manner in which He gives them.

You can’t put God in a box.  Yes, but you also can’t take God out of a box that He has put Himself into. He has put Himself there for us.  Why do we get so easily become unsatisfied with the gift and with box in which it is packaged? Now that He has come to us through His Son and located Himself for us in His word and sacraments, are we really going to insist on something different, something more? Are we going to act like children who are unsatisfied with the gifts their fathers have given because they are too small, too boring, or simply not what we expected?  We are called to repent of trying to sneak a peak at God undressed, of treating His gift of salvation in Christ too lightly, of trying to toss the present out with the wrapping paper and box.

If you want to have anything good from God, any blessing from Him, He’s got to put Himself in a certain place for the good of His people.  In Exodus 20:24b, right after delivering the 10 Commandments to His people, God states, “In every place where I cause My name to be remembered I will come to you and bless you.”  The blessings come from when God places Himself in a box, the box of human flesh in Jesus, the box of Word and Sacrament. Trying to take God out of the box in which He has placed Himself is a very dangerous thing. Luther once talked about those who want to see God in His full glory, unboxed as it were.  He warned of a speculative theology about those who wanted to sneak into heaven and see God nude.  The problem with seeing God in His full glory is that we can take it. It’s too much for us. If you want to see God unclothed from the boxes that He puts Himself in, that ends only in destruction. “No one can see God and live.”  You cannot see God in His unrestrained glory and, as a sinner, survive.

Let us take hold of the gift of God who comes for you “in a box,” in the flesh and blood of Jesus, in bread and wine and water and word to be God with you and for you. On this Christmas Day, let us rejoice in this free gift of God, received by faith in the Word made flesh, the one in whom is the life of the world.