Well, it's almost here:  Christmas.  As I remember the fourth and final Sunday of Advent and look towards its culminating event, the incarnation, God's appearance in human flesh, I think frequently about how Christmas plays out across the world.  In the West, it is of course remembered, in spades.  Unless one is living in a dream, he or she cannot miss sit.  In other parts of the world, however, regions dominated by other religious viewpoints, not so much.
     Christmas's seminal moment and foundation, that is, the incarnation, however, came to a world not entirely prepared to believe it.  Very few people were ready to accept that God could become flesh, could become a human being.  Today is no exception.  Although there are roughly 2.3 billion Christians on the planet, this leaves over five billion people who are not, people who likely do not believe that, in Jesus, God came in the flesh, became a person like you and me.
     So why Christmas?  Precisely because it is Christmas.  If God had not become a human being, we would not really know him.  We would not really understand the transcendent, the "great beyond" (to borrow a term from REM's song of the same name).  Without Christmas, we would still be wandering in the dark, a dark of rich and profound spirituality, yes, but a dark still searching for its real meaning.
     At the time it occurred, few people cared about Jesus' birth.  Ironically, now nearly everyone on the globe has difficulty avoiding it.  Though we could, and not without falsity, attribute this to centuries of Western dominance of the international cultural discourse, this only answers the reality in part.  The logic of Christmas is inescapable:  if God had not become human, we would never fully know him.
     And this is precisely God's point.  Though Jesus was a very tiny point in a vast and unyielding global empire, born in obscurity and overlooked by the rest of the world, he was the one in whom God chose to make himself known to all humanity.  Jesus was the one whom God would use to manifest and reconcile himself to his human creation, the one whom God would use to draw all people to himself.  In Jesus, the forgotten child, was the greatest hope of all time.  It's the ultimate irony, the greatest surprise.  It's God's way of demonstrating to us that just when we think we have everything figured out, we really do not.
     Only as God becomes like us can we know him.  As John so wisely observes, "And the Word (God) became flesh" (John 1:14).