I spent Christmas Day home alone with a cold, but I didn’t mind. I’m living in a country where December 25th isn’t a holiday, so everybody around me is at work having a normal day. Both last weekend and next weekend are full of Christmas outreach events, and I had a party with other expats yesterday while a dinner is planned with local friends tomorrow. My family already video-called me to watch the niece-and-nephews open their presents, including the gifts I sent. And when I check my phone there are invitations from people around me to visit, to teach, to serve, to mentor, to get together as soon as I feel up to it. So I was actually relieved to spend today alone with the Birthday Boy Himself.
Only we weren’t alone, of course. I had told the Lord that what I would really like to do on December 25th was host a Christmas party at my house for all the angels in my life and adore Him together. I didn’t know exactly how to host an angel party, but He said they were very excited to come. So I kept the day free for our special time together. I am relieved that no other humans were invited to our party, because I have been feeling under the weather ever since returning from the latest of two December trips away, and so I still haven’t felt up to even cleaning the house for Christmas, let alone setting up my little tree. My table is instead strewn with unwrapped presents for the upcoming youth group party, waiting for me to feel up to walking through the snow to buy wrapping paper. And I have been spending my free time between human gatherings recovering in bed with my eyes shut, vaguely and sweetly aware of faint impressions of my angel hanging up festive garlands and streamers in the room in the unseen realm.
And, resting again today, I saw the vision-picture of all the angels assigned to different areas of my life and ministry, looking much more traditional than they usually do, all dressed up with white robes and feathery wings for the occasion, holding candles the way we did at our Christmas Eve service in my childhood church when I was growing up, preparing to sing “Silent Night,” with Jesus sitting on a chair in the middle of the circle, waiting to be sung to. Now, if their purpose was just to comfort me with nostalgic memories of my childhood Christmases when I am living far from home for Jesus’ sake, I guess holding candles and singing “Silent Night” would be a good way to do it, but this is not what I was expecting for an angel worship party. I started laughing at them. “Guys, you look like Christmas tree angels, or stained glass window angels! This song is good for humans celebrating Christmas, but it is a ridiculous song for real angels to be singing to Jesus now, when He’s all grown up and sitting there running the universe!” But when I complained, I saw that I accidentally blew out the candle they had given me to hold with them, so they patiently relit it and told me to be quiet, they were having fun dressing up as traditional Christmas-card angels and they wanted to sing “Silent Night” for Jesus.
So I tried to cooperate with the program, and we started singing, but it was so funny to me I had to smother my laughter to not blow out my candle again. I just barely made it through “holy infant so tender and mild,” but when I tried to sing “sleep in heavenly peace!” as a worship song, picturing Jesus all grown-up and listening to me, I had to cry out, “Only, please, please, don’t Lord, please stay wide awake and keep ruling the universe so that the rest of us can sleep in heavenly peace!” The second verse was a little better, with the “heavenly host singing alleluia” and the third verse was the best, “Son of God, love’s pure light, radiance streams from Thy holy face”–I could actually raise my hands and worship Him with those words, except when it finished “with the dawn of redeeming grace, Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth,” I whispered to Him that I wanted to update the ending now to include something about reaching the full high noon of redeeming grace since His birth, with His life and death and resurrection and pouring out His Spirit and sitting at His Father’s right hand. And He said that now that we had sung “Silent Night,” I was welcome to write a new song for Him of what I really wanted to say, and all the angels would happily sing it with me. I was a bit intimidated, but I climbed into my place on His lap and started brainstorming to Him what was in my heart, and this is what I came up with.
You came down from Heaven,
Landed in a womb,
Lay down in a manger
When we said we had no room,
Hung up on a cross,
And walked out of Your tomb!
But the coolest thing we’ve ever seen You do…
Oh the coolest thing we’ve ever seen You do…
…Is that now You’re sitting down!
Our High Priest’s sitting down!
At Your Father’s right hand,
Your work completed now,
The sacrifice all made,
“It is finished,” the price paid,
So put Your pierced feet up, Lord,
On the footstool of our praise
As we see You sitting down.
I started to place a simple melody with it, and to imagine the angels beginning to sing it. They all started gathering around Him, still holding their candles, but reaching out to stroke His head and caress His hair fondly. “You came down from heaven” was their line, they had actually seen it from the other side. “We said we had no room” was my line; it was my race that started rejecting Him from day one, not theirs. On the line “You hung up on a cross,” one of them reached out to stroke the scar in His hand. On “You walked out of Your tomb,” I whispered into His chest, “You are the most amazing ever!” And when we sang “Now You’re sitting down!” I whispered, “And I’m so, so glad, because I couldn’t sit on Your lap like this unless and until You did!”
But the next time we sang it through, I noticed my angel kneeling on the floor picking up His feet on “put Your pierced feet up Lord” and kissing them, and I wanted to get down and kneel beside her and do that too. I immediately remembered the woman in the Bible washing His feet with her tears and wiping them with her hair, and I whispered, “the only difference now is that when she did that, Your feet didn’t have nail scar-holes in them, and when I do it, they do!” I kissed the soles of His feet and whispered, “First You got thorn scars on the bottom of Your feet, earth-curse thorns every day between the manger and the cross, rejection and conflict every day, and dirty every day of needing Your own feet washed and choosing to wash other people’s, and then finally nail scars from the top. No wonder the angels kiss Your feet. It is so, so right.”
After a few rounds of singing the song in my heart with the angels, I tried to rasp out a whispery, physically-sung version through my stuffy nose, as an offering: Put Your pierced feet up Lord, on the footstool of my praise…
It is wonderful today to remember Him in the manger, “holy infant, so tender and mild,” and think how we would have kissed His ten little perfect tiny toes if we could have seen Him then. But this Christmas in particular I have been enjoying the thought of Him as He is now, too, sitting in victory–and to think of kissing the scarred feet that walked every step in between. I love to marvel in awe, as the writer of Hebrews 8, 9, and 10 did, at the miracle implied just by the sight of the Savior-Priest done with His job and sitting down.
Merry Christmas!
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