So now there isn’t any condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. God has done what was impossible for the Law, since it was weak because of selfishness. – Romans 8:1-3 

Today I want to dig down into the bottom line of the season, to the implications of the fact that God took the game-changing step of entering into this world as a helpless infant.

I have been thinking about this as I read yet another news story emerging from the confusion and angst so much of humanity is immersed in when it comes to the meaning and the purpose and the practice of life.

Specifically I’m talking about the shooting of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson.

Here in America our bedside-manner is too often reduced to data points on a spreadsheet. We treat the care of beings created in the image of God as a commodity rather than an essential human need, and because of this everyone suffers, including doctors and patients and everything as well as everybody in between (interestingly, these practices don’t produce savings so much as escalate cost).

Yes, this is about Christmas

What we absolutely must learn – and, yes, this is about Christmas – is that the worth of a human being cannot be quantified, appraised, digitalized, organized on a spreadsheet and assigned a value on a numerical scale.

This is why the practice of reducing each moment of care to a recordable datapoint is both inflationary and ultimately inhumane. Also – and admittedly tangentially – the well-worn sci-fi storyline of digitalizing someone’s essential self for later use will always remain make-believe.  

This is important to the conversation around Christmas why? Because, likewise, God’s intervention in this world, this breaking into time and space, was not is not cannot be quantified, measured or assigned a discrete value. Ideas such as loving, giving, generosity, putting others first, caring and healing are also not quantifiable and therefore cannot be measured, evaluated, digitalized or monetized.

Had God added up all the data on the debit side of our account and come up with a representative number, then salvation may well be transactional. But God does not do that. Instead the Creator sent/sends all that God is, wrapped up in a tiny helpless infant, immediately dependent on care from people. 

This is Christmas. Not that God evaluated the cost and made a transaction but that God declared us priceless and worth, well, everything

This is Christmas. Not that God evaluated the cost and made a transaction but that God declared us priceless and worth, well, everything.

Just how my brain is working today – DEREK