Christmas reminds us of God's abiding love for all things imperfect in our world.

I love Christmas. I love the whole idea that we wait — all year — for this very night, and that we mark that anticipation by putting up decorations and trees and baking cookies, and, in the church, by lighting the Advent candles and reminding ourselves that the best gifts can’t be bought: hope, peace, joy and love.

But most of all, I love the story. We tell it again and again, year after year, and it never gets old. I love it. It’s perfect.

News of a child

We often think of the Christmas story beginning with Mary, but it doesn’t. The Christmas story actually begins with an angel appearing to a couple who were too old to have children to tell them that they were finally, finally, going to have a child. And that was kind of perfect, because in those days people thought that if you didn’t have children, God had cursed you or you were being punished because you had fallen out of favor with God.

So this angel appears to Elizabeth and Zechariah in their old age and tells them that they’re going to have a son, that they’re to name him John and that he’s going to announce the coming of Jesus, who is the Messiah, the savior for whom the world had been waiting.

It was kind of perfect because it was foreshadowing the fact that Jesus, when he grew up, would be in ministry to people who thought they were out of favor with God for something they had done and who thought they were far away from God’s love.

Later, the same angel appears to Mary, who was probably a teenager. And the angel says, “Mary, the Lord is with you, and you have found favor with God.” To which Mary replies, “How on earth can that be? I haven’t even lived long enough to find favor with God!” She knows she’s an unlikely candidate for the role she’s been given, but she says yes anyway.

That’s just the thing about this story: The people who take center stage — people like Elizabeth and Zechariah, Mary and Joseph — are unlikely people who thought they were either too old or too young or simply outside of God’s favor. Their presence in the story points toward the kind of Messiah that would come: a savior of imperfect people living in an imperfect world.

Then there were the shepherds. If there ever were imperfect people in the world, it would be shepherds. In their day, shepherds were known to be rough and tough and always on the outside of things. And yet, in this perfect story, the angel also appears to some shepherds who were in the fields nearby on the night Jesus was born.

The angel says to them, “God is doing something incredible in the world, something new and unlike anything that God has ever done before, and God wants you to see it. Even though you have never been a part of anything like this before, even though you are always on the outside and never get invited to anything like this … God wants to include you in this thing that has taken place.”

And it’s just perfect because when Jesus (whom we call the Good Shepherd) would grow up, he would spend so much of his time going to people who were outsiders — who were outside of the religious system and outside of a relationship with God — and saying to them, “God loves you, and you’re invited, as well …”

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Another story at the same time

Now, while all of this was happening, this perfect story of a perfect savior coming into an imperfect world, 1,500 miles away there was another story taking place. You see, in the Bible, Luke pinpoints this event to a specific moment in history — a time when Caesar Augustus was emperor of Rome. If you remember back, you know that Julius Caesar, Augustus’ adoptive father, was considered to be a deity. They called him the Divine Julius, which meant that Caesar Augustus, the Roman emperor at the time when Jesus is born, was considered the son of a god.

So you have Caesar Augustus, the son of a god, ruling the Roman world at the same time that Jesus, the actual Son of God, was being born into that world. All these years later, though, the only time you ever really hear about Caesar Augustus is in this story. The son of the great Julius Caesar, the emperor of Rome, has become a footnote in a story about a Jewish carpenter, born in a humble stable in a humble town to humble people. It’s just … perfect.

Although what makes the story truly perfect is that, beginning to end, it’s all about God’s love for the world.

God's good news this Christmas

I’ve heard it said that God has a preferential option for the unexpected, a bent toward the improper. That God always chooses little, out-of-the-way places and unlikely, overlooked people who are too young or too old, too this or too that. After all, people and places that are full of themselves often have no room for God.

The good news is that since God has a preferential option for the unlikely, for the imperfect, you and I and our unlikely, overlooked, ordinary and imperfect lives may be just where God chooses to come and be born new this year. Wouldn’t that be perfect?

The Rev. Daniel Vigilante is senior pastor at The Presbyterian Church in Morristown.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Christmas 2023: God's love for the imperfect is abiding