Underneath the Stars

Today, Abi, our church's music director, sang a Polish carol for the congregation. She sang first in her native language, then in English. Before she began the song, she told us she remembered singing the carol with her large family in their home of two small rooms while Poland was still a communist nation. Despite poverty and strain, she said that in singing this song they knew that God's great blessing rested on their lives.

"Jesus Christ was born / Underneath the stars," her alto voice filled the sanctuary as her hands handled the keyboard with the grace and strength of gymnasts. "Underneath the stars" . . . In the first moment of hearing the translated words, they seemed anti-climatic against the lovely, lingering melody. Underneath the stars? Everybody knows that. Where else would He be born, considering that all of earth is underneath the stars?

How like one born underneath the stars, herself, to miss the glory of the thought through a fancied detection of cliché--to see something big as small, and something small as big.

Our stars are not so impressive here in the city. Fuzzy atmosphere dims them. Out in the country on a clear night, they people the sky, some bright, some so faint they are seen best when one doesn't really look at them. Standing by the hulk of the barn back home, I have admired the faintly misty band of the milky way curving over the sky and the brighter outlying slivers surrounded by blackness, "all the lights hanging up there," as my small group leader at church described them. But even in the country, the stars look small. We make children's songs about the ancient light that "twinkles" outside the window, sent from a terrifying ball of heat and light big beyond our comprehension. We illustrate the relative differences of size and distance between planets with peas and balls and yardsticks and city blocks, but we grasp only an echo of the reality behind our demonstrations. And beyond these familiar and companionable heavenly bodies, live stars upon stars upon stars--supremely beyond our comprehension or control. As God asks Job, “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion? Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season, or can you guide the Bear with its children? Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth?" (Job 38:31-33 ESV). Obviously, that's God's job.

But Jesus Christ was born underneath these stars. The one who holds them together became a tiny child lying beneath them like any other human. This Christmas, may God help us glimpse the immensity of the truth of the Incarnation, even though it is beyond our complete comprehension. May He help us wonder anew that God Himself entered the smallness of our existence, and may we explore again why He did it.