painting by Sarah Stevens

How a winter ride home from church taught me more about the Gospel than the service itself.

by Stephen Hess

_______________

I was raised in a nominally Catholic family. By nominally, I mean that church was seen as an obligation, that somehow going to church meant you were a moral person. We would dutiful attend mass on Sunday mornings or occasionally Saturday nights, but an actual faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior was absent and frankly inconsequential the other six days of the week. I left college and experienced the reality of my own sin and received the free gift of saving grace through Jesus Christ’s death on the cross. But when I am back in Rhode Island over holiday breaks, I attend mass with my parents, setting aside the banner of my reformed theological views in order to spend time with them.

As I was in the passenger seat of my mom’s car on our way to the 5pm Christmas mass at St. Mary’s Church in Newport, Rhode Island, my eyes were fixed upon the cold landscape. For the very first time, it occurred to me that the look of the snow in New England was the perfect metaphor for the depraved state of the world that the second person of the Trinity entered into in the form of a helpless and vulnerable infant. When the snow first falls, it is absolutely picturesque. The pure, clean, white snow covering everything remains one of the most breathtaking and beautiful images that I have seen first-hand. But the purity of the winter snow is fleeting. Driving, just a few days after the first snow falls, one does not glance out onto pristine snow, but blackened, dirt-filled slush lining the roads–a product of cars and SUVs travelling up and down those very roads.

God created Adam and Eve “very good,” like the gleaming white snow that first falls, but through their disobedience sin entered into the world, defiling and staining mankind, separating them from perfect communion with their creator, God. And while God intended and designed for all of humanity to be as pure and white as the first falling snow, the reality and severity of sin means that we are all like the blackened, dirt-filled slush that lines the sides of the road. Through sin, just like Adam and Eve, we are defiled and separated from God, with his wrath heavy upon us.

Yet, it is because of that very blackened state of humanity–of you and I–that Jesus left the glorious riches of heaven–the perfect communion with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, and took on flesh in helpless babe. The incarnation, God becoming flesh, Jesus’ birth, which is now celebrated as Christmas, presents to us both our total depravity and God’s boundless grace.

Random Posts:

• eleven months, one day and a thorn in the flesh (volume one)
• Is God Done with the American Church? Perhaps Not.
• Get yourself some Spurgeon