Christmas in the Backseat

In my Christmas column, which appeared in our local paper, I wrote about unusual births and the miracle of God entering our world amid less-than-ideal circumstances.

Christmas in the Backseat

You may have seen the recent story about a woman in San Francisco who gave birth in a self-driving taxi. She went into labor, called for a robo-taxi to take her to the hospital, and didn’t quite make it before giving birth to a healthy baby in the backseat. According to the company, “the car has been removed from service for cleaning.”

For Christians, this time of year focuses our hearts and minds on another unusual birthing experience. Jesus was born, not in a sterile maternity ward or behind the fortified walls of a palace. He wasn’t laid in a beautifully hand-crafted crib fit for a king. Rather, after his family found no room at the local inn, he was born in a humble stable and placed in a feeding trough.

This certainly wasn’t how Mary envisioned the arrival of her newborn son. Just as I can’t imagine it was the young woman in San Francisco’s dream to give birth all alone in a cyber-taxi. 

Yet God takes all that is not ideal — the mud and muck of the stable, the sense of isolation and abandonment — and transforms it into hope. One of the most remarkable claims about the Christian faith is that we worship a God who entered into relationship with us in less-than-ideal conditions.

Yet God sent his only Son into the very heart of the human condition. Jesus comes to us not in spite of, but precisely because of, our brokenness and sinfulness. He enters directly into the messiness and disarray of our lives. 

And I find that incredibly hopeful. Why? Because God gets it. God understands our hopes and our fears, our desires and our shortcomings. And God loves us anyway. Despite whatever may not be ideal in your own life in this moment, God loves you, and delights in you, and will never, ever abandon you. 

That’s the miracle of Christmas. Not that everything is perfect — we don’t live in a Hallmark Christmas movie where problems magically resolve and there is always a predictable and happy ending that takes place before the credits roll. The miracle is that God sees our struggles and enters into them. 

In that holy stable, God enters the fray of the human condition, and then continues to walk alongside us, rather than standing at a safe distance. God takes all that is not ideal in our lives — the loneliness, the brokenness, the fear, the heartbreak — and through relationship with us, transforms it all into a loving, liberating, life-giving hope.

So perhaps it’s fitting that during the twelve days of this Christmas season, we spend a moment reflecting on a birth in the backseat of a driverless taxi. Life doesn’t always unfold in the ways we plan for or prefer. But even there — in the unexpected, the inconvenient, the imperfect — new life breaks forth. That’s what happened in a taxi in San Francisco last week, and that’s what took place in a manger in that little town of Bethlehem.  

The Rev. Tim Schenck serves as Rector of the Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach.