Jake and I and a group of dear friends went to Andrew Peterson's Behold the Lamb of God tour a couple of nights ago, and it was awesome. It was glorious. It declared to me the glory of God in a way that only Christmas-y type things can. You know what I mean. There's something special about Christmas that fills our hearts with a breathless wonder, a heaviness of awe deep in our chests that cannot be replicated at any other time of year. So I got to thinking about what that might be. What's behind this feeling?
It's such a weighty feeling. It's a feeling of being very small, in the middle of something very, very grand.
Which made me remember a sermon I heard several years ago about the glory of God. I think it was a Rob Bell sermon. He talked about how, in the Hebrew, the word for "glory" is "kavod". And something with kavod is something that's here to stay; it's something significant, honorable, heavy, majestic, weighty. It actually comes from the word "kaved", if I remember right, which is another Hebrew word that might be used to describe the heaviness of a rich person's jewelry, weighing them down. So is the glory, or kavod, of God. It's like the bass drum at the core of creation. It's that deep rumble in the universe of the things that aren't going anywhere.
The heavens declare the kavod of God. The starry night sky drips with His glory. We gaze up at its vastness and are reminded of our place in a very great, epic story of the world. We are reminded of beauty, mystery, sacrifice, love, depth, reverence, perspective. And there is something about this, something about coming face to face with a cosmic weight and significance that is so much larger than our own... I'm convinced it's good for our psyche. Or at the very least, good for our pride!
God is drenched in glory. But God has crowned us, His children, with glory as well. He has placed us over the created realm. He has fashioned us in His image.
Yet, Scripture tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of the kavod of God. We have been crowned with glory and honor. But we are also not as we were intended to be. So we must live with the tension between the two, between who we are and who we could be. And oddly enough, I'm beginning to speculate that that might have something to do with why Christmas moves us.
Perhaps the power of Christmas is that we know we need saving. We know we have fallen short and need help. And the birth of the Christ child announces to us that God has not given up on us, that God wants to rescue us, save us, redeem us, forgive us, wipe the slate clean, give us new birth, new life! Christmas is God's way of not giving up on us, and that, I hypothesize, is why it moves us at such a soul level. We can reclaim the kavod we were crowned with.
Anyway, these are just my musings, for whatever they're worth. Take them or leave them. But what I actually set out to share with you when I started this post was something much less serious/philosophical. I was just gonna say that I went to the Andrew Peterson show, and it was awesome, and that there was one singer/songwriter of the bunch (Andy Osenga) whose stuff I particularly enjoyed, so I looked him up afterward. And found this.
Good times.
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