Modern Miracle(s) of Christmas

Today crackles with excitement, with anticipation… It’s almost here. It’s almost here!

Millions of children are engaging in the postmodern, digital age version of a traditional ritual: tracking Santa’s progress across the globe, via “satellite”, on Google.

How to track Santa with Google & NORAD using the web, apps, & social media

Millions of Christians of all ages are preparing for candlelight worship and Christmas carols. There is the postmodern, digital age version of this ritual, too, as many will worship via livestream.

The core of both these rituals – the Gift that inspires the story of the gift-giver and his reindeer, the Lord who inspires the worship – is Christ. Christ, come for us! Christ, come to be WITH us – Emmanuel!

Christ, Who came to shatter the darkness with His glorious Light and conquer all evil with His perfect goodness and rescue His children (us!) from all that darkness and evil would do to us.

Christmas reminds us: we are HIS!

In our postmodern, digital age existence, it can be tempting to downplay or even dismiss the miracle of God’s self-giving. The Incarnation, conceptually, doesn’t lend itself to interpretations within the Metaverse… and the Magi knew nothing of Bitcoin… and sheep are multi-colored and unpredictable, in no need of shepherds, in Minecraft.

But Christmas – and the Christ Who made Christmas, Who gave Christmas, Who IS Christmas – remain miraculously powerful across the ages.

And here are two concrete examples from modern times that prove the persistence of our Messiah’s miracle-birthing presence…

Ceasefire in the Trenches

Christmas Eve, 1914.

The early days of the first “modern conflict” – when the horrors of machine guns, mustard gas, and artillery were being discovered by soldiers existing in trenches so filthy, wet, and unsanitary that “trench fever” claimed thousands of lives.

“British machine gunner Bruce Bairnsfather, later a prominent cartoonist, wrote about it in his memoirs. Like most of his fellow infantrymen of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, he was spending the holiday eve shivering in the muck, trying to keep warm. He had spent a good part of the past few months fighting the Germans. And now, in a part of Belgium called Bois de Ploegsteert, he was crouched in a trench that stretched just three feet deep by three feet wide, his days and nights marked by an endless cycle of sleeplessness and fear, stale biscuits and cigarettes too wet to light.

“Here I was, in this horrible clay cavity,” Bairnsfather wrote, “…miles and miles from home. Cold, wet through and covered with mud.” There didn’t “seem the slightest chance of leaving—except in an ambulance.”

At about 10 p.m., Bairnsfather noticed a noise. “I listened,” he recalled. “Away across the field, among the dark shadows beyond, I could hear the murmur of voices.” He turned to a fellow soldier in his trench and said, “Do you hear the Boches [Germans] kicking up that racket over there?”

“Yes,” came the reply. “They’ve been at it some time!”

The Germans were singing carols, as it was Christmas Eve. In the darkness, some of the British soldiers began to sing back. “Suddenly,” Bairnsfather recalled, “we heard a confused shouting from the other side. We all stopped to listen. The shout came again.” The voice was from an enemy soldier, speaking in English with a strong German accent. He was saying, “Come over here.”

One of the British sergeants answered: “You come half-way. I come half-way.”

What happened next would, in the years to come, stun the world and make history. Enemy soldiers began to climb nervously out of their trenches, and to meet in the barbed-wire-filled “No Man’s Land” that separated the armies. Normally, the British and Germans communicated across No Man’s Land with streaking bullets, with only occasional gentlemanly allowances to collect the dead unmolested. But now, there were handshakes and words of kindness. The soldiers traded songs, tobacco and wine, joining in a spontaneous holiday party in the cold night.

Bairnsfather could not believe his eyes. “Here they were—the actual, practical soldiers of the German army. There was not an atom of hate on either side.”

And it wasn’t confined to that one battlefield. Starting on Christmas Eve, small pockets of French, German, Belgian and British troops held impromptu cease-fires across the Western Front, with reports of some on the Eastern Front as well.

German Lieutenant Kurt Zehmisch recalled: ‘How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was. The English officers felt the same way about it. Thus Christmas, the celebration of Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.’” (History.com)

An Empire Ended and Atheism Abolished

The Soviet Union was one of the most aggressively atheistic nation-states in history. Within it, Christianity was illegal and Christians were ostracized, persecuted, and routinely “disappeared” to labor camps from which few returned. Several generations lived and died without access to the gospel.

Then, on Christmas Day 1991, “Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sat down at a table deep inside the Kremlin and prepared to deliver a monumental speech. Associated Press reporter Alan Cooperman was among the few journalists allowed in.

“We were ushered down into some kind of underground chamber where they had a formal television studio with those big, Soviet-era tripods and huge cameras.” Cooperman recalled. “We sat there for a while and then Gorbachev came in.”

Cooperman and AP photographer Liu Heung Shing were sternly warned not to ask questions or take pictures.

“It was an extraordinary speech. I remember thinking that Gorbachev looked very tired,” Cooperman said. “He expressed trepidation about the future. But I thought he just seemed relieved.”

Gorbachev announced that after 74 years as one of the world’s most powerful nations, the Soviet Union no longer existed, and would break up in 15 separate countries.

As Gorbachev finished speaking, Liu ignored the warning he’d been given and quickly snapped a photo that became an iconic image: Gorbachev closing the folder that held his speech, marking the end of the Soviet empire.

Seconds later, a Soviet security official approached Liu and “slugged him, hard, right in the stomach,” Cooperman said.

The journalists were whisked out of the room and down a hallway. They saw Soviet officials walk by with huge, red Soviet flags, emblazoned with the gold hammer and sickle.

As Cooperman exited the Kremlin and looked at the Moscow night sky, he suddenly realized what he’d just seen.

“They were carrying the flags that had just been removed from the flagposts above the Kremlin. And you can see it at night because those flagposts were always illuminated,” Cooperman said.

The flags were gone, and so was the Soviet Union.” (npr.org)

What we need NOW

Looking at these two modern miracles of Christmas, we see Christ, the Prince of Peace, turning No-Man’s-Land into Everyman’s Land. We see Christ, whose kingdom is not of this world, breaking up an earthly empire that His kingdom might come near. We see Isaiah 9:6 displayed on the canvass of 20^th century history in terms as concrete and indisputable as possible:

“For a child has been born for us,
    a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
    and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Consider this Christmas.

Does the Big Picture look too bleak, too broken, too sophisticated in its lostness for Christ’s salvation?

Does the small, up-close, personal picture look too deeply and routinely stuck for Christ’s liberation?

Look again, keeping in mind not just the image of the Infant in the manger but also the image of the war-battered enemies singing praises together in the frozen, blood-stained field… and the image of the world-weary despot declaring the defeat of a system of government that had devastating nuclear capacity but not enough energy to continue its despotism.