Nothing is perfect, but the hymn Silent Night nearly perfectly expresses how we should picture what happened at the birth of Christ. Its melody soothes like a mother soothing a baby, and that melody is wedded to words that describe beautifully what took place at the birth of Jesus.

In a word, it was silent! No fireworks, no crowds, no shouts, no cameras, no press coverage, no social media, no proclamation that something earthshaking was happening. None of these. It was quiet, save for the occasional gentle sound of a baby crying; just an unknown couple in an animal shelter with a helpless newborn, stared at by a few mute animals.

That’s how God entered our world at Jesus’ birth, and that’s still how God normally enters our lives. Silently, quietly, helpless as a baby, having only the power of vulnerability, of innocence, of a moral tug that touches the higher angels inside us and asks to be picked up and nurtured.

God wasn’t born into our world as a self-sufficient adult, let alone as some superman or superstar. God was born as a helpless infant who could not feed himself or change his own diaper. And that’s the way God is normally present in our lives, as a helpless infant we need to pick up and nurture into adulthood. And, as a helpless infant, God can be ignored, though only at the cost of our own integrity and conscience.

Note this is also the pattern of Jesus’ earthly ministry, not least in how he gave his death to us. He never overpowered anyone. He never coerced anyone. He never performed miracles to impress anyone. He never tried to use divine power to prove that we have no other choice than to believe that God exists, that the Sermon on the Mount is the ultimate moral code, or that love lies at the center of all existence. The divine just lies there silently, an invitation, a constant moral pleading.

When he was taunted on the cross and challenged to show divine power, Jesus resisted, choosing instead to give himself over in silence and love rather than to physically overpower any earthly forces. Like the baby lying helplessly in a crib in Bethlehem, he hung helpless on a cross in Jerusalem. That’s how God is present in our world.

But that’s not how we want God’s presence and power in the world. Like our ancient faith ancestors who longed for and prayed for an earthly Messiah who would physically overpower the forces of evil, we too don’t want a helpless child as a Messiah. We want a Messiah who shows some earthly power, who dazzles, does miracles, brings about justice by force, gives us miracles whenever we need them, and constantly flashes divine power to show the world who’s really in charge. We want a Jesus who, when taunted, comes down off the cross by divine power and humiliates those who thought they had power over him. We don’t want an infant lying in silence, unable to speak. We want divine birth as a supersonic boom exploding all our doubts.

But that’s not what we got!

Daniel Berrigan once was asked to give a public lecture at a university on the topic of Where is God Speaking in our World Today?  In words to this effect, he addressed the topic in less than three minutes: I now work in hospice, sitting with people who are dying. Right now, among those dying is a young man who is completely debilitated and helpless. He’s bedridden, unable to feed himself, mostly unconscious, and unable to speak. I try to sit with him for a good stretch of time each day, holding his hand and struggling to hear what he is saying – because he can’t speak, because that’s the only place where God is speaking in our world.

 I’m not sure the university paid him a stipend for that two-minute presentation, but forty years later his words still stand out in my memory because of their radical challenge: We need to struggle to hear God’s voice in what’s unable to speak.

Joseph Mohr wrote the lyrics for Silent Night during a time of war and great social upheaval. Mohr, a young Austrian priest, was inspired to write these words after seeing a young mother in a hut on Christmas eve, sitting in silence, peacefully nursing a baby.

On the night he was born, the infant Christ-child spoke only in silence, in one that radiated peace.There’s an ancient poem that reads something like this: If you’re walking down the roads of life these days and looking for God, or for a piece of God, or for some spirit by which to guide your life, you should be looking down. For if God is going to be found these days, it’s going to be in small things, it’s going to be close to the ground, it may even be below the ground, it might even be in the silent face of an infant.