Wishing you all a "scandal filled" Christmas!

Frederick Buechner writes in his book The Faces of Jesus: A Life Story

"In trying to say too much, piety always runs the risk of saying too little or saying it wrong, and the great pitfall of Christian art, especially when it tries to portray the birth of Christ, is sentimentalism. The stable becomes a painted backdrop, the floor a carpeted stage, the manger a prop lined with artificial straw. Neither the holiness nor the humanness of the moment is rendered so much as the schmaltz, and the Incarnation becomes merely a Christmas card with all the scandal taken out of it instead of what St. Paul called a "stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles," instead of the proclamation that the Creator of the ends of the earth came among us in diapers." pp. 20-21

Photo by The Rev. Elizabeth Diely