Profound truths are best understood not as “exact” definitions, but as living encounters with their meaning in our own lives. We can only deeply know this story of “God with us” as we are willing to become part of that story.

For example, here’s a story: Once there was a church and the church elders decided to purchase a very expensive, life-size ceramic manger, complete with a baby Jesus in a manger, and figures of Mary, Joseph, the wise men, a cow and a sheep. The pastor protested the cost, arguing that so much money should instead be given to the poor. But the church elders persisted and the manger set was purchased.

Much to their consternation, however, when these church elders opened the crates and set it up, the baby Jesus was not attached to the manger, but instead was a separate ceramic figure, about ten pounds in weight. “Someone will steal the baby,” they cried, and so they set about getting a bolt and chain in order to chain the baby Jesus to the very heavy manger.

“No,” the pastor said. “I didn’t want you to buy this, but now that you have, we can encounter in a small way the fear of what it means that God came into the world as a vulnerable little child.”

Did the elders put the chain on the baby Jesus anyway? Yes, of course they did, because this is a true story and because the risk God took in coming in vulnerable baby flesh is so hard for people to face that they always want to run away from it.

The hardest question is not whether Jesus is the child of God, but what does it mean that Jesus is the child of God? I believe that the story of God come to us as a vulnerable little child means is that each child is sacred. That is where I enter the deep truth of God with us. We must protect little children from war, from famine, from genocide, from abuse and from neglect and the thousand other horrors visited on them. For as the adult Jesus said, “Just as you did it to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.”