Mennonite Weekly Review

I didn’t want to be at that Thanksgiving Eve service. This was no fault of its gifted leaders; rather, it had been an unusually intense week amid sicknesses in the congregation I pastor. I just wanted to be home reading that gripping novel.

Michael A. King

Then a preschool boy came to the microphone. His job was to say things he was thankful for. So he expressed gratitude for Jesus and God. He had been coached, and nothing wrong with that — this was his role. If he had stopped there, he’d still have opened hearts.

But he wasn’t done. Gripping the microphone, mouth almost on it, voice now booming as he deviated from the script, he added one more thing he was grateful for: “And snakes!”

The congregation roared. What a delight. Now we knew what was in his heart. Yes, he was thankful for Jesus and God, as well he should be. But what really gripped him was his gratitude for snakes.

I in turn was thankful for him and his snakes. Because with those two words he changed me. Suddenly my weary resignation to sitting through worship until I could get home fled. My spirit softened. From that point forward worship came alive for me.

Why? Because that young man had incarnated his gratitude. His gratitude was fully made flesh. In his “and snakes,” who he really was and what he was thankful for were fully joined — and radiated beauty.

Not long after, I heard someone quote the early church father Iraneus: “The glory of God is man fully alive.” That is what “and snakes” represents: the glory of God shining through a boy fully alive.

Something like this is also what makes the Christmas season come alive for me.

I am actually a Scrooge, as my poor family too well knows. I dread many of the holiday trappings and disruptions. Give me Jan. 2, when finally the parking lots are empty, everyone’s napping after too much partying, and life feels normal again. But the Christmas spirit can slither into me through the “and snakes” moments that remind me the coming of Christ was itself the great “and snakes” outburst of God.

This can be seen in any of the four Gospels, but maybe especially in Luke, which so lovingly sketches the human details leading up to and including Jesus’ birth in a manger. And in John, who skips the earthy details but cuts straight to their meaning as he exults that the “Word became flesh and lived among us” (1:14).