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We wreathe our doors with juniper and if holly, deck our shrubs with tiny white lights and our living rooms with spruce trees, candles, Nativity scenes. We dress ourselves for Christmas: she sporting a cotton sweater with stars and snowflakes, he wearing a candy-caned tie, baby kicking green and red socks with tiny bells.

Ironic, all of this decking, when you consider that the Christmas movement of God is away from glitter and glory. To get ready for Christmas, God undressed.

God stripped off his finery and appeared—how embarrassing—naked on the day he was born. God rips off medals of rank, puts aside titles, honors, and talents, and appears in his birthday suit. Veiled in flesh the Godhead see; hail the incarnate deity. In the Incarnation, things heavenly and earthly are gathered into one: one in the naked flesh and folds of God.

Do we get Santa Claus and God mixed up? We think of a portly God with a long white beard, well covered in red flannel and fur. It's part of our great project—clothing God—making him as respectable as we are. No shirt, no shoes, no service, we tell him. Dressing God is, for many, a compulsive hobby.

God deserves the best-dressed celebrity award, as we have robed God not only in Santa suits, but in fine marble, gilt, marvelous mosaic. Let God be anything but naked. Yes, I want that cloth right there: Thank you, sculptors, for helping God where he could not help himself, covering God's bare flesh and unprotected love.

When the gospel was first preached, Romans laughed at the idea of a god become flesh. Oh, sure, a god might have a fling with a mortal woman and then disappear to better realms. But you know your side of the tracks, and the gods know theirs. God become flesh—hilarious!

Instead of laughing with the Romans, we've done a sleight of hand to turn the celebration of the Incarnation into Christmas. Into the hat we stuff a fleshly God; out pops tinsel, wrapping paper, photos of children with starry eyes. The incantation? Hocus pocus backwards—no, this is not my body, not my blood. Because of this trick, many educated people know nothing of what scandalized the Romans.

Dig under stockings, Christmas concert programs, carols, a gingerbread house recipe, and—Oh my God. What is it? A baby. Not a silent symbol of benign blessing, but meconium, squalling cries, desperate need for warm breast, loving eyes to search his: God is naked and not ashamed.

God's heart of love moved him to make choices that seem absurdly unstrategic. If he'd kept his wits about him, God could have hit the ground running, birthed as an emperor or at least to wealth. A wise God would rub shoulders with movers and shakers, attend presidential prayer breakfasts, speak at the National Press Club. Even the Devil could see God was ill advised, and in the wilderness he offered Jesus the opportunity to pull rank. But Jesus declined. God trotted past the great and leapt onto lesser mortals, knocking them flat by his grace.

Over and over, God plays the fool. He sends the massed angel choir to a rabble of shepherds. Why send such a hard-to-book troupe to riffraff who would have been wowed by one shabby angel clutching a bit of tinsel? God over-the-top throws the party-to-end-all-parties for scum who had never been to so much as a kegger.

God doesn't care whether they are wearing Brooks Brothers or bathrobes; God prefers them smelling of sweat or pig, not Obsession or soap. God doesn't worry about proper accents, good grammar. God has hidden these things from the wise and revealed them to infants. Searching high for God in mystical experiences, complicated revelations, asceticism, spiritual exercises? God is laid low, tucked under the mundane. Look down, not up—dig to find the treasure buried in your own backyard, called flesh.

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December 8 1997, Vol. 41, No. 14