“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” ~Romans 1:16

My son and I were walking through the neighborhood yesterday as I donned my (John the Baptist) wig & he wore a George Washington wig. Suddenly a car turned towards us and he quickly tore off his wig and hid it behind his back. He then muttered under his breath, “That was embarrassing.” My heart broke for an 8 year-old to already understand, let alone pronounce, the concept of embarrassment.

Each Christmas, I am reminded that the birth of Jesus is an embarrassing story. It’s not that He wore a wig, but put on mortal flesh. The Word that created the heavens and the earth, became a crying, babbling infant. The All-Knowing God became a teachable student. The immortal tasted the pain of mortality. The sinless felt the weight of God’s abandonment.

In Christ, we have nothing to be embarrassed about, because the reason we become “embarrassed” is because we are ashamed. We try to cover and pretend that life is better than it is. The clothes we buy, the gadgets we purchase, the homes we build, the faux-friends we follow are all attempts to cover the shame so we will not “be embarrassed.”

But, the very purpose of Jesus’ birth was to cover that shame once and for all. So we do not have to live lives worried about being embarrassed, but we can live in the freedom of joyful foolishness in Christ.

The good news of the Gospel requires that we see ourselves in need of a Savior. The very things we try to cover up out of embarrassment are the very things that Jesus came to redeem. Therefore, we can join with Paul and claim that in the Gospel there is “No Shame.” TBG