As I began to work on this reflection, a friend sent me a quotation from Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, which was addressed this month to the Taizé gathering in Berlin, Germany:

"The miracle of Christian faith is that… God takes on a human life in Jesus -- he lives in complete solidarity with us, sharing our vulnerability, our fear and suffering and even our spiritual anguish when God seems far away. And at the same time he lives out an absolute confidence, joy and generosity in the midst of all this; he tells us that the darkness need not be victorious, and that we can still touch the rock of unchanging love even when the storms are all around." 

What is our path to Jesus Christ?  Is it the straight and narrow? Today’s genealogical gospel tells us not only about the link between King David and Jesus, but it also tells us a story about how humankind made the journey to Jesus. This string of descendants from Abraham through King David to Jesus includes men and women, saints and rogues, even departures from clan and tribe. It is anything but the straight and narrow path.
Constructing genealogies in our time is often an avocation. Many of us do it for fun, to find out how far back in time we can go to see who we might be connected to. For Jews in Jesus time, it was no lighthearted pastime. It was a deadly serious activity. If you could not track your family genealogy back through an unbroken sequence of Jewish ancestors, you were in trouble in society, possibly not being considered truly a Jew at all. Purity was a the heart of this. And in part, this was what St Paul argued was a dead end when he said that it was hopeless to try to fulfill all the strictures of the law, it couldn’t be done.  Jesus Christ came to bring that to an end.
For St. Matthew genealogy was important because it was needed to prove the link to King David. Yet it did more, it ran all the way back to Abraham. However, purity was not part of the plan. Indeed, this genealogy called into question many societal and cultural taboos. It broke through the barrier between men and women, the barrier between Jew and gentile, and the barrier between saints and sinners.
Getting into the Kingdom might be described in terms of following the straight and narrow path or going through the narrow gate which is Jesus. But getting to Jesus and getting on that path to the Kingdom is another story altogether. And the genealogical path we heard described today, the Sunday before Christmas, gives us reassurance that anyone can be on that path.
So who came to see Jesus in the manger?  St Luke tells us  shepherds, wise men, angels, and even the animals in the stable. One also could speculate that many who were nearby and knew that a baby had been born, came to comfort the mother and child in that cold and rugged place. They came to comfort the one who came to comfort us.  And were all those people who came just the pure of heart? Or rather, did they come with their own stories of joys and sorrows, of successes and failures, of expectations and discouragements, of graces and sins and they brought to the child and that family what they could of themselves and their possessions. And that child gave to them a joy beyond material things.  This God [known or unknown to them] whom they were visiting, touched their lives in unimagined ways and they most likely did not realize it. Any more than all the people who make up the forebears of Jesus Christ knew they were part of a procession heading toward the salvation of the world.
This movement toward God is not an intellectual exercise. It’s a matter of the heart. Its an interior stirring that seems to draw us toward a reality that can release us from the purely mundane worries of daily life. And we are still coming to be witnesses to that special birth that brought God into our circumstances “in a way beyond our understanding” as our Christmas texts proclaim, so that we can reach out and touch that “rock of unchanging love” described by Rowan Williams.
Another email message came this week with a photo and story that brings still another image that breaks a barrier sometimes erected between God and creation. The message read:
“The Nativity Scene was erected in a church yard.  During the night the folks came across this scene.
An abandoned dog was looking for a place to sleep. He chose baby Jesus as his comfort. No one had the heart to send him away so he was there all night. 
We should all have the good sense of this dog and curl up in Jesus’ lap from time to time.”