KSR Voices: God Brought To You In The Most Ridiculous Manner Possible

From the very beginning, KSR has been upfront and honest with their intentions to deliver UK news in the most ridiculous manner possible. And I think it’s safe to say they’ve succeeded. When it comes to ridiculous, no one does it better than KSR. What they do and how they do things should never work, but that is exactly why I think it works so well. They have separated themselves from the crowd of conventional media by embracing the unconventional. Ridiculousness, as it turns out, is actually quite compelling.

In the coming days, many of us are going to celebrate something utterly ridiculous. Granted, it’s such a common cultural practice that the ridiculousness has been normalized, but let me remind you exactly what Christmas is claiming. Almighty God became a lowly infant. When it comes to religious claims, you don’t get more ridiculous than that.

When we speak of God we are not speaking of the greatest being in all of existence. In fact, God does not even exist like we exist. Instead, He stands outside existence as the Creator of existence. There is a big difference between the greatest character in a story and the author of the story itself, and by definition, God is the latter. He does not inhabit our reality; He authors our reality. So if you want to understand the relationship between God and humanity, then imagine the relationship between Shakespeare and Hamlet. 

Now, bearing in mind that immeasurable divide, behold the ridiculousness of Christmas: The Author writes himself into his own story. God as a newborn baby, helplessly dependent within a world of his own creation–that’s a religious claim as scandalous as it is unique. And yet the absurdity is its beauty.

This unconventional belief becomes the foundation of a likewise unconventional belief system. Religions may appear on the surface to be very different, but in reality they are all different takes on the same concept. There is a system to follow, tenets to keep, commands to obey, philosophy to embrace, etc. And doing these things will get you to an ultimate goal, whether that be a god, heaven, nirvana, or even the new secular spirituality of finding your inner self. It’s all the same idea of self improvement and advancement expressed in so many different ways.

But then the myriad of conventional religious claims is interrupted by the unconventional cry of a newborn in Bethlehem. Here we discover something different. Ridiculously different. Yet glorious in its ridiculousness. Not a way for us to find God, but the news that God has found us; not a religion for us to achieve salvation, but the news that a Savior has been born; not the means of obtaining joy; but the news of joy to the world. Indeed, Christmas has forever disrupted religion by subverting religion. It’s no longer what we do for God, but instead what God has done for us.

If true, this is history’s greatest news, but deep down we doubt that it could possibly be true. Which brings us to KSR’s other favorite slogan: facts are optional. This all makes for a great story, endearing hope, and sentimental holiday, but we can’t be expected to actually believe this.

Why not? If you believe in God and consider yourself a religious person, then is this really beyond comprehension? I would actually argue that the unbelievable nature of Christmas is what makes it so believable. A glorious story of the Author writing himself into the story to be the hero of the story by saving the characters of the story–that’s not something any person would ever come up with, which is precisely the point. When you explore, not just the birth, but the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, it all sure seems like God’s story to me.

Now if you don’t believe in God and are skeptical of religion, then you’ve got a ridiculousness of cosmic proportions on your hands–the fact that we exist at all. Granted, Christmas claims the virgin birth of Jesus, but is that any more outlandish than the virgin birth of the universe? Without a Creator, we are asked to believe that nothing acted upon nothing so that out of nothing came something that, as it turns out, is outright extraordinary. Now who’s being ridiculous?

Two thousand years ago this world was surprised by the ridiculous. Our Creator joined the creation, our Author entered the story, our God became man, and religion would never be the same. No longer is it us getting to God. Instead, God has come to us. That’s almost as ridiculous as it is glorious.

Robert Cunningham is the Senior Pastor of Tates Creek Presbyterian Church. Follow him on twitter at @tcpcrobert and send any comments or questions to [email protected]