The Gathering Up (Day 26: Roots & Shoots

• The Ornament: The Manger / The Chi-Rho / The Star
• The Scripture: Ephesians 1:3–10 and John 1:1-5

Timeline Check: The Fulcrum

Where we started: On Day 1, we stood in the chaos of creation, watching God breathe life into dust.

The Journey: We have walked through thousands of years of history. We survived the flood, wandered the desert, built (and lost) a kingdom, and listened to the prophets scream for justice.

Where we are now: We have arrived at the fulcrum of history.

The timeline doesn’t end here; it pivots. We aren’t just at the end of a calendar; we are at the center of God’s story.

The Surface Reading

We finally made it. The tree is full. The candles are lit.

For twenty-four days, we have traced the roots of this family tree through highs and lows, always looking forward to a promise. Today, that promise is kept.

On the surface, we celebrate this as the happy ending to the Old Testament story. The wandering is over. The exile is finished. The King has come to claim his throne. We celebrate today because the hope of Abraham, the song of David, and the vision of Isaiah have all finally taken on flesh and blood.

A Closer Look

Guide: Rob Bell / Richard Rohr

But if we zoom out from the manger, we see something cosmic.

In Ephesians 1, the Apostle Paul uses a distinct Greek word to describe what is happening in Jesus: anakephalaiossathai.

It’s a mouthful, but it translates to “The Gathering Up.” It means “to sum up,” “to bring everything under one head,” or “to knit together.”

Think about the last 24 days. We have looked at a family tree full of liars, tricksters, outsiders, and failures. We have seen the threads of empire, trauma, and broken Shalom. It feels like a tangled mess.

But Paul says that in the Incarnation, God is anakephalaiossathai-ing the universe.

God is gathering up all the broken, disconnected strands of history—the violence of David, the tears of Hagar, the silence of Elijah—and is knitting them together in the person of Jesus.

Richard Rohr reminds us that Jesus isn’t just a baby; He is the Cosmic Christ. He is the Knot that holds history together. He is the place where Heaven and Earth, Brokenness and Healing are finally summed up into one.

The Mystery of Dirt

Guide: James Martin SJ / Karl Rahner

And how does God do this cosmic gathering? He does it by becoming small.

The Jesuit priest James Martin reminds us of the “Scandal of Particularity.”

God didn’t just become “Humanity” in the abstract; He became a specific Jewish baby in a specific dusty town. He became a carpenter who got splinters and smelled like sawdust.

By doing this, God sanctified the “ordinary.” As theologian Karl Rahner argued, the Incarnation means that matter has become the home of God.

Because of Jesus, you can no longer divide the world into “holy” and “unholy.” The dirt is holy. The wood is holy. The messy family tree is holy. God has gathered it all up into Himself.

The Lens of Shalom

Guide: Lisa Sharon Harper

This is the ultimate restoration of the web of relationships we talked about on Day 1.

In Genesis, the web snapped. In Jesus, the web is re-tied.

The story of the Jesse Tree ends not with us escaping the world to go to God, but with God crashing into the world to be with us, gathering up every broken piece of our lives and saying, “This belongs to me, too.”

The Question

We often think we have to “clean up” our lives before we bring them to God. But Christmas says God has already come to the mess.

What “broken thread” in your life—your anxiety, your past mistakes, your doubts—do you need to hand over to Jesus today, trusting that He can gather it up into His larger story?