Four weeks ago, when the church entered a new year with the First Sunday in Advent (November 27), the three-year lectionary plunged us again into the Gospel of Mark.

For those of you who don't know, the biblical readings for Sunday worship in liturgical churches operate most often by a three-year cycle (called the lectionary) which roughly corresponds to the three so-called "synoptic" gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). John, being in more ways than one the outlier, is interspersed among the three.

There is a problem with Mark, though, when it comes to Christmastime. It has no account of the nativity.

No shepherds with angels singing "Glory to God in the highest." No Mary singing the Magnificat. No manger or swaddling clothes. That's Luke.

No angel appearing to Joseph in a dream. No Magi bearing gifts. No Holy Family running off to Egypt to escape King Herod. That's Matthew.

Not even a line like "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." That's John.

Nothing in Mark for Christmas Day.

So, once again, the church will borrow readings from the other gospels (primarily Luke and John) to make Christmas work this year, if for no other reason than to give Linus good lines for the Christmas play.

Because, instead of a nativity, this is how the Gospel of Mark begins:

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

From there, Mark launches into the life of a fully-grown Jesus of Nazareth, and the whole thing feels like we're drinking water from a fire hose. Mark jumpstarts his gospel in medias res, in the middle of things, and we're sprinting just to catch up.

Thus, no time in Mark for Christmas Day.

But Mark's first sentence is famous because it is an incomplete sentence, both in the original Greek and in most translations. All noun, no verb.

Such is the "beginning" of the story of good news...incomplete, broken, a fragment.

And I don't know about you, but there's something about that sentence fragment that feels a whole lot like Christmastime. I find myself in medias res, in the middle of something that flies through the calendar like a high-speed train. And I have to time my jump just right or I'll be left at the station. Or lying flat on the tracks.

Mark's first sentence is for people who are quite certain that just yesterday was October, and we have no idea what happened to November.

Mark's first sentence opens up something deep in our hearts. That life often feels incomplete, broken, a fragment of something we wished and hoped would be different.

But it isn't. And so we search for something to make us whole, complete, a sentence with both a noun and a verb.

It doesn't come right out and say it, but the miracle of the Christ child, according to the Gospel of Mark, is that he enters into the world in medias res. He enters into the middle of things, so that God can—through the life Jesus is about to live on earth—complete what is incomplete, finish what is unfinished, end what has just begun.

In Luke, Jesus says it this way: "The Spirit of the Lord...has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free."

John makes it more poetic: "From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace."

But Mark doesn't need to say it in words. Very shortly after the "beginning" of Mark, still in the first chapter, Jesus comes upon a leper, one whose own body is literally decaying into fragments, into incompleteness. The leper kneels and whispers to Jesus, "If you choose, you can make me clean."

Jesus simply responds, "I do choose. Be made clean." And a broken man is made whole.

Ironically, Jesus' response is almost all verb, all action, with hardly a noun in sight.

That's a message to make Christmas merry. That the one the Gospel of Mark is unashamed to call the Son of God "chooses" to enter into the suffering of the world—to be made broken and incomplete in his own body and soul—so that all the world, and all that lives within it, may be made whole, free, full of new life.

In a word: complete.