This
Christmas season there has been something that has been gnawing away at me more
than it has in other years.
Like
everyone else, I enjoy the nativity pageants: the children waving at their
parents, re-inventing their lines (if they remember them at all), picking their
noses, or dropping the baby Jesus on his head! Indeed some kids are true angels on the stage; while others we all know
will become the future Jim Carries of entertainment, like one of the kids I saw
at the Catholic elementary school concert this week playing an unscripted role
of a ‘donkey’ without the costume!
With
mulled apple cider and shortbread cookies to pleasure our taste buds and
tummies, we enjoy the warm fuzzies of all these Christmas celebrations.
But
all of us, I’m sure, wonder at times what all the harried gift shopping, and
Santa Clauses, and ‘holiday’ lights have to do with the essential message of
Christmas, or that very first Christmas.
Madeleine
l’Engle, the author of the brilliant children’s novel A Wrinkle in Time,
once wrote that she wasn’t disturbed so much by all the gross commercialization
of Christmas. What disturbed her instead
was God. How could God, who spoke the
galaxies into being, volunteer to stoop to take on our feeble human flesh, and
what good did God’s actions accomplish in the end? We just keep creating better war machines to
kill each other off and continue to wreak havoc on the earth and in our own
lives. 1
It
is in the very midst of our all too disturbing human behaviours that God seeks
to disturb us at Christmas. Yes, the
appearance of angels singing ‘Gloria,’ and the warmth generated from the bodies
of the sheep and oxen and cows in that humble stable setting, and the
appearance of wise men bringing expensive gifts, and the prophecies and the
Star all fill us with awe and joy. But
that is only part of the Christmas story: the one we focus on and celebrate in our children’s Christmas
pageants. It is the story that almost
all people know and can accept at some level, even if they see it merely as a
quaint myth.
But
in only looking at these aspects of the Christmas story year after year, I feel
that our cult-ure has somehow missed something equally as important, and as a
consequence has watered down, if not contaminated, the message of Christ’s
coming. And that is unfortunate, because
for many people at this time of year, the wonderfulness of the message
Christmas seems to proclaim clashes with the reality of their lives, and with
all the atrocities and pain in our world the media are so good at keeping in
our faces. Despite all the lights and
ho-ho-ho-ness of the season, despite those many traditions we claim arise from
the joy of the Christmas message, many people are in fact super-stressed by the
season, and many more dread time with families with whom they feel obliged to
fake harmony.
Where
is God for us in these Christmas circumstances? What place does Christmas have in a world torn apart by violence, and
drought, and poverty, and disease? How
do we juggle the beauty of the first Christmas Eve and Morning with all that is
terrible in our world and in our own lives?
I
would propose that we can actually find that balance in the rest of the
Christmas story that we too often ignore, and I will get to that in a
moment. But first, I want to frame what
I see as the answer within the context of some of my own experience. One day particularly stands out. Throughout some synchronicities of that day,
I believe the Spirit was leading me to some basic understandings of life and
God.
I
was on my way to Sorrento, an Anglican conference centre on the Shuswap, for the first time. Between Vernon and Armstrong on that gorgeous, sunny day, I marveled at the beauty of that
valley. But as glorious as Nature
appeared that day, somehow the intense beauty seemed to suddenly clash with all
the pain in the world. In that moment, I
had a kind of revelation: Life
essentially boils down to two things: Joy and Sorrow. All other
emotions or states of being are but mere variations of these two states. I believe that is why Paul instructed
Christ-followers to relate to one another with this simple formula: “Weep with those who weep; and rejoice with
those who rejoice.”
At
the time of my trip, the outer world seemed to mirror my inner world. I was enjoying a rare moment of being able to
travel—to ride with a ‘fresh wind’ as it were—despite my debilitating chronic
fatigue that had plagued me for 7 years at that point. My own world had become one filled with a lot
of pain: physically, emotionally,
socially and spiritually. My illness had
in fact isolated me in large measure, and as a result I had, and have,
experienced numerous losses. Yet here
was a wondrous world still waiting to be explored. Hence, Joy and Sorrow co-mingling in my own
life.
When
I got to Salmon Arm, I stopped in to see a family I had chanced upon at a
restaurant the previous summer. Their
four children had charmed me, and so I began talking with the parents and
learned, as I suspected, that they were Christians. Anyway, since that day, I’ve had an
iron-against-iron kind of relationship with the man who is evangelical now, but
who comes from a Catholic background. At
the time, I was going to a Catholic church myself. Given my illness, I so appreciated the
upfront-ness of the Crucifix, because I saw it as God’s identification with my
suffering, with all suffering. He, however,
preferred to think about the Resurrected Christ, the happy Jesus playing with
children, bringing joy to any and all with “eyes to see.” He was concerned my focus on the Crucified
One might become a morbid fixation. I
puzzled on this contrast inherent in the Easter message as I continued on my
way to Sorrento.
That
evening, Margaret led the community’s evening prayer. Her meditation was based on a poem by Ted
Loder. One of his poetry-prayer books is
entitled Guerrillas of Grace which will give you some idea of how he
plays with paradoxical notions. But this
particular poem entitled So magnificent…
so flawed aptly summed up my experiences on my literal and spiritual
journey that day: Joy/Sorrow;
Cross/Resurrection. I’ll read you some
parts of that poem before moving on to tell you what I think all this has to do
with God’s Christmas message to the world.
O God, I am torn.
Do I rant or praise?
This world is so
magnificent,
So flawed,
And I cannot
divert
my gaze,
or heart,
from
either.
So I rage,
shudder out my fear,
cry my
compassion
at
birth defects;
at
kids therapied bald-headed,
playing
out their short days,
while
parents watch, helplessly;
at
twisted limbs,
spastic
bodies,
blind
eyes,
vacant
minds; ….
at
so many plagues, so many blights,
such
endless, frenzied feeding,
germ
on cell,
glitch
on gene,
species
on species;
and
at this ugly coil of violence
lurking
in my shadows,
striking
to wreak its havoc.
I despair.
Damnit God,
why these terrible, hellish,
insidious,
all-too-perfect imperfections?
Has it gotten out of hand?
Has it fallen too far?
Have I?
I really cannot
bear it!
Can you?
Is this what the
cross is all about?
I half-trust it is, and yet…
I rage and lift
the whole to you.
Which means I
praise, as well,
for beauty past all telling of it,
which no one in
the least deserves;
for the urge of love that
stirred the earth
and folded in
the dust of us,
and
raised us up and set us free,
yet
pounds within our veins;
for all that summons from my
heart,
for the songs it
strangely knows,
for
those heights my words don’t reach,
but
hurl them up, I do—
like
courage, truth, and ecstasy,
and
the hardest one, trust.
Yes, both rage and
praise,
the bag is mixed in me as in the
world,
and to deny one
is to cancel the other.
So, as an act of
trust,
and trustworthiness,
I take these
steps,
first
limp, then leap,
toward
lonely, loving you
and learn to
live
as
best I can,
with
all there is
in
this wondrous, puzzling world…. 2
This
Christmas I am seeing the same tension between Joy and Sorrow, Crucifixion and
New Life. How do those who grieve the
recent loss of a loved one at this time celebrate what has become such a family
bacchanalia (or debacle, depending on your circumstances)? In fact, how do people from really
dysfunctional homes celebrate? Everything around them is cheery: the stores, the sales clerks, the music, and the people at church. Even the characters in the life-sized
nativity scene on the corner of Clearbrook Road and South Fraser Way have their eyes blissfully closed, like
those who use meditation to shut out the world’s suffering in order to attain
“inner peace.”
In
his Christmas letter this year, church planter Murray Moerman talks about
watching the movie The Nativity Story “prepared,” as he writes, “for angel
announcements and lowing cattle.” But
“[t]he first scene shocked me—the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem. It was so disturbing …"
I
think in all of our recounting of the Christmas story, we so easily forget the
social and political contexts from which the stories of Scripture are framed
and emerge. And so we tend not to relate
the messages of Scripture to our own life-contexts.
In contrast to our highly
commercialized Western world, I believe that the subtexts we so easily forget
in the Story would be more readily felt and identified with by the many peoples
fleeing for their lives because of their country’s dictators or warring
factions or invaders. We forget the
frankincense and myrrh were used for burials! And I suspect that the gift of gold probably got used up by Mary and
Joseph living as refugees in Egypt!
And
yet, angels were there! And a star, or
conjunction of planets in the night’s sky, informed Eastern astrologers of a
mighty event which, they soon learned, posed a huge political threat. There was a heavenly reality briefly revealed
in the midst of all the harsh realities, including no room for a pregnant,
poverty-stricken couple forced by an oppressive Roman regime to be counted—all
in a measure to ensure that the world’s wealth continued to flow into Rome. Here the main character of the Story shows
up: God with us, Emmanu-El, in the midst
of all the world’s worst sufferings, sharing them with us, transforming them,
redeeming them, and redirecting them in new ways of being that do bring Joy out
of the midst of Sorrows—God working all things out for good.
What
has too often been reduced to a primitive, punitive god made in our own flawed
human image with whom Isra-El—the strugglers with El (God)—started out their
journey, turns out to be in fact the God revealed in the life of Jesus: the God of Romans 8 who does not condemn us, and whose love is not impeded by
our “troubles or hardships or persecutions or famines or nakedness or dangers
or slaughter;” the God who is with us through the harshness of our lives to
support us, to grow us into a New Creation of Love, groaning with us and
through us for our son- and daughtership, our god(like)ness, to be revealed in
actions that benefit all of God’s Creation. 3
Basically,
the birth of Jesus, and all that flows from it, affirms that we can be totally
honest with God about how we are feeling: whether we weep or rejoice, God weeps and rejoices with us. God is not punishing us; but living our lives
with us, and sharing with us God’s own befriending joys and sorrows as well.
God’s
entrance into human form, and leaving that human form through a cruel, yet
transforming death, had moments of sheer grandeur and awe, with angels like
bookends attending to Jesus’ birth and resurrected life. But everything else in the middle was for
Jesus,4 and is for us, fraught with all we go through, our
truths: Reality as we know it, yet now
Reality with a twist: God’s Love and
Truth overarching human horrors, impregnating our feeble frames, now alive in
us: God’s Word revealed, full of Grace
and Truth.5 God’s response
to us, one so different from our own usual reactions to one another. The Word revealed graciously.
And
so my Christmas wish for myself and all of us is this: that we will find God with us in the midst of
all our troubles, in the midst of all the world’s troubles. Jesus, indeed, in the thirsty, and the
hungry, and the naked, and the imprisoned, and the sick.6 Emmanu-El. A little Babe born in a humble stall containing all the Beauty and
Brilliance of the Universe coming to embrace and transform all the horrors and
pain of our world and of our lives.
In response to the Jesus
who comes to us in all the messiness (and all the goodness) of our lives, I
want to slightly alter some phrases from a hymn to reinforce the Christmas
message that we “have seen a great Light” 7 and it does shine in our
darkness!
“When [Christmas] morning gilds [our skies],
May Jesus Christ [indeed]
be praised.” 8
1. Madeleine l’Engle. The
Irrational Season. (New York: Crosswick, 1979).
2. Ted Loder. (poem sent to me from a book other than Guerillas
of Grace).
3. The thoughts here are all references to, and reflections of, Romans 8.
4. “A man of sorrows,
acquainted with suffering.” Isaiah 53.3
5. John 1.
6. See Matthew 25.31-46
7. Isaiah 9.2 (cf. John 1.14)
8. Hymn: “When Morning Gilds
the Sky.”