Today I celebrated Christmas Day with my dad in his Extended Care Unit—at a luncheon filled with people’s bodies and minds frozen to various degrees, and staff and family members cheerfully feeding them, greeting them, teasing them. The wife of one of Dad’s roommates wished me “a meaningful Christmas.”
For weeks I’ve been pondering the meaning of Christmas, which we so associate with snow, snowmen and sleighs, with carols, cards, and cheer, with lights, trees, and decorations, with Santa, elves, and reindeer, with whether we’ve been naughty or nice, with noisy, overcrowded shopping malls, with buying and getting lots of expensive gifts, with family gatherings and family letters to friends, with stuffing ourselves with turkeys, eggnog and puddings—oh so many things, and, oh yes, with school pageants, nativity scenes, and midnight mass.
Yesterday I took Dad to his church for the Christmas Eve service which asked some of its members how they had celebrated Christmas when living in other countries. A couple that spent time in the Congo said that Western culture hadn’t yet reached the people yet in this regard. No lights, no trees, no songs about snow or Santa Claus, no gift giving. Christmas is seen as a holiday, yes, but as a true holy-day: for church, for prayer, for quiet reflection.
I do think Christ’s Mass gets lost in all the syncretism of Western culture. The lights, the gifts are all good, but they can also distract us from the Light and Gift that refracts into a world of colour, celebrating the wondrous diversity of all Creation God so loves.
But even when churches focus on the Christmas story in the humorous pageants and candle-lit carol services, we can still get distracted by dogma, doctrine, and ritual—with a disproportionate focus on angels and the spectacular and the warm home-iness of the Story. All that is familiar from years of traditional celebrations can lull us into momentary "comfort and joy." There is something more we often ignore, forget, or have simply never bothered to contemplate.
It is this aspect I was invited to share at a local church just before Christmas. I realize now I could have also entitled my talk: “Where Is God When It Hurts?”
My ‘sermon’ followed a powerful slide presentation of the ‘apartheid wall’ Israel has built around Palestinian Bethlehem, shown to the music "O Little Town of Bethlehem". Ironic, and chilling, especially knowing this Christmas, Israel is bulldozing Palestinian homes there, many of them belonging to Christians.
The next day, I realized there was more I wanted to say. I thought of another person spending this Christmas in Africa, someone who also has spent time in a country influenced by the religious-based fundamentalism of the Taliban; a country that in many ways still lives out similar customs common in the time and country of Jesus’ day: where greeting someone with your left hand was (and is) considered “dirty”, an anathema: where people can be ostracized from their villages for life for breaking similar social taboos we’d consider totally acceptable in our modern, Western “enlightened” world; where men talking with women, let alone engaging them in theological debate and instruction, was (and is) strictly forbidden; where people (mostly women) were (and are) executed for suspicions of adultery; where women could be (and are) easily divorced for the flimsiest of excuses, but who have no rights in turn; where child’s play, and almost any form of fun, were (or are) frowned upon or disallowed.
It is no wonder then that when watching “The Jesus Film,” these people’s eyes light up. Oppressed by such customs and religious fundamentalism, they get how radical Jesus’ actions were in his day in ways we ‘enlightened’ Westerners often don’t understand. And so we often miss the import/ance of the Good News and its utter relevance for our troubled world.
Christmas morning I opened a gift from a friend: A.J. Jacobs’ book The Year of Living Biblically! In the Amazon package was a leaflet (for some reason) from the UN Refugee Agency stating these stats: "We are currently helping over 34 million refugees and displaced people in 116 countries. Over 2/3 of them are women and children." In this but one “small” example of the massive human suffering in our world, I again ask, as I did in my ‘sermon’: Where is God this Christmas?
Christmas, I believe, is about God trying again to turn our world’s systems upside down, the continuing unfolding of a vastly different (God) perspective on all things human.
As Simeon the prophet said as he held the baby Jesus in his arms:
“This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel,
and to be a sign that will be spoken against (or contra-dict/ed),
so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed.” (Luke 2:34b-35a)
This sign of contradiction is God’s Word fleshed out in a man performing God’s actions in ways that reveal the failings of humanity’s ways and beliefs, in all the cult/ural aspects of our lives that we deem as being just “the way it is.” The “way it is” being interpreted as the way it should remain, or “good,” or even “ordained and approved of by God.”
But as a previous prophet proclaimed centuries before:
“My thoughts are not your thoughts;
neither are your ways My ways,” declares Yahweh. (Isaiah 55:8)
So how did (and does) God’s Word contradict our thoughts and ways? Just what was (and is) God’s Word on our ideas about success, status, power, wealth, gender relations, illness—the whole human lot? And just how was (and is) “God with us?” How did (and does) God’s “Kingdom”—God’s ways and thoughts—break into our darkened world? How did the Light and Gift of God dawn upon us?
In, as the Gospels assert, the One called “Emmanu-El” (meaning, “God with us”).
God with us:
A ‘king’ born in a barn, not a palace, in an insignificant little village in a country occupied by an exploitive, foreign military power.
A birth—to a young peasant girl—illegitimate, and questionable.
Angels appearing to lowly farmers with the announcement, not to the Pope or (Arch)bishops of the day.
Foreign astrologers figuring out the significance of the birth; not the religiously orthodox academics and priests.
A political threat: no Christmas toys for the boys that year, just a slaughter of the innocents and much weeping.
A family fleeing in the night to live in a foreign culture, having to learn a second language and fit in somehow.
A return home to rumours about the real dad of the lad who grew up elsewhere.
God with us:
One who was considered insane by his own family and hometown.
A man who began to overturn patriarchy (“Call no one on earth ‘father’”) and extended “family values” to include all (“You all are my mother, and sisters, and brothers”).
A man who gathered the most unlikely mix of followers (politically, career-wise, and with clashing personalities and agendas) to become a new type of family.
A guru who befriended and served his followers.
An itenirent rabbi who dared to teach women and accept their (financial) help.
An adult who elevated children as ones to model and embrace.
God with us:
A teacher who, in his storytelling, equated God with a lowly shepherd, a poor woman, a dad crazy in love with his two sons (whether ‘sinner’ or ‘righteous’) who couldn’t fathom the depths of his love.
A strategist who used outcasts as the heroes of his stories.
A healer who touched people everyone else condemned as God-damned sinners because of their afflictions, who freed them their introjections of guilt and shame that everyone heaped upon them.
An exorcist who cast out the demons from scapegoats whom society demonized and cast out of their villages.
A Jew who loved his nation’s enemies, who saw exemplary good in people from the ‘wrong’ ‘godless’ cultures.
God with us:
A rabbi who taught, not the religious especially, but common folk (although he vigorously debated scholars and poked fun at their neurotic hypocrisies).
A man who partied with pub-owners, whores, and other ‘sinners.’
A teacher who said the poor were blessed and proclaimed woe to the rich.
A leader who taught forgiving economic debts and restitution of ‘legalized’ theft by lenders who foreclosed on unpaid loans.
A man who held “losers” in high regard; and often viewed “winners” as corrupt.
A rabbi who taught that our choice about whom (or what) we serve is not between God and the devil (surprisingly enough), but between God and Money.
God with us:
A courageous mentor whose love in action and en-courage/ment of non-violent resistance threatened the established order and engrained traditions.
A populist leader who refused to embrace revenge, military solutions, revolution, or rule by force.
A controversial figure, who in the end, was not celebrated by the fickle masses because he didn’t ultimately fit their expectations, their ways, their ideas.
A man who wept angrily at a friend’s death (despite his belief in resurrection), yet who was betrayed, abandoned, and denied by his (male) friends in his deepest hours of agony and need.
A Jew tortured and killed, all on trumped up charges, by an oppressive foreign government in collaboration with the religious establishment.
God with us?
A man who, despite all his faithfulness, in the end felt abandoned even by God.
A leader who in human terms “failed” in his mission, and was thus "esteemed [by humans to be] stricken by God.”
But this “sentence” imposed on such a servant of humanity by the Establishment and his society was not God’s view of him.
Nor was it his view of himself.
He refused humanity’s judgment of himself, seeing instead that his victimizers were the ones needing God’s forgiveness.
And God agreed.
God with us!
God contradicting human judgment on this extremely radical, unsettling man by resurrecting him to new life.
A resurrected ‘new creation’ who came back not to chastise, but to reassure his befuddled friends in all their bewilderment, their confusion, their grief, their guilt and shame, their doubts.
In all this: God. God’s thoughts. God’s ways. God with us. God identifying with the suffering of the world: the homeless refugees, the victims of economic injustice, gender inequality, familial abuse, military oppression, religious bondage and judgment, and scapegoating in all its forms. God so loved the world. Our world. The Palestinians, not just the Israelis. The ‘right’ and the ‘left.’ The rich and the poor. The well and the sick. The just and the unjust. God’s love shining on us all. God’s love exposing and forgiving our human thoughts and ways. God’s love inviting us to peaceful cooperation with one another.
“Your will, Abba, be done ON EARTH. (Forgive us our debts, as we forgive….)”
In his earthly role, Jesus said: “I only do what I see my Abba doing.” And in commissioning (co-mission/ing) his followers to do the same, his final words were: “I am with you always.” To the ends of the earth. To the end of days.
So where is Jesus now? A wounded, raised Lamb upon God’s ‘throne’—above it all, but like God, still choosing to identify with us in our suffering: Jesus in “the hungry, the thirsty, the poor, the imprisoned, the sick” (Matthew 25), the dying. Suffering continues, and with it the mystery of it all. Peter Gabriel of the Genesis band queries this mystery in their song Tell me why.
Mothers crying in the street
Children dying at their feet, tell me why
People starving everywhere
There’s too much food but none to spare, tell me why….
People sleeping in the streets
No roof above, no food to eat, tell me why
If there’s a God, is he watching?
Can he give a ray of hope?
So much pain and so much sorrow
Tell me what does he see
When he looks at you,
When he looks at me?
What would he say?
It seems there’s no one listening
…. Just hope against hope it’s not too late
You say there’s nothing you can do,
Is there one rule for them and one for you?
Tell me why
Listen, can you see that shaft of sunlight?
Can you see it in my eyes?
I can feel the fire that’s burning
Anger and hope so deep
So deep within my heart, before my eyes;
For some it’s too late:
It seems there’s no one listening
‘Hurry for me, hurry for me,’ they cry….
As we ask God where God is when it hurts, it seems from the Christmas story and from the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus, God is with us sharing in our suffering, in all that makes up our lives. But it seems that God is also, in turn, challenging us where we are when others hurt. In John’s version of the Good News, Jesus says his sheep hear his voice. In Matthew’s version, Jesus says his sheep are the ones who respond to the hungry, thirsty, poor, imprisoned and sick.
As I write this, I’m happy to know some of my friends are celebrating Christmas with refugee families from around the world whom they are helping to settle in Canada. True miracles are such acts of love.
In this coming new year, may we likewise find ways to follow Jesus in turning the world’s systems and ways of doing things upside down: being there for others in all the same unexpected ways God showed up in Jesus, our Emmanu-El.
Truly, Love brings Shalom—the peaceable reign God desires for the entire world.
“My peace I give you, not as the world gives,” Jesus told his followers, his friends. (John 14). Not, I take it, the “peace” of the “Pax Romana” or “Pax Americana” or any other imperialistic or pathriarchal power which forces itself upon others and exploits them to their own advantage. But God’s Peace, God’s Love, the kind of unconditional love the apostle Paul so eloquently describes in his letter to the Corinthian followers of Jesus (1 Corinthians 13). A love that raises us up from all the ways we are downtrodden and put down others to a new, affirming and communal life in Christ.
So, truly, may the Peace of Christ be with us all—expressing itself in ever new and expanding ways this Christmas and throughout the new year. And, God bless us, every one.