Preaching text: None
I find more and more that I have a rather ambivalent reaction to this festive holiday. Like many people, my emotions around Christmas are mixed. Some are very positive. Others bittersweet, and still others downright unpleasant. So I’m not always eager to jump on the bandwagon of nostalgia and sentimentality that drives so much of this season. But that’s me. That’s my personal issue on which I’ll dwell no more.
No, most of my ambivalence really comes down to the vast gulf between the way the world celebrates Christmas and what the Church lifts up on this holy night. To the world, this has become a festival of greed, buy buy buy, spend spend spend. He who dies with the most toys wins. You can’t have a real Christmas without...(insert whatever expensive item the retailers are selling this year.)
To the world, this is a festival of saccharine sentiment and nostalgia, as I already mentioned. Pine for those Christmases past when it was Mom, Dad, brother, sister, dog, cat all opening their gifts by the fireplace. Pine for the time when downtown department stores had these amazing displays in their windows on Christmas. Pine for the visits to Santa’s lap and looking through the Sears catalog for your most wanted toy. It’s a time when the lonely find love and everything is perfect. And if it isn’t, you darn well better pretend it is or else.
To the world, this has, somewhat recently, become also a holiday of arrogance. Don’t you dare replace “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays.” Don’t you dare allow those non-Christians to celebrate their winter festivals! This is OUR time. Ours and ours alone, despite the fact that nearly all religions have a winter holiday centered around the solstice and there are also more than a few secular holidays as well (New Years anyone?) But no, they aren’t allowed to exist anymore. It’s Christmas and nothing else. And we won’t dare give those heathens even a portion of our good will and peace towards men and all that Christmas spirit that belongs to us and to us alone.
That’s the world’s Christmas. That’s what it’s become. And we are as caught up in it as anyone. Perhaps willingly. Perhaps reluctantly. It’s insidious and inescapable. But this night we turn to the tiny town of Bethlehem. To a stable behind the inn. Gone is the glitz and the glamour. Gone are the flashing lights and the memories of our childhoods. The guns of the War on Christmas have fallen silent. And all that remains is a child in a manger.
A child that comes to put right what has gone wrong in the world. A child that will make the last first and the first last. A child that will welcome all people into his kingdom. A child who will weep with the brokenhearted and bind up their wounds. A child, a Messiah, who could not be more the antithesis of the world and its view of Christmas if he tried.
In fact, the whole story of the real Christmas flies in the face of what we so often celebrate during this time of year. Mary is a teenager mother and we all know what we normally think of them, accompanied by a man much older who claims to be her husband. Tell me the optics of that aren’t a bit off.
And this teenage mother, when word of her pregnancy comes to her, she bursts into song. And it’s not a “Yay, status quo” song. It's not a "Yay, everything is going to stay the same as it was" song. It’s a “tear it all down and start over song.” Shaming the rich and uplifting the poor. How often does that happen in our world?
And not long after this birth, she and Joseph and the child are chased out of Bethlehem by the threat of marching soldiers. They feel to Egypt as refugees. Probably a good thing they didn’t try to come here, given how we treat those similar at our borders.
No, if this story happened today. If Mary gave birth to a baby in a barn with her much older husband at her side, they would not be lauded. They would not be praised. They’d be condemned. Hated. Seen as leeches upon society at best or downright dangerous radicals at worst. They are literally everything that society teaches us to hate: poor, brown-skinned, homeless, a teenager who clearly made the wrong choices, a predatory man taking advantage, punks wanting to tear down the system, to challenge “the man.” They’re scum or so the world would claim of them.
Is it any wonder then that Christmas as we’ve come to celebrate it has as little to do with them as possible? And yet from these hated outcasts comes the salvation of the world.
That was, of course, intentional. God sent his son into the world so that we would be challenged by him, even in his very birth. Will you welcome this outcast king? Will you follow his Word? Will you work to change the world, to flip it all upside down? To make peace instead of war. To embrace instead of reject. To comfort rather than condemn. To feed rather than starve. To heal rather than harm. To love rather than hate.
That question is before us every day of our lives, but it is most keen I suspect at this time of year. The world throws up a glittering spectacle before us and calls it Christmas. It is meant to obfuscate not merely who Jesus is, but what he is about. It’s not greed. It’s not shallow sentiment. And it certainly is not hatred and rejection. It is the beginning of a kingdom where all that is wrong in this world is made right. Where sin is forgiven. Love has the last word. Where all are welcomed, fed, clothed, and healed. Which Christmas matters most to you? The one that serves our bases desires? Or the one that will one day bring paradise? Your call. Amen.
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