Kings, Countries, and Christmas

Kings, Countries, and Christmas

It’s coming around to that time of year where everyone turns to thoughts of gift giving and generosity. This isn’t simple coincidence. It is a direct link to the holiday that gives the season its name; a holiday that has in many ways been twisted and perverted by commercialism to gain as much revenue as possible. And yet beneath all the trappings, commercials, decorations, and treats there remains the idea of something strange and amazing happening. There clings to the days a sense of magic and wonder in what would otherwise be considered the bleakest of seasons, and it is this wonder and awe that inspires gifts freely given to family and strangers alike.

The wonder is that Emmanuel came into the world. That the spaceless and timeless God fit himself into a mortal body to live in this place of dirt and famine, wars and intrigue. Many people have quit social media sites because the burden of dealing with other people’s unfiltered opinions and emotions causes to much strain for a health life. And God, who is apart, who is holy, who is perfect, chose to immerse himself in that humankind. He didn’t do it for the amusing qualities of mankind. He did it to save us.

To anyone who has celebrated the advent before or attended Sunday school, this is not new information. In some cases, it may even be a bit tarnished and drab with unimaginative retelling. But that isn’t the point I’m going after here.

My point is that God came into the world to save men from the destruction they wrought with their own hands. Everything we have, from the next heartbeat to the homes we live in and our families are from God. We own nothing. It seems natural then to give away what we have at this time of year, as a sort of offering, and nod in the direction of the one who makes life possible.

And then… what?

Do we go back on December 26^th to protesting immigration, to wishing that the homeless wouldn’t set up their tents in our towns, to spouting caustic opinions about how right we are and how wrong others are?

Deuteronomy 10:18-19 “He [God] executes justice for the orphan and the widow and shows His love for the alien by giving him food and clothing. So show your love for the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”

Unless I’m much mistaken, this verse doesn’t apply to a particular time of year. This is a direction for how to treat people… all the time. But what if we allow people into our country, our city, our lives that don’t believe as we do? What if crime rates go up? What if we have to pay more taxes to support them? What if, what if. There’s no end to the possibilities. And none of them matter because what we have isn’t ours. This country, no matter who runs it or what the economy looks like, isn’t ours any more than Babylon belonged to Daniel or Nebuchadnezzar. Our jobs, our land, our food, our money, our healthcare: they aren’t ours. And until we acknowledge that, Christmas and all its wonder is going to remain inextricably linked to this one season and the rush of holiday shopping; that one day, shared with a man in a red suit; and fit into a neat little box so it can’t effect the rest of our lives and the rest of the world.

“Self-righteous religion is always marked by insensitivity to issues of social justice, while true faith is marked by profound concern for the poor and marginalized” (Keller, 2018, p 61).

Rather than worrying about what we could lose, I would love to see us separate ourselves from the individual mindset so popular in the West and start to think about what others could gain. What if we gave up some of our prejudice and worked with people on the other side who wanted to help people? What if we stopped letting the media or the politicians draw our lines for us? What if we refused to be separated from the work that God gave us?

What if Advent wasn’t just these few weeks in December, but a year-long recognition of the fact that Jesus Christ has in fact arrived and is working here still?

Keller, T. (2018) The Reason for God. New York, New York: Penguin Random House LLC.

Stories and Storytellers

In all stories, we are told by our high school and college writing professors, there must be a core element of truth. You can only expect the reader to suspend reality for so long before they lose interest if the story becomes unreliable. This means that although you can have unlikely devices and twisted plot lines and magic and zombies, the characters who use such devices, traverse the plot lines and defeat magic-zombies must always act in a way that is realistic. In other words, in a way that we as people who have been studying the way other people react all of our lives will find believable. So a man who has never in his life forgiven anyone for a slight cannot suddenly forgive some young woman just because it helps a romance along. There must be a catalyst, a force of change, something that is believable because it holds to reality.

To switch tracks a bit, let’s assume you are a person living during the height of the Roman Empire. In this time period, it was not unreasonable to assume that a god or goddess might step down to earth and dally with humans. This is primarily because said gods and goddesses had extremely human traits, quarrels and jealousies. They were, in fact, little more than immortal humans. And they were born of stories created by human minds, following the very important laws of storytelling to make them believable and relatable.

However, if you are talking about God, and not gods—if you were Jewish (which you most likely were if you were a monotheist in those days) the assumption that God would come down and live among men was another proposition entirely. We are talking about God here—the one who laid the stars in place and spread out the oceans, who stores thunder and lightning and fights in pillars of fire. He held all of the supposed power of the Olympians combined and even more.

King Solomon the wisest man who ever lived did not believe that it was possible. He said, “But will God indeed live on earth with man? Even heaven, the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this temple I have built.” (2 Chron. 6:18)

So when we tell the story of God coming down to earth we must see that it is not a story that a human mind, who understood the vast power of God, could imagine telling. It doesn’t hold to reality. It is not expected. It isn’t simply a plot twist, it is a twist of the very fabric of the world—this thought that God could consent to be a companion of men, to put on flesh and blood and time itself—the God who created TIME, submitting himself in so many ways to his own creation. It is fantastic and unearthly.

This is not a story that anyone who believed in the one, true God would dare to create on his own. It’s too impossible.

Truth became infinitely stranger than fiction on the day Jesus was born.

And yet, it isn’t strange at all if you consider that God loves humans. Because love is a catalyst, a game-changer. Love explains deeds that would otherwise appear irrational (and perhaps sometimes they still are). God proved his love by sending his son, and up until that point it was not something that man could comprehend—God’s love. Now it is. He put it into context for us. He told a story that we with our limited human understanding could never create on our own, but one that we could believe.

“…One will come from you to be rule over Israel for Me,

His origin is from antiquity, from eternity.” (Micah 5:2)

The Arrival

It is such an old, old story, one that has been played and replayed every year until I begin to fear it might lose interest. But the old stories are always the best ones, so I beg of you to listen only a little longer, even if you've heard it before.

In a far away land, there lived a carpenter and a virgin. There were a few kings and several shepherds. There was a host of angels and a star and most certainly there were startled sheep. There was gold and myrrh and frankincense. There was straw.

And there was a baby, who was God, swaddled against his mother's chest and breathing the air of this world. God. With an infant's tiny hands and precious little mouth.

It is a story of surprising contradiction and juxtaposition.

Those who were waiting for a soldier king as great as Alexander never looked his way. 

Those who relied on their own perfection of the law scorned his mercy, but could find in him no flaw.

And those who were destitute and despised: the ill and crippled, the possessed and broken, the women and children and pagans, they saw him and believed in a hope that no one and nothing else had ever or could ever have offered them in all the vast expanse of history.

This is the story of a love so great that it reached across infinity to hold your hand and whisper, "You are precious. You are honored. I love you."

It is the story of a light that came down into the dark and sparked a hope that brought everlasting peace and shattered all fear.

This is the story of the Advent of the savior of the world.

May you savor it as you celebrate this holiday season.

Life was in him, and that life was the light of men.

John 1:4 

Abandoning Christmas

What if we didn't celebrate Christmas at all? What if as an entire Christian community we decided to say, "Okay, World. This holiday is yours. Obviously, as many of you will no doubt point out, it was your idea from the beginning. So here you go. Take it back. We won't interfere with your decorations, your choice of greeting or your frenzied sales. Do whatever you like. We can't control you, and we don't want to."

I don't mean this to sound facetious. I wonder if we could actually do it, and I wonder how the world would change if we did. I think some Christians (and I myself have occasionally though this way) feel that if we abandon a holiday to the secular world, to their strange icons of fat men or giant rabbits, we will have lost foothold and given the enemy another beachhead in this vast war for souls. I would counter by asking what good we have done thus far in clinging to a tattered idea of a sacred day that has been warped to the point that it does not in any way resemble the grace and holiness that it was meant to celebrate. We forget, I think, that Christmas is a man-made celebration, and like everything made by men, it will go awry. God did not mandate that his people keep it sacred. He did not command, "Thou Shalt Remember Christmas and Keep It Holy." No. He did not. 

By the very appearance of Christ in human time and form, God was removing the obstacles and veils that separated the holy from the unholy. By the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, he allows us (the unholy) access to him (the most holy), every single second of every day of the year. There is no reason at all why December 25th ought to be more important than May 23rd or July 2nd. Jesus Christ was indeed born at a fixed point in time, but only so he could then save us all from the darkness and pain of death throughout the rest of eternity.

So what if we gave up Christmas? What if we abandoned it to the spoils of the world and concerned ourselves with other things? Honestly, I don't think the world would notice, except to sigh in relief as the whingeing and controversy dies away. But what if we took all the money and time and effort we spend on worrying and preparing for this one holiday and spent it on someone in our community instead? A homeless man, a heartbroken co-worker, a frazzled mother.

To clarify, I don't think celebrating Christmas is bad or wrong or somehow unChristian. We mean well. Honestly, I think, we do. But we are seeking in a human construction once again a sacredness, a sense of peace and belonging that only God can give.

Time, as I was reminded the other night, is precious. We have it in limited supply. We ought to give a great deal of thought to how and why we do what we do in order to avoid squandering what time we have. And it seems to me we could do a great deal of good if we stopped celebrating Christmas as a single day and started living as if the reason we were celebrating were actually and truly a part of our lives every day of the year.

So from me to you, have a very merry holiday season.

Why I Don't Believe in Santa Claus

I don't like Santa. I love Christmas. My dislike for Santa Claus has nothing to do with how I feel about the holiday. But I'm frustrated by what I see in every store, in almost every facebook post, and shining bright in Christmas lights. The magic of Christmas is not a jolly man in a red suit coming to reward good behavior and punish bad. It isn't even the more realistic story of a good man who wanted, either in reality or simply in legend, to help three poor girls out with their dowry. I very much doubt that St. Nicholas, if he were really as righteous and pious as the stories suggest, would have even wanted so a--well, let's face it---ludicrous character named after him, and I am certain he would not have wanted said character to take over the holiday meant to celebrate the birth of Christ.

Because the true "magic" of Christmas is simply this: that God became human to save a people who wasn't even that interested in him.

Wait...

Let that sink in.


I know you probably know it already, but really stop and think about it. The God of the universe, the one who created galaxies and knows the stars by name and is eternal, timeless, ageless, became human. He stepped, intentionally and with perfect design, into a single, fragile body on a single broken world, to be helpless, and hungry, to know pain and loneliness and suffering.

This broken world had no hope. None at all. The world was dark, and there was no light in it. Until God came to walk with us. Imagine being in the dark and the cold. Imagine never knowing light. Then imagine the amazement of seeing for the first time, of light coming through the dark and showing you colors, textures, brilliance and radiance. Hope. Love. Peace.

That fact, in itself, is so amazing that I can hardly hold it in my head long enough to really think about it.

This is the Christmas story. It is the very essence and meaning of Christmas. And anything else, no matter how cheerful, or harmless, or well-meant, looks cheap and tarnished in comparison.

But do the people across the street have a manger scene in their yard? No. They have a blow-up Santa. Why? Santa Claus can't save them. St. Nicholas couldn't have even if he'd tried. And the Santa today very little resembles the saint for whom he was named in any case.

My problem with Santa Claus is that he isn't my savior, he's not real, and he has no right to be at the center of attention. My problem with Santa Claus is that people use him as an excuse to lie to their children because it's "traditional" and "magical" and because they don't want their kids to miss out. But I have to ask, what would they be missing out on? Christ's salvation still stands, so what do they have to lose? Except, maybe their faith in you, when they realize you've lied to them.

So, no, I don't believe in Santa Claus, nor do I think we should encourage children in any tradition that, at its core, has deception as a necessity. Stockings are fine. I think they're a cute way to do little gifts. But don't lie about who fills them.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...in him was life, and that life was the light of men. The lights shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

John 1