What is it about Christmas? It commands an entire retail
season without which many small businesses and corporations alike might not
make it through the rest of the year. It has become an incubator of sorts to
kick start an entire world into consumer-mode, Black Friday Frenzies, and
multiple visits a day from UPS, Fedex and your local US Post Office.
Christmas sets millions if not billions of people out to
risk life and limb stringing endless miles of lights – white lights, red and
green lights, icicle lights, blue lights, large bulb lights, small bulb lights,
LED lights, light up figures of Santa and Dickensian Choir Boys, blow-up
interior lit two-story tall Nutcrackers, whole villages, towns illuminated - leaving one wondering just what it all
looks like from the International Space Station as we increase our consumption
of fossil fuels by some unimaginable percentage of our usual gluttonous
kilowatt hours.
Light in the darkness during what is for the Northern
Hemisphere the shortest days of the year, the Sun playing its annual game of
hide-n-seek, bracing itself for a return visit as we prepare to spin ourselves
madly, steadily around our own personal nuclear furnace one more time.
A sudden outburst of generosity as Red-Kettles spring up
everywhere with Santas of all shapes and sizes, uniformed Salvation Army
volunteers and charities of all kinds offer every possible opportunity for the
once a year outpouring of cold, hard cash to help those in need – those poor,
those homeless, those outcast and imprisoned ones that the child in the manger
would remind us, just days before his own state sponsored execution, will
always be with us.
One must at one time or another stop and wonder: what would
he make of all of this? This orgy of celebration, consumption and charity that
in a few short days and nights will all be boxed up and placed upon the shelf,
in the garage, or up in the attic until that sacred moment we finish the last
bite of Turkey on Thanksgiving night next year. Would he be at all impressed? Honored?
Pleased that we at least, if nothing else, recall that morning that a young
woman, a girl really, an unmarried pregnant teenager “betrothed” (do we even
recall what that means) to an older gentleman gave birth to a baby boy whose
arrival caused such a stir in a backwater village of the once strong and mighty
Roman Empire that a civil servant on behalf of Caesar would slaughter millions
of innocent children in an attempt to prevent this child who now is seemingly
lost in the midst of our annual Dionysian carryings on from ever growing up to
become a savior of the world.
“A Thrill of Hope,” a
DVD that offers an in-depth glimpse into the story via the artwork of one John
August Swanson who strives to connect our story to his story to God’s story in
paintings and prints that seeks to depict the sacredness of the ordinary – a
young Mary feeding chickens as part of a community of people baking bread,
lighting candles, doing the things we do every day without thinking just how
miraculous it all is. How the miracle of photosynthesis in the cells of a
single leaf can simultaneously feed a tree and make it grow while creating the
very oxygen we need to breath, to sustain life, while in other plants providing
food for creatures whose fat becomes tallow that when lit becomes light in the
very darkness which although it arrives every evening on a daily basis still
causes some often imperceptible fear to creep into our supposedly sophisticated
but really quite primitive mind.
As our disgust with the machinery of politics deepens like
the night itself at this time of Winter Solstice, we all too easily forget that
the story as told by Luke and Matthew is as much a political story as it is
religious. Things like religion, politics and money were not so easily
compartmentalized back then as we try to pretend they are today. How odd that
an historic moment like the enlightenment ends up clouding and darkening our
view of just how holistic, interconnected and interdependent all things are and
by necessity must be if we are to survive. The child Jesus, who as a boy would
delight as well as confound the local scholars in Jerusalem – then an armed
camp under severe military occupation. A young Jesus who would echo the likes
of the Buddha, Lao T’zu, Socrates, Confucius, the Hebrew prophets and others
who also drew our attention to our necessary interdependence as pleas to
somehow create a world without warfare, a world without wanton killing, a world
in which all people everywhere attend to one another’s needs and develop an
awareness that we are also inter-related to the Earth, the environment, in a precarious balancing act that makes life
possible and also makes it possible to shine light in the darkness.
I have been told that James Carroll, scholar and columnist
for the Boston Glove, recently called our attention to the militaristic
atmosphere into which God inserted God’s self into our lives, that the birth of
Jesus took place in the midst of a paranoid and power hungry military empire, a
detail that cannot be clouded over with endless strings of lights and an
economic orgy of consumption. Jesus, the Thrill of Hope, came as an alternative
view of how life can be lived in a world of war and darkness. Consider: not
only Christianity, but all the world’s living religions arose in such an
atmosphere of military dominance, economic chaos and overall darkness.
So, what is it about Christmas? I believe that like the
Hindu deity Agni who is relied upon to light sacred fires in ancient Vedic
rituals, Christmas reignites our sense of what it means to truly be human.
Whether we can get our heads around the child whose birth we recall is divine,
human, or both, the fact is that we are not entirely through with him – nor he
with us. Jesus continues to insert himself into our world, a world still beset
with serious and dangerous military actions, state sponsored executions and
torture (of a kind he himself endured and endures), and a world awash with
political refugees, homelessness and those in need of all kinds of charity and
compassion. Yes, as he observed so long ago, the poor are still with us. And
yet, inspired by his example of what it means to be human, what it means to be
created imago Dei, in the image of God, so too do we have the means to relieve
suffering once and for all.
Light a candle and consider the miracles that make that
possible. Then become a light in the darkness. Each of us can and do make a
difference every day. Celebrate the sacred in the ordinary. Feed chickens with
Mary. Confound the scholars like the Christ child. Render unto Caesar that
which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s. And guess what? It does
not matter whether or not you believe in God. You can still live a life created
in God’s image shining a little more light into the dark places. Our collective
interdependent beams of radiant light together can and do make a difference.
And that is what Christmas is about. God bless us every one.
