A Christmas Meditation
It doesn't take many years to hear all the changes rung on Christmas themes. The holidays have been peered at from most possible perspectives and crusted with colorful legends and sentimental tales. It is inevitable in our day to have, in addition, the lurid and the holy cheek by jowl.
We almost overlook the paradox of madly shopping while a drummer boy carols with sweet simplicity he has no gift to bring but his pa-rum-pum-pum-pum. People disbelievingly paw over last minute sales while a singer croons "All I want for Christmas is you."
Puritans wanted to rid religion of pagan clutter and extraneous trappings. No trees or yule logs, Druid mistletoe or heathen bonfires. They thought Christmas celebrations were non-Biblical and opened the door to all sort of spiritual maladies. They were not entirely wrong. Aldous Huxley ends one of his novels with a host's warning to departing guests: "Drive carefully. This is a Christian country, and it is the Savior's birthday. Practically everybody you will see will be drunk." There are jarring combinations of holy day and holiday all around.
But in fact God is responsible for the most jarring paradoxes of this season. The heavenly carols were first heard not in church but by the third shift out in the field. And in the child Jesus the line distinguishing the sacred and the secular, the divine and human was seriously and permanently blurred by God.
This birth becomes a parable for a new vision of the paradoxical way things really are. God sending ambassadors to bless the working poor. A human baby in the fellowship of animals. A divine arrival on a workday in the middle people preoccupied with their tax returns. Magi offering expensive gifts to a spiritual king.
Richard Crashaw put it memorably:
Welcome to our wondering sight
Eternity shut in a span!
Summer in winter!
Day in night!
Heaven in earth!
and God in man!
The mystery of Christmas is God has come close to us where we are. The Eternal doesn't wait till we get life all settled and neat to knock on our door. God does not wait till we are in a spiritual mood, but barges in on the ordinary like a carol in the middle of the shopping mall. Heaven does not wait till the coast is clear to be born vulnerable in a dangerous world. The Almighty will not wait till everyone is in church and quiet to make his presence felt. His angels are out there in the field serenading the third shift, or catching Mary up to her elbows in dishwater with news of an unwanted pregnancy, or whispering to Joseph in the middle of a nightmare.
Like Dickens's "Christmas Carol," Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" has become a classic for this season, because it catches something of the meaning of the Christmas message. The angel Clarence Oddbody has to show George Bailey that no matter that he is facing some monstrous problems, he is wrong to think that his life is a waste or that whether he lives or dies matters to no one. Things are not perfect in the world, and not everything is splendid about our lives, but each life is wonderful nevertheless. Incarnation means, among other things, that an individual human life has the capacity for God's presence. No babe is too poor or birthplace too mean that God cannot be there. Each life can become a place of revelation and grace. The mystics said that God became incarnate that we each might be bearers of incarnation, that we might become the place where God dwells. Clement of Alexander wrote, "The Logos of God has become human so that you might learn from a human being how a human being may become divine."
What brings us to church, really, should not be the idea that we need to go to a holy place to find God. We go like the shepherds to verify the rumor of angels that God has come to us. And we leave rejoicing as they did because it is true. God is with us in this world. And his coming makes our lives holy with possibilities.
