We Call It Christmas

Suggested scripture: Isaiah 11:1-9

I love Christmas. It’s not popular in all circles to admit that. And for many, the sweet story about angels and sheep and a baby in a manger doesn’t cut it, not in the face of the plunging stock market and two wars and environmental crises. Not in the face of the nihilism (belief that life is pointless) and narcissism (excessive focus on self) of our culture. Not in the face of the evening news. There’s a lot of darkness out there and for some, the Bethlehem star doesn’t seem to be much help.

But I love Christmas because of its in-your-face attitude to the despair and the darkness. Every thinking person is saying how awful everything is, and here comes Christmas, singing “Joy to the World.”

A baby is born in a manger. The story makes clear to us that the Christian faith is not about heaven only or spirit only or mind only. It is about flesh. It is about the earth. It is about this world. God’s will is incarnation: Spirit becoming flesh. For God, matter really matters.

Our faith is not about escaping from this world with its problems. It is about our bringing the Divine into this world. It is about a holy infant, the Creator of the cosmos in diapers. The Christmas story tells us that the Divine is found in the midst of the world, not apart from it. God’s will is incarnation: like Jesus, we are called to incarnate God in the world, we are called to enflesh Spirit.

The Franciscian priest Richard Rohr was on a retreat once at an abby, and he knew there was a hermit living there who lived in silence. Out walking one day, Rohr saw the hermit coming down the path toward him. Not wanting to intrude on his silence, Rohr said nothing. But the hermit, recognizing that Rohr was a priest and an influential writer and speaker, said as he passed, “Richard, tell them God is not out there. Thank you.” And he kept walking. That is the Christmas story. It is about incarnation.

God is incarnate, that is, Spirit is hidden in flesh. So when you go into the world with its terrors and tensions, with its nihilism and narcissism, you carry God into that mix. When you speak a voice of hope in spite of the jeering of your cynical friends, perhaps that is God’s voice speaking. When you refuse to participate in the despair that pervades our time, you are loosing God into that darkness. When you live out of values beyond the market mentality, you are bringing the presence of God into our culture.

In our incarnational faith, the world is not evil. It is broken, but not bad. It is in the midst of the struggles of the world that we find God: it isn’t about removing ourselves from the struggles, but about going into them with a different vision, with God’s vision.

The church is sort of like daytime tv: we are big on reruns. Every year we rerun Christmas. Over and over we do that so we can keep before us (it is so easy to get distracted) this alternative vision of God’s, the one Jesus talked about all the time, the one he called the Kingdom of Heaven, Kingdom of God. We rerun Christmas every year so that we don’t forget that God is not far away looking down at us, but right here in the glory and the garbage of life on earth.

Our God chose to be incarnated into a world of taxes and stables and Roman soldiers murdering new babies. The same thing happens in our world: the Holy takes on the flesh of the ordinary. God is not out there. God is here.

And so I love Christmas. I love it even though this year my father (who loved Christmas, too) is missing from our family’s celebrations. I love it even though I have some years been lonely on Christmas day. I love it even though it gets frantic and frenzied. I love it in part because it tells me that my body, even with its limitations and imperfections, is holy ground. It tells me that because the Holy became human, the human is holy. It tells me that the ordinary stuff of my days, the messes no less than the miracles, is where God hangs out. It tells me that the human is the place where God sees fit to dwell.

You and I, with all of our addictions and inadequacies: we have the power to incarnate God, to let the holy express Herself through our humanness. We have the power to do that. We have the invitation to do that. That invitation to incarnate God in the world as it is right now with all its pains and problems, that invitation has a name. We call it Christmas.

©2008 Janice Jean Springer