Christmas 2014

 

This is my favorite time of the year. I love the decorations. I love the music. I love the story. Throughout my life I have participated in many pageants and choirs. I have played my trumpet in many church balconies and I have played carols next to Salvation Army bell ringers. I have decorated with ladders and beeswax candles and real evergreen branches. I love the smell of sap on my hands. I love the smell of gingerbread cookies baking in the oven. I listen to old songs and I read old books over and over again. I watch the same old movies and TV specials. I look forward to seeing the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge and the Grinch. I can’t wait to see the renewal of faith in Charlie Brown and George Bailey.

Mostly, my faith is restored by what I hear each year in church, with the familiar retelling of the nativity story. I don’t want to change a thing. I want to sing every single note just like I remember – especially the tenor part with my father singing bass on one side and my mother singing soprano on the other. We all become lost in happy memories at this story. We remember our childhood. We keep up old family traditions. We put decorations in the same places. We keep trying to recreate the joy we remember.

All of this is wonderful, with maybe just a touch of wishful thinking. For no matter how hard we try, we can never have a perfect Christmas. Someone is always sick or unhappy. Someone is missing. Someone is troubled or broke or unemployed. As hard as we try, every gift cannot be the perfect gift. We get stressed and depressed. We make plans and a snowstorm (or a thunderstorm!) comes and changes everything.

Our trouble is we think that Christmas is some kind of perfect event that we have to re-create or live up to.

The reality is that Christmas isn’t about permanence. It’s about transformation. God didn’t choose to make everything stay the same. God didn’t choose to restore everything back to the good old days. God chose to turn everything upside down. God chose a poor young woman to bear his Son. God chose a poor village in the middle of nowhere as a birthplace. The news wasn’t reported to the usual media outlets, but to shepherds: the workers with the lowest status who happened to be awake at the time.

God made all of these surprising choices to tell us that everything we thought we knew was wrong. We don’t need more stuff. We don’t need to have everything perfect. Jesus isn’t born in the best place with everything in order. He enters a world of disorder and pain. He enters a world of poverty and loss. He enters a world of violence and racism and greed. He enters our world – the one we live in all the time.

Jesus came to show us love and give us life. Our brave attempts to look cheerful aren’t nearly good enough. God’s gift freely given mocks all our attempts at generosity.  But we are not called to be as good as God. We are called simply to accept the gift that has been given and live into the love that we have been shown. We have been given a great gift. We can only marvel like the shepherds and rejoice and share the good news.

Maybe we can give up all the striving for the perfect Christmas. God has already given us the perfect present. We keep Christmas best by seeking a world transformed by God’s love. Jesus is not born to bless the way we’ve made things. Jesus comes to offer us a new way of living and loving each other.