Christmas Eve
There have been some great Christmas films over the years… It’s A Wonderful Life… Home Alone… Die Hard. I recently watched one of the dozens of new holiday movies that came out this year. This one purported to tell the story of Christmas, its origins. You know, the Elvish holiday a medieval boy in Finland introduced to humans.
Not the origins of Santa Claus, mind you. Not some reindeer with an incandescent bulb for a nose. The actual holiday itself, even the name of the holiday.
Now, I am not the kind to clutch my pearls about the secularization of Christmas. I’m okay with red coffee cups that simply say “Happy Holidays,” and I’m down with including a menorah in our civic holiday displays or forgoing those displays altogether. I’m not a huge fan of the crass commercialization, or of carols before we’ve even disposed of the jack-o-lanterns, but I have little time for the culture wars. Still, this movie really is the ultimate in taking the Christ out of Christmas. And Christ in Christmas is worth keeping.
Christ, and therefore Christmas, hinges on a truly radical notion when understood in the context of the religious traditions of the ancient world. The Hebrew cult was already a religious outlier when it declared that human kings were not gods. But even the Hebrew tradition made God something wholly other, remote, inaccessible, and scary, a pillar of cloud and fire. Their theology even evolved to locate God in a singular place, the Holy of Holies in the Temple, with access controlled by the priests, powerful men using fear and might and holiness as a weapon. A powerful God invented by and controlled by powerful men.
Claiming that God could appear at the margins in the form of a vulnerable infant was radical, and the Christian notion that God was present to ordinary humans, not just as Jesus, but also through the Holy Spirit, was truly revolutionary. The teaching in Matthew, what you have done to the least of these you have done unto me, was revolutionary, not only because it made the Way of Jesus a discipleship of selflessness, but also because it told us to see God in everyone. You have to care about those wrongly arrested, innocent men executed, when you follow a man who was wrongly arrested, an innocent man murdered by the state.
Our own Protestant tradition had to wrestle for that truth, the vulnerable and present God, all over again during the Reformation, for once again powerful men had inserted themselves between other humans and God, has attached God to places and objects, to power.
This is a battle we must fight again and again, for in our fear we worship power for it gives us the illusion of control when we are not in control, have never been in control. We construct a God that thinks like we think, that wants what we want. We need those revolutionaries who insist, in every age and every place, that holiness is not locked away behind the doors of some Temple, that our source is not some man sitting on bloody piles of gold, but that the holy is found at the margins, in the poor and the madmen, in the arms of a young mother in a temporary shelter.
In you. And in me.
That God is with us, Emmanuel, is humbling and inspiring and a little terrifying. No wonder the shepherds were afraid. Because on Tuesday morning, you may well run into God, standing in the checkout line, loose in the world, and you will be called to love in ways that can be uncomfortable and inconvenient.
Tomorrow may be the day we celebrate the way God is with us in Jesus. But in truth, Christmas really is every day, for every day and every way, a savior is born unto us. Amen.
December 26th
Deep Purple’s rock-and-roll classic “Smoke on the Water” references the 1971 fire that destroyed the Casino de Montreux in Switzerland. The conflagration, started when a fan ignited a flare, also destroyed the equipment of the band that was performing that night, the Mothers of Invention, led by the controversial genius Frank Zappa. At their very next performance, in London, Zappa was nearly killed when attacked by a fan. But he survived, and lived for a couple more decades before dying of cancer at the age of 53.
No doubt he’d rather be known as a serious jazz composer than as the person behind the early 1980’s hit “Valley Girl,” which both parodied and unintentionally promoted the speech patterns of San Fernando Valley teens. The song was performed by his daughter Moon Unit, the oldest of four siblings, followed by Dweezil, Ahmet, and Diva. What can I say? Zappa didn’t like guardrails.
His freewheeling creativity extended to those kids. The year he died, he said in an interview with Mojo Magazine:
“The more boring a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being good parents– because they have a tame child-creature in their house.”
Mary and Joseph did not have a tame child-creature in their house, no matter what centuries of parents and nuns might have to say on the matter, at least if we are to trust today’s scripture reading. And can we talk about how long it took before they noticed that their child was not in the traveling party? I mean, good thing there wasn’t an ancient child and family services agency, adolescent Jesus in a foster home in Bethany, ’cause that would have seriously screwed up the whole prophetic narrative.
By today’s standards, the kid is trouble, a pubescent know-it-all, a vibration of obnoxiousness and hormones. I’m totally down with Mary using that classic line of weary mothers everywhere: “I brought you into this world, and I can take you back out of it.”
By the standards of theological orthodoxy, this is all a divinely scripted play, and the child Jesus isn’t just a tame or untamed child-creature, but is instead an infinite god in a tiny little package.
The entire faithful imagining here at the moment Jesus becomes an adult in that ancient Hebrew tradition serves as an overture to the Passion, when he will once again travel to Jerusalem for Passover, will once again re-appear after a three day absence.
What I see, the useful meaning I can make of this story, is a kid who is absolutely passionate about something, in that name every dinosaur and earnestly correct adults when they get it wrong sort of way. What he was passionate about wasn’t dinosaur bones planted by Satan to mislead us into believing in evolution (wink, wink)… It was God, and the story his people told about their encounter with that mystery that they named Yahweh. He understood himself in the context of that story, as belonging in that story.
I can think about worse things to be passionate about. I can also imagine that not all of those scribes were quite so amazed at this kid. I mean, where are his parents?
Holy imagination gives us a story that is meant to show that the untamed infinite-god child-creature understood Yahweh’s plan better than the officials of the Hebrew establishment.
I just see a kid filled with curiosity and courage. The kind of kid who might grow up to name his own kid Moon Unit. Though I don’t remember seeing that in Dan Brown’s fiction.
And though this is the day after Christmas, and we are still stuffed, physically and theologically, I think there is a lot to digest here, not just a throw-away story. Do we understand ourselves as part of a story that still has the power to shape and change lives? A living story? Might we yet regain some of the passion displayed by this boy in the Temple?
By all rights, 1971 should have been the end for Frank Zappa. He still had a lot left to contribute to the world. So do you.
Amen.