"MOVING INTO THE NEIGHBORHOOD"

 “MOVING INTO THE NEIGHBORHOOD”

When I was growing up and celebrating Christmas, I would often get depressed on Christmas afternoon when all the presents were opened and Christmas dinner was over.  My mother often compounded that sense by insisting that we take down the Christmas tree the day after Christmas – it was over and done.  I loved Christmas  presents and the decorations, and for all the religious atmosphere which permeated my consciousness as a child,  it became clear that the spiritual power of the holiday was tied to the secular ideas about Christmas – presents, pretty lights, and decorations.    

Over the years (and especially in this crazy year of 2020), I’ve thought a lot about the Story that undergirds this season, a Story that often gets lost in sentimentality and a sea of materialism.  As I think about this process, the verse that comes to heart and mind is John’s Gospel 1:14:  “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  Translated more literally, it is the Word pitched His tent among us, but the most helpful translation to me is “the Word moved into our neighborhood.”  I like that one because it emphasizes the power of the idea of the Incarnation, but also because it brings me the warm fuzzies of Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.   The spiritual power of Christmas is that it makes an astonishing assertion – the center of all that is, God (by whatever name we call Her) has committed Herself to us in a way that is new and different.  This idea also assumes that we believe in God, which many of us do on some level.  

The Christmas Story offers us the opportunity to consider the meaning of our lives – who are we?  Whose are we?  What centers our lives?  What fires our lives?  Whatever the answer may be, we are asked to consider that love and justice are at the center of life and of our lives.  What would it mean to try to live in the neighborhood with those twin values at the heart of individual and corporate life?  For all the warm fuzzies of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, that production still was permeated by a radical and demanding idea:  each of us is loved, and all of us are loved.  In Christian language, we would say that each of us and all of us are children of God.

That sounds simple on one level, but we have all found that concept difficult to live out.  Three movies that I’ve seen recently have helped to provoke these thoughts.  First there is Pixar’s “Soul” which asks these very questions in a way that was surprising to me.  Who are you?  What is the meaning of your life?  How do you learn to live for others, especially when that life conflicts with your view of yourself and your needs?  All of this is wrapped in the life and permutations of jazz.  The second movie is “Wonder Woman 1984,” which was a disappointment in that it seemed to drop the theme of the powerful women.  It did, however, dramatically share the theme of materialism and power run amok, with only a slightly veiled portrayal of the villain as a snake-oil salesman named Donald Trump.  The rage and deep hostility of King Herod in the Christmas Story is displayed for all of us to see.  

The third movie, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” struck me the most deeply.  It is an adaptation of one of August Wilson’s plays – part of a series of his plays that are being produced by Denzel Washington as movies (the first was “Fences”).  It is set in the 1920’s in Chicago, and it focuses on an historical character named Ma Rainey, who was one of the driving forces behind the development of the blues.  Powerful actors, including Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman (in one of his last performances), drive a tense and provocative script.  The scene that stays with me in connection with the Christmas Story is one in which Boseman’s character Levee rails and curses and wrestles with God, because God refused to intervene when Levee’s mother was raped repeatedly by white men, when he was a boy.  

These movies and that scene remind us of the problem with saying that God has moved into the neighborhood with us.  If She has, where is She?  Why these 330,000+ people dead from Covid?  Why the continuing power of racism and white supremacy?  Why the continuing oppression of women?  These questions are always with us and with this Christmas Story.  Yet, as John put it in another verse, “The Light of the World was coming among us, and the confusion and craziness of human life has not extinguished it.”  That is our hope and our dilemma.  Where do we center ourselves?  This Christmas Story asks us to consider these questions once again and to find our places in the Story.  That’s the work of Christmas.