“WE NEED A LITTLE CHRISTMAS”
Yesterday
was the 159th anniversary of the execution of John Brown in 1859 in
what is now Charles Town, West Virginia, an event that led quickly to the Civil
War. Saturday was the 63rd
anniversary of the Rosa Parks’ sit-down on the bus in 1955, an event that
joined with the Brown V. Board SCOTUS decision and the lynching of Emmett Till
to ignite the modern civil rights movement.
Now we are in a time when much of the gains recognized from those events
seem to be in doubt. It is a crisis in
the most profound root of that word in Greek:
a time of great danger, but also a time of great opportunity.
In the
midst of this time of crisis, I think that it is time for Christmas. To borrow from the commercial song, “we need
a little Christmas.” That song was
written by Jerry Herman and debuted by Angela Lansbury in the 1966 Broadway
play “Mame.” The song came in the play
in response to the stock market crash of
1929, and it was an attempt to recover the spirit of hope and love. Of course, nowadays, we probably would sing:
“we have way too much of Christmas,” since the stores start advertising it in
September. The Christmas that I need is
not the commercialized, sentimental, capitalist, Santa Claus kind. The Christmas that I need is the loving,
enduring, courageous kind seen in the biblical witness – the kind that happened
at the margins of life.
During this
season, I’ll be looking at some of the narratives of the Christmas story in the
Bible, but we should be noting that the story itself is an invitation into our
deeper selves as individuals and as a culture.
It asks us to consider that at the heart of our lives is not the evil or
even tragedy that we all experience in our human journeys but rather a sense of
love and even justice. In Christmas we
proclaim that the God who is the center of all things, this God has come into
our midst and has proclaimed solidarity with us. This Incarnation, as it came to be known, did
not occur in the halls of power. No
appearance at the Christmas parade, no edict from the Roman emperor, no
conquering general riding into town on a horse or a tank, no address at a joint
session of Congress, no stock market bull run, no celebrity with the cameras
flashing and the spotlights heralding.
Rather,
this Incarnation came at the margins of life, where oppressed people try to
cross borders, where pregnant teen-agers wonder how they will survive, where
women build community for themselves, where children are born on the streets,
where males wrestle with sharing power, where emperors order populations to be
on the move – places where vulnerability is evident and where courage endurance
are called out. In this story are the
themes of home and longing and memory and love. Why did God choose to appear this way? Why become so dependent and vulnerable to us,
to come among us as a little baby? Why
depend on the human beings who prefer money and weapons and race and sexism to
the saving values of love and equity and justice? Here’s a clue that we’ll be exploring in this
season: this story is not about bright
lights and presents and trees and selling products, although I like most of
those. From its beginning, this story
has asked us to look beneath the surface of our lives, both our individual
lives and our cultural lives, to look for the values that sustain us and give
us life.
So, in this
season of great discontent and crisis and danger, we do need a little Christmas. I’m hoping that in my own life, I’ll find the
Christmas story as it was meant to be: an invitation into our own lives as
children of God. And, I’m hoping that
you’ll find that too. I’ll be using the
poetry of Howard Thurman during this season, from his book “The Mood of
Christmas.” Here’s one entitled: “At
Christmastime:”
The tides
flow out from the Inner Sea
At
Christmastime:
They find
their way to many shores
With gifts
of remembrance, thoughts of love---
Though the
world be weary and the days afraid
The heart
renews its life and the mind takes hope
From the
tides that flow from the Inner Sea
At
Christmastime.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete