""A DIFFERENT VISION - ROSA PARKS DAY"

“A DIFFERENT VISION – ROSA PARKS DAY”

            The Christmas season now begins in September, as our consumer culture seeks to tweak the heartstrings earlier in order to sell more products.  Because of this development, it is easy to become cynical about Christmas and the Christmas story.  Many of us are cynical and tend to become jaded in this season – we long to find some respite from its frantic nature.  As we begin another Advent season, leading up to Christmas, let us take some time to reflect upon this ancient story, because at its best, and even at its least, the story itself offers us some opportunities to see a different vision of ourselves, of others, and of life itself.

            I am one of those who tends to be jaded about this season, but in my early years I was given a great gift regarding Christmas.  My mother loved all things Christmas, and she passed that affinity on to me.  We were poor,  abandoned by husband and father, and living with my great-great aunt, who refused to celebrate Christmas for religious reasons.  “Gran,” as I called her, was an Associate Reformed Presbyterian, a very conservative branch of the Presbyterian family.  Coming out of the Puritan tradition, she felt that the cultural trappings of Christmas were an evil that needed to be avoided – no tree, no decorations, no mirth, no presents, although a big Christmas meal was both allowed and celebrated.   When we first moved in with Gran, my mother and I shared a small bedroom with two twin beds.  Gran would not allow Mother to put up a Christmas tree in the common living area, so for several years, we had a tree in our already crowded bedroom.  My mother was a Christmas season evangelist, however, so eventually she won Gran over, and the tree moved in to the common area, along with a growing number of decorations (and most important from my child’s point of view, presents under the tree were also allowed).

            So, I am grateful to my mother for her imbibing me with the Christmas spirit.  Her enthusiasm pointed me and others to see the Christmas season as a time to look for another vision, a vision of life that is deeper and broader and more connected than the current capitalistic, money-is-god vision.  The church uses the Advent season as a time to prepare us to be able to re-focus our perceptual apparatus so that this new vision can come into view and take root.  Writers like Howard Thurman (“The Mood of Christmas”) have encouraged us to understand the Christmas story as a powerful time of re-engaging our imaginations about who we are and what life is.  The Christmas stories in Matthew, Luke, and John urge us to see where God’s preferences are and where God’s energies are.  These Biblical Christmas stories place God’s emphasis on the margins of life:  a teenage girl pregnant before marriage by someone other than her fiancé, the fiancé being forced to engage his patriarchal privilege and make a decision on it, the baby born on the streets, the holy family greeted by working class people and then exotic foreigners, then forced to flee political persecution as immigrants who illegally crossed the border with Egypt.  These stories are not about God at the center of celebrity culture – these stories are about God at the margins.  That should be the first thing that we notice, as we begin this Advent and Christmas season.  Whoever you think is marginalized – that is where God is appearing in 2019.

            Second, we should notice that a central characteristic of these Christmas stories is resistance.  God is resisting the Roman Empire and the powers that be.  The Romans are mentioned in Luke’s version but only as an aside that requires the holy family to go to Bethlehem.  Mary will resist male patriarchal power, and so will Joseph.  It is as if God is saying in these Christmas stories:  “There’s another view of life – look at it and find your way in to it.”  At best, our culture begrudgingly acknowledges the power of love in these stories, but it is the sweet, sentimental kind of love, not the institution-challenging, life-changing love found in these Biblical stories.  They emphasize that this event will challenge us to engage and confront institutions of oppression and injustice.

            I don’t know if Rosa Parks thought about these Christmas stories or not, as she decided to resist the unjust segregation laws on that bus in Montgomery years ago on December 1, 1955, but she did have resistance on her mind and heart.  She wasn’t the first to do it – Claudette Colvin and Homer Plessy and Ida Wells and Frederick Douglass and others had preceded her in challenging the separate accommodation laws.  But, her resistance caught fire, mainly because some other women like Joanne Robinson picked up her witness and resistance and helped it to spread in Montgomery and around the South.  I don’t know if Rosa Parks framed it in just this way, but it is easy in retrospect to hear the angel of the Lord telling her:  “Keep your seat, Rosa – God is with you.”  “But, I’m just one small black woman – how can this be?”  The reply: “With God, nothing is impossible.”  And, a new vision was born and seen, out of her resistance.  This is the different vision – this is the meaning of the Christmas stories.  Let us find our voice also in this crazy season – God is inviting us in.