(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for A Disrupted Christmas, originally shared on December 24, 2020. It was the seventy-fifth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Christmas is going to be celebrated a little
differently this year, but it will still be Christmas. What can we learn this
year that will help us make the focus of Christmas more meaningful?
It’s a holly jolly pandemic
Christmas this year. Santa got a vaccine injection direct from Dr. Fauci as an
essential worker, so he’s good. Snowmen and icicles are decorating Southern
California homes where neither has ever been seen. One of area hospitals is
seeing patients in its gift shop. There’s a Christmas irony for you. The malls
are packed, as are the ICU’s. I wonder if there’s a connection? They say that the
last few miles of a marathon are the hardest. Is that why we see so many people
ignoring the simple steps they can take to literally save lives? Because it is
hard? I’ve run a couple of marathon and I know that the adrenaline kicks in
with the end in sight. Let that be our reality, people trying even harder to do
the right things as we near the finish line.
Over 9,000 people have died of
COVID-19 now in LA County, and it’s still rare to see anyone wearing a mask as
they walk by our home. A group of people in Thousand Oaks held an event the
other night to protest current restrictions by singing Christmas carols in a
mall parking lot; no masks, no distancing.
As a result of this
indifference, we’ll be celebrating Christmas apart from our families this year.
We won’t be traveling to exotic destinations. Our online shopping won’t all get
done, or arrive on time, because of COVID related volume. We won’t be going to
our go-to local businesses for gifts. Some of them aren’t there anymore. We
won’t be going out to restaurants. Some of them aren’t there anymore. Our
economy is starting to bounce back. Some jobs aren’t there anymore.
Christmas has become a difficult
time for many, missing loved ones who have died, particularly those who have
died in the past year, trying to live up to everyone’s expectations, trying to
keep up the pace and the peace.
I saw that one of our local
churches is having a service specifically for those for whom Christmas is a
hard time. They’re calling it the “Blue Christmas” service.
It’s been said that Christmas is weird. It is that time of year when we
sit around a dead tree and eat candy out of our socks. If that’s all that
Christmas means, that is pretty weird.
Christmas is going to be
celebrated a little differently this year. It’s been disrupted by both the
pandemic and by an increasingly secular popular version of the holiday.
By the 26th, it will be toast.
By January 2nd it will be packed up and put
away.
But, what if we disrupted this year’s disrupted Christmas?
What if we made it into something less commercial, less about spending, something
with fewer unreasonable expectations, something more meaningful?
I know. Whenever I say something like that, I think of Pastor Ingqvist, the pastor in Garrison Keillor’s mythical Minnesota
town, Lake Wobegon, who began an Advent sermon with a proposal. “This
Christmas, I propose that we resist the temptations of our world to make
Christmas about the things we can buy. Let’s make it less about the gifts we give
and more about the gift God has given us in Jesus Christ.” And just then his
gaze fell to the row in front of the pulpit, where his five children were
mouthing words at him. “No! Dad, no! No!”.
We all get sucked into the Christmas machine and come out of it slightly
more processed and the worse for wear, pledging to do better next time.
[***What do you think? How do you try
to resist the commercialization of Christmas?
Share your thoughts in the
comment section below and we’ll respond to every one.]
Not that its been easy. Ever.
Think about that first
Christmas. It’s not a cute story, or even a pleasant one.
Mary, who likely is barely a
teenager, is pregnant and Joseph knows it’s not his at a time when Joseph could
have had Mary put to death for the shame she had brought upon them and their
families. But Joseph, who like Mary had been visited by an angel, a messenger
from God, moved forward with Mary. Just then, everyone was ordered to go to
their family’s city of origin in ordered to be registered by the occupying
Roman Empire. The Romans wanted to make sure everyone was accounted for at tax
time.
Mary and Joseph travel the 90
miles to Joseph’s family town of Bethlehem, by donkey and on foot, in Mary’s
ninth month of pregnancy. They arrived and found that people coming into town
from all over have taken all the rooms. It’s almost inconceivable that Joseph’s
family wouldn’t have found someplace for them. But the out-of-wedlock pregnancy
had shamed the family.
It was not likely that there
was no room for them at the inn, but that thee was no room for THEM at the inn,
or anywhere else with the family.
They find some shelter in an enclosure
for animals and, having no place to put her baby, Mary wrapped him in tight
bands of cloth and laid him in the container from which the animals ate.
I spent a semester studying in
Israel when I was in college. I was there the first semester, so I was able to
spend Christmas in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus.
The students in our group were
all excited about this, as were thousands of other people from all over the
world, who were also wanting to spend Christmas in Bethlehem.
We went on Christmas Eve. Bethlehem
is in Palestine, not Israel, today. There had been violence between
Palestinians and Israelis, so we had to purchase a special permit to visit
Jerusalem and board special busses in order to get there. When we arrived at
“Manger Square” outside the Church of the Nativity, a place we’d toured before
but where we now wanted to worship, the scene was controlled chaos.
Armed soldiers patrolled
everywhere. Crowd flowed elbow-to-elbow falling on souvenir displays where
prices had at least doubled for the occasion. Children went around selling hard
boiled eggs for $1. All the food prices had been jacked-up.
Tourists, far from home and
their social constraints, were chugging alcohol and vomiting in the square.
We were surrounded by a Tower
of Babel rush of languages everywhere we went, most of which we hadn’t heard
before and didn’t understand.
There was such a crush of
people that we never even got close to the church, much less worshiped there.
We left, disappointed that
Christmas in Bethlehem was nothing like what we expected. Until the next
morning, Christmas morning, when the pastor at the Lutheran church in Old
Jerusalem, preached about how he, too, after spending his first Christmas in
Bethlehem, had been disappointed until it dawned on him that his experience was
closer to what had happened at the time of the first Christmas than the experience
of Christmas for most people today.
Somehow this has gotten conflated
with cute kids in their bathrobes, unrestrained spending, weird social customs,
unrealistic expectations, the trying to please everybody, winter decorations
where there is no winter, nostalgia for idealized Christmases past, a tree
slaughter, and so on.
And the long period of
commercial preparations ends on Christmas Day, and then it’s done. Really done.
The Christian Church, however, starts
the Christmas season on Christmas Eve, and celebrates it for 12 whole days,
until January 6th, the Day of the Epiphany!
So, now we get Christmas pretty much all to ourselves.
There is no more holiday stress. The
long nightmares of excess and expectations are over. Now comes the Christmas
blessing.
How might we spend this time
by actually celebrating Christmas? Here are seven simple suggestions:
1. Open your heart and
allow God to make or re-new you as a new person.
2. Spend some time in
grateful prayer.
3. Take some time to read
the Christmas story at the beginning of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John in your
Bible this season.
4. Talk with your family
and/or friends about the old, old story and how it has changed you.
5. Show others about how
grateful you are for the birth of Jesus in your life through acts of giving and
love.
6. Leave your Christmas
decorations up and lighted until January 6th.
7. Help someone else find
their true self in the name of Jesus.
*Luke 2:1-20
Welcome to the season of
Christmas!
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