(76) Christmas Con Carne

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Christmas Con Carne, originally shared on December 28, 2020. It was the seventy-sixth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   How do we best share the good Christmas news that God became flesh, that Jesus was born for all humanity, with the growing numbers of people who know nothing of Christmas except Santa Claus? Starting with what we believe in common, or starting with confrontation? The answer, as they say, might surprise you.

   We had some rain last night, and some thunderboomers where we are. We had a little break, and then the rain started again. (Open door). See, streams of living water! We need it. Some of us have been praying for it, so I guess the message is be careful for what you pray for. 😊

   This time of year reminds me of one of my favorite online videos. It shows an office with dozens of people working. A TV monitor is on the wall for breaking news when suddenly the screen turns red, “Storm Watch Southern California”.

   An announcer comes onscreen and, trying to disguise the panic in his voice, says, “One-half an inch of rain is expected throughout Southern California today.” The whole place is thrown into chaos. People are running in circles, raiding the snack cupboard for survival food, hiding under their desks, cowering in the corners in the fetal position, when the announcer comes back on and says, “Just a minute. Just a…no…no, it looks like the storm is going to avoid us. It’s going to be another beautiful day in Southern California.”

   The office workers come out of their holes, laugh in relief, and return to their work. Just then, their whole building is shaken violently. Earthquake. The workers barely notice, or just shrug, laugh, and go back to work. That’s life in Southern California.

   That’s kind of our approach to the coronavirus, too. There are significant numbers of people who panic over the restrictions that are in place for their safety and ignore the real threat that is right in front of them.

   More and more groups of people are getting the coronavirus vaccine and, by the middle of next year or so, we should be approaching herd immunity. More and more people seem to be willing to ignore all the safety recommendations and our hospitals are now at a bursting point. When the consequences of that behavior over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays hit, its going to get ugly. I wonder if the anti-vaxers, the conspiracy theorists, and those who believe that the number of coronavirus cases is vastly exaggerated have every seen the state of our hospitals. The numbers of people being treated for nothing else but actual cases of COVID-19 is an objective fact. It is draining our health care system, particularly, our health care workers. It is not a pretty sight, but one would think that seeing it would lead people to change their behavior simply for the sake of others.

   We treat Christmas in the same way. We are uncomfortable with the reality of the Christmas story, so we make it into something that is more pastel

   Much of popular Christmas imagery depicts the silence of the birth of Christ. I guess that is to engender a sense of awe at the meaning of the event itself. Sanitizing the story also makes it more palatable for non-believers to absorb and for business interests to use to sell things.

   But, those things don’t have much to do with the event itself. I shared a description of the event itself last time. Today, I’d like us to consider why it’s hard to share the Christmas story with others in any meaningful way, and what we can do about it.

*John 1:1-14

   Jesus is the Word made flesh. The gospel of John was written for a world other than the Biblical world of which Jesus was the fulfillment. John was written for people who never heard of Adam and Eve, or Moses, or David or Elijah. It was written to a gentile audience, a Greek audience.

   In that world, the natural state of all things was chaos (a Greek word that came also into the English language). Onto this natural chaos, logos (that is, order or reason or The Word, or all bound up together) had been imposed. Order was everything to the Greeks. It was how they saw the essential character of civilization, how we got along with one another for everyone’s benefit. It was how they measured beauty, by pleasing proportions, a standard still dominant in the cultures of the Western world.

   John began his gospel at this point of commonality with the Greeks, but not to accommodate them. In fact, it may well have come across as confrontational. That is to say that the good news of Jesus Christ is that God had become human flesh. The Word was Jesus Christ, God.

   This idea was a difficult hurdle for the Greeks has they had many Gods, and they believed that the interaction between human beings was primarily to make mischief. It was offensive to them to think that a god would be born to serve, much less die on a cross. It was foolishness.

   John proclaimed that

   John proclaimed that the Word had become flesh, i.e. meat. This was another problem. The Greeks believed that the body was bad. It was just a body that housed what was truly important, a soul. Christians believe that God created the body, that what we do with our bodies is our spiritual worship, and in the resurrection of the body. Christians believe in the incarnation. See those letters in the middle? C-a-r-n? It’s the same root as carne, as in chili con carne, chili with meat. God became meat, human flesh, and dwelt among us.

   John found a point where Christians and non-Christians could agree. And then he kind of got into their faces.

   Nevertheless, most our art depicts a quiet, tranquil scene. Jesus, Mary and Joseph posed serenely with clean fluffy animals around them, all cooing at the baby Jesus.

   Our Christmas hymns contain lyrics like, “The cattle are lowing, The poor Baby wakes, But little Lord Jesus, No crying He makes”,  or  “Silent night, holy night! All is calm, all is bright.”

   The Christmas I read about in the Bible doesn’t sound like this at all. I sounds like a story of God born into rejection, laid in a trough filled with animal feed, filled with the smells of yesterday’s animal feed.

   Have you had a baby? Have you seen a birth? It may be beautiful to you. Now, anyway. But no one would say it was pretty. It’s filled with pain, and cries, and fluid and blood and body parts.

   I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, if the Incarnation means what I think it means, it means that Jesus did what babies do: cry. And, it means that there were diapers involved. I remember a painting by 15^th century artist Hieronymus Bosch showing Joseph drying clean diapers next to a fire. That’s the incarnation.

   I don’t think that this reduces Jesus to a human level, unless that’s all we chose to see. The message of faith is that God was fully human and fully divine. Both. At the same time.

   That’s the central mystery of Christmas, not mystery in the sense of something to be solved, but a mystery in the sense that God cannot be apprehended by human beings, except to the extent that God reveals God’s self. The biggest challenge of Christmas is that Jesus is God.

   The Greeks, the non-believers, were deeply offended by this whole picture.

   We are now on the 4^th day of the 12 days of Christmas, the Christmas season.

   When someone asks you, “What did you do for Christmas”, you might answer by saying that you heard a Christmas story that was kind of disturbing, but that meant a lot to you.

   It’s still time to talk about Christmas. Not about Christmas traditions. Not about Christmas customs. But, about Christmas.

   Those may not always be comfortable conversations anymore than the Christmas story is a comfortable story to tell.

   How, for example, do you think Joseph’s friends responded when he told them that, no he wasn’t the father of Mary’s baby.  betrothed (a state in between engagement and marriage)’s.  It was a miracle! God was the father!   How about the story that Mary had been raped by a Roman soldier that has been told from time to time? Which seems more credible to most people, then and now?

   How do we tell that story without confronting the powers that deny God?

   I don’t think we do. I don’t think it’s possible.

   Today, it is not the cross that seems foolish to the wise of this world, but the idea of belief itself. It seems irrational to believe in something because your parents believed, or you grew up in a certain geographic area, it seems random and not unlike many other “religions” who also claim to be true.

   We empathize. Christianity is not a religion, it’s a relationship. It’s not myths but a historical reality. It’s not doctrine but the work of the Holy Spirit, active and present, pointing us to what is doctrine. But, still…..

   It’s like looking at a stained-glass window from the outside. It’s just a blob of brown glass. Look at it on the inside and you see its colors, its shapes, and its meaning. The difference is the light. Jesus is the light of the world. The darkness has not over come it. Jesus has overcome the darkness.

   Our faith is their indictment. It is a rebuke to the idea that the only things that exist are the things that can be measured. It is a rebuke to those who, when they don’t live according to their values change not their behavior but change their values.

   Christmas is not just good news to the world, it is a rebuke to it, to Sin, to everything that defies God, the one true living God who can’t be described or explained and doesn’t need to be. It’s been said that the best way to defend God is to get out of his way. Any proposed deity who can be explained by its Creation, isn’t a deity, but an invention.

   Instead, God did the difficult and the foolish. God became human flesh.   Christmas is not a story about how we came to God, but about how God came to us, in the flesh.

 I’d say 12 days is at least the number required to try unsuccessfully to absorb this. And to celebrate it.

   We, too, have a birth story. A new birth story. A born-again story. We may have been saved from addiction or a life of crime and given eternal life. We may have been born in the church, raised in a Christian home, and been baptized at an early age. We may have been released from a destructive job, friends who did not have our best interests in their hearts, and bad influences all around us.

   Being born again is messy. Being pulled away from that which is killing us, mocking us, damning us is not easy. Being pulled away from old friends and toward real friends is not easy. Giving up lucrative practices that diminish people is not easy. But, person after person, for thousands of years, have said that it’s the best thing that ever happened to them.

   Maybe that’s the best place to point people this Christmas. To Jesus.

   Christmas is still good news for all humankind. God became a child, incarnate to redeem us and our Sin by giving up that life for us, to make us his children.