christmas

Day 22: Overjoyed or Over It?

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After the Magi had heard King Herod, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed.

-Matthew 2:9-10

Confession: I am not expecting to enjoy the World Cup final. I am planning to watch it, but I expect to gain very little joy from it, because I watch with all the tension and expectation of someone who has assigned enormous significance to a moment that is unlikely to rise to the occasion. In my own metaphors, I’ve equated Lionel Messi to every people-pleasing overworked and underappreciated Millennial pastor and I want for him a victory because that, in its own way, feels like a “fuck you” to the broken system. If he loses, I will be very sad. If he wins, I will feel the creeping sensation that haunts every perfectionist after a victory: that it is never enough. This is probably not rational, but we passed the threshold for rationality a long time ago.

While finals are supposed to be the exciting culmination of a tournament, they are often injury-ridden and conservative games. Most finals are not that fun to watch. This is perhaps the hallmark of sports fandom, to submit yourself to a game that is unlikely to make you happy yet unthinkable to miss.

Christmas can be the same way. With all the expectation and anticipation, the day itself can feel like a tense spring of waiting for everything to unfold as perfectly as you’d imagined. We place such a big burden on these culminating moments. 

I envy the Magi their genuine, childlike joy when they see the star stopped over the place where the child was (probably not the stable, although it’s romantic to imagine so). Many adults struggle to find that kind of authentic, awe-inspiring joy in the Christmas holiday. The mysteries pile up over the years and turn into a to-do list of family and presents and bathroom cleanings. I am the sort of person that loves the holiday season and finds the holiday itself tedious. 

It is possible that a final is best experienced in the past or future tense, when we have the optimism to love it and/or the reality to make sense of it.  I take joy from anticipating it and I take meaning from remembering it, but in the moment, I am stressed and concerned. The joy arrives, but the joy is easiest to access in a different tense.

When you watch the final today, you don’t have to be like the Magi. You don’t have to be overjoyed. Let time work the joy into the moment. Find the holiday joy in the tense you can, whether that is past, present, or future.

A dozen players from the French national team smiling and surrounding Olivier Giroud, who holds the World Cup trophy, as gold confetti rains down.
In 2018, France celebrated like it was Christmas in July after winning; this year, they hope to make it Christmas in December.

Day 20: But the Final is on a Sunday

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All men are like grass
and their glory is like the flowers of the field.
The grass withers and the flowers fall
because the breath of God
blows on them.

-Isaiah 40:6-7 (gender exclusivity preserved for irony)

After a social media argument in which I wrote a small theological treatise encouraging pastors to watch the World Cup instead of going to church, on Sunday I took a deep breath and wondered if I’d taken this metaphor a little too far. Does the World Cup really have theological significance I have assigned it? Should I, as an ordained, retired pastor in Mennonite Church USA, take the dignity of my office just a little more seriously? 

My goal, in each of these posts, has been to collapse time and story: to put us more fully in the biblical story by putting us more fully in the present moment. For many people, the Bible is so distant that it is best understood through a mediating metaphor. That can be football or the Chronicles of Narnia or the Marvel cinematic universe. A mediating metaphor collapses the distance between our story and Jesus’ story. The World Cup is part of a healthy theological imagination. It’s what theologians call the hermeneutical bridge.

If the FIFA World Cup took place on the fourth Sunday of Advent every year, I would be singing a different song (well, I’d still be singing the Magnificat, I’d just be singing in a different place). But the World Cup just once in our lifetimes is being played on the fourth Sunday of Advent, and two or three billion humans will watch it. It is literally the most human thing you can do this year, beyond universal biological functions. And all humans are like grass; their glory withers and the flowers fall and most poetry doesn’t translate.

Metaphor won’t yield rich theology on its own. Exegesis, historical study, and other tools also matter. 

But the ancient flowers have withered, and so we search for the flowers that bloom in the present moment. Mediating metaphors. Things that collapse the distance between ourselves and the biblical story, that allow us to encounter King Herod and Zechariah and Mary in our daily lives, as much people we know as celebrities or social media influencers. The Bible matters to our life to the degree we understand the people to be full, moral characters whose choices are like our own.

Not everyone should skip church for the World Cup. It’s not a particularly moral choice, nor an educational one. It is, simply, a choice of meaning-making and metaphor. Those for whom soccer is a mediating metaphor will find the story of Christ within the story of this game. If the World Cup is something that has significance for you, it will have theological significance. If the World Cup is not something that has significance for you, may you find theological significance in your deeply held passions and practices.

This is not a hermeneutical bridge, this is just a bridge where things look different on one side than the other, but no matter which side you stand on you are in the same place, on the same bridge.

What if the True Meaning of Christmas is about Self-Worth?

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In our hyper-programmed culture of productivity and accomplishment, it can be a relief to reach the Christmas season: those precious few days when there is finally a cultural pressure to just be nice. Time for Christmas, time for Love.

But we also receive very specific messages what that Love should look like. These messages are everywhere, but most powerfully in the inescapable holiday soundtrack that somehow penetrates every public and private event.

In church, it’s often said that faith is defined by music: our truest beliefs are not from the Bible but from the songs we sing each week, whether it’s lofty hymns battling the organ or the not-so-affectionately titled genre of “Jesus is my Boyfriend” songs. There’s nowhere in American culture that music more deeply shapes us than at Christmas. Our experience and expectations of the holiday is based on the songs we’ve committed to play in public spaces, whether out of cultural consensus or media manipulation.

The radio-dominating carols of snow and good cheer shape our subconscious holiday landscape, with their parties and presents and mistletoe and food and family and friends. These songs point us toward an elusive sense of comfort and love, but it’s a love wrapped up in a prescribed set of practices, ie., walking in a winter wonderland, getting the turkey and the mistletoe, letting it snow, and rockin’ around the Christmas tree.

The musical consensus tells us Christmas is about more than presents and lights. But only to the degree that the  #1 Billboard Holiday song by Mariah Carey tells it: we believe we can transcend the materialism of the season and access the true spirit of Christmas only by attaching ourselves to a romantic partner. “All I want for Christmas is You.” True Christmas is about falling in love, because the only thing worse than being in an unhappy relationship at Christmas is to be single at Christmas, as if singleness is evidence of unloveability.

Mariah Carey All I Want for Christmas is You

Mariah Carey’s Christmas hit was almost titled, “All I Want for Christmas is to Stake my Self-Worth on Someone Else in order to Cover my Crippling Fear of Unloveability.”

The classic (can we say classic about 1994 yet?) gives voice to one of the deepest American anxieties. If we make the leap to eschew materialism in favor of love, but can’t even master the connection of romantic love, it must mean we are not be loveable.

At Christmas, as at Valentine’s Day, we perform acts of conspicuous love without these displays, we would be unworthy of love.

To hear the Christmas songs tell it, Loving means giving as much of yourself away as you can—to buy presents; to send cards; to attend obligatory gatherings in an endless blur of warm and mildly intoxicating beverages; to socialize in specific and highly programmed ways; to make the season as perfect, as the song says, “as a picture print by Currier and Ives.” But somehow that Currier and Ives print becomes a month lived in a frenzied generosity and accommodation and giving more love than you receive until it all culminates in a sugary crash and a coma of introversion. The American Christmas is about giving away love, even when you have no more love to give. It’s the idea if you don’t give it away, you’ll never be worthy of receiving it.

Christmas can bring out crippling feelings of perfectionism and inadequacy as we race to give away “enough” love to become worthy of receiving it.

From this perspective, Jesus becomes a magic “Love Your Neighbor” card that gives you the energy to give away more love. But the real mystery and challenge of God Incarnate is that your own flesh is worthy of love. In that small baby in the manager, you face the reality that you—you, with your flaws and shame—are deeply loveable.

The Birth of Jesus is the antithesis of the Christmas carols’ message. It’s realizing that love doesn’t keep a scorecard, that no amount of presents or cards will make you more or less deserving. Christmas is about an encounter with a God who challenges you to say, “I am loved.”

This is exactly what the Virgin Mary does, in spite of theological attempts to reduce her to a humble saint who has somehow transcended the need for self-love. In carrying God inside of herself, she names her own self-worth and identifies herself as not only someone who gives love, but someone who receives love.

Annunciation El Greco

“Annunciation,” by El Greco; or, “The Terrifying Possibility of Self-Love.”

Immediately after the angel announces her pregnancy, in Luke 1:39, “Within a few days Mary set out and hurried to the hill country.” She learns she is pregnant and… She’s out. She’s on the road to visit her cousin Elizabeth. The Bible says nothing about talking to her parents or consulting with Joseph, she just packs her bags and walks across Roman-occupied Judea by herself. Mary meets the angel and she realizes, “God has a plan for me and I have to get my s*** together.”

And so she creates more space to be herself. As she contemplates engagement, pregnancy, and marriage, as she comes into adulthood with the massive task of forming her own family unit, and as she thinks of how she wants to create a family where she gives love but also receives love, she takes time to be a single woman. She puts her obligations to others on pause in order to reflect on her own patterns of loving.

And she’s gone for 3 months. That’s one-third of her pregnancy devoted to reflecting on love with a trusted woman friend.

Her visit is about adult women making space together to be adult women. Mary and Elizabeth spend three months together. Of course, Elizabeth’s husband is around, Zechariah, but Zechariah got into an argument with an angel and the angel struck him mute. So while Zechariah is around, these three month aren’t about him. It’s truly just a time for the women be together understanding themselves and their capacities to love. To love a child, but also to love themselves.

When Mary arrives, Elizabeth says, “Blessed is she who believed that what our God said to her would be accomplished!” (This is the part where John the Baptist leaps in her womb, but let’s de-center the male experience and look at the women beyond their fetus-carrying capacity.)

And Mary responds,

“My soul proclaims your greatness, O God,
and my spirit rejoices in you my Savior.
For you have looked with favor upon your servant,
and from this day forward
all generations will call me blessed.
For you, the Almighty, have done great things for me,
and holy is your name.” (Luke 1:46-49)

Mary responds to Elizabeth’s blessing by blessing herself. Elizabeth says, “You’re so great!” And Mary replies, “Yes, I am great! And God loves me that way.”

Her song is full of my’s and me’s. It’s about her as an individual. Maybe coming from someone else’s mouth, it would sound self-centered, but here, it is Mary’s understanding that as a woman, she is deeply loved and worthy of all the love she has received.

Only from that place of belovedness does she launch into this vision of dismantling the political system and creating a more equitable world, the lowly lifted up and the powerful pulled down from their thrones, which is what the Magnificat is so well-known for.

Christmas is a season of love and loving. But it’s also a season of belovedness.

Among the pressure of cultural Christmas to perform acts of other-centered love, there is also space and theological precedent to shower yourself in love. To bask in the love of God.

Because you are loved and you are worthy of love. When God takes on flesh and walks among us, God gifts us the stunning truth that we are worthy of love.

 

This post was adapted from a sermon given Dec. 23, 2018.

The ABCs of Christmas: A Christmas Eve Service

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Christmas Eve services can be a beast for pastors and worship leaders. Typically, my does the nativity scene tableau–people love it, but it’s more of a logistical headache than planning Christmas dinner. Even though the Christmas Eve service is always full, it’s difficult to pin down who will attend, and you can only arm-twist so many adults into playing Mary and Joseph.

After two years re-sizing angel costumes and stockpiling bathrobes, this year, we looked for an alternative. I found one service that used the alphabet as a frame for the worship–using each letter of the alphabet to tell the Christmas story. However, the text itself was short and not very compelling. So I took the bare bones of the text and revised it, creating a rhyme scheme, fleshing out the story, and adding a sense of humor at times to keep the story interesting.

We divided the ABC’s of Christmas in six segments, interspersing carols and Scripture. We also had a poster for each letter, hanging them on a frame as we read. And of course, we ended the program with a candle-lit “Silent Night.” The service received generally positive feedback (no one I spoke to missed the nativity scene, at least not enough to volunteer to lead it next year). I’m not sure we’ll do it again (perhaps we will, with a revised text), but I highly recommend the service for overbooked or small congregations with few Christmas Eve volunteers. The text is below–you can adapt as necessary for your congregation.

A is for the angel, Gabriel was his name.
He visited Mary and told her God’s claim:
“Hail, Miss Mary, do not be afraid
by your holy child, the world will be saved.”
This child is Mary’s, but he’s also God.
Is he human or heavenly? That’s very odd. Continue reading →