CHRISTMAS, CELEBRATION OR REBUKE TO SINNERS?

Summary: Christmas is always a conflict at this time of year. Is it a celebration, or a rebuke to sinners? This Christmas, as we await with bated breath coming of an authoritarian, nay, Fascist, regime in Washington, we realize, perhaps more than ever, that it must be both.  Our Savior called us to repentance and self-examination, and he also called us to a gospel of radical inclusiveness in which we love our neighbors as ourselves.  To live that kind of gospel is necessarily to foreclose the approach of Donald Trump and his supporters, an approach that finds expression in exclusion, in comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted. Today we recall that Jesus came into the world not only to reconcile us to God but to recall us sharply from the errors which made necessary this altogether singular divine intervention in our human history.

It’s Christmas.

This year, as on just about every year of my adult life, I find myself retreating to my office, on the theory that in a silent office, with no phones ringing, no mail delivery, and no other interruptions, I might be able to get some work done.

What began as an ad hoc need to find some time to do some ordinary work back at Christmas, 1989, has become very much a shibboleth since then. It is, I suppose, by way of saying “Bah, humbug!” to a crassly commercialized time of conspicuous consumption is beginning advances every year a little bit further into the liturgical season of Pentecost.

This year, I find in the Christmas season, or at least in the way we Americans do Christmas, less to celebrate than ever before. I find myself cringing at the way Donald Trump and the Republican Party have managed to appropriate the phrase “Merry Christmas,” turning it into a war prize in the annual phony culture war that  ineluctably crops up at this time every year since that fascist Bill O’Reilly invented a so-called war on Christmas in order to boost ratings for Fox News.

Now, the Trump people have taken “Merry Christmas" and turned it into an ugly, triumphalist war cry, intended to remind everyone that in Donald Trump’s ‘Murica, we had all better be prepared to toe the line, or else.

Yet, despite the temptation that rises unbidden in my mind to respond to every “Merry Christmas,” Trump-tainted or not, with a snarl of “Bah, humbug!” I find myself confronted every Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with visible reminders that this day is supposed to be something different.

Seeing yesterday a homeless man crossing an intersection near my office, wending his way with a kind of sad, weary dignity, from one side of the street to the other, it came home to me forcibly that, as a Christian, a Catholic, an Anglican, an Episcopalian, I profess and confess a deep and abiding faith in a God Who took human form that we sinful humans might be reconciled to God.  God made for that holy purpose an icon of Godself to draw all humankind to God.

And seeing that homeless man, I also remembered the words of the Lucan infancy narrative, and their powerful description of a couple caught up in the bureaucratic toils of an occupying power in an occupied territory who had, when the time came for the Blessed Virgin Mary to be delivered, no place to lay their heads.

Across more than 2000 years, the Lucan infancy narrative, with its central, profound theme of the paradox of power pouring itself into powerlessness, has become and remains one of the most precious possessions of the Western, nay, Christian mind. It is a story known to the entire Christian Republic. It tugs at our heartstrings, because it awakens in us a sense of compunction and compassion for the baby Jesus in the manger. It speaks, in that sense, less about awe then about “aww.”

Yet, perhaps we should bring more awe to our understanding of the story. As the shepherds in the fields gaze with awe upon the infant God in the manger, so, too, should we tell the story of those blessed events in tones of hushed awe, for the Savior of the world is at hand, come, let us adore Him!

But, in rejoicing at this climactic act of divine intervention in human history, we should not allow ourselves to believe that we in any way have deserved this offering of divinity. For we do not deserve anything of our own merits, lost as we are in Original Sin, a sinfulness ever more obviously on display since November 8.  What we see, instead, is a love offering, made by a passionate God, Whose passionate love for us is passionately expressed in the Incarnation, passion, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ our Savior. 

For if the world were not lost in sin, it would not have been necessary for God to pour God’s very essence into human flesh in the form of Jesus Christ.   In that regard, the Incarnation we celebrate at Christmas stands as much as a rebuke as anything else. Because, in truth, the world has always organized itself very much without reference to the love to which God calls all of God’s children. Indeed, when we consider the events of November 8, 2016, in the United States, we are forced the conclusion that not only does the world organize itself without reference to the teachings and the faith to which God calls us by becoming Incarnate from the flesh of the Virgin Mary in Jesus Christ our Savior, but that in this sinful society, we have chosen to organize our world in flat defiance of the radically inclusive love of God and neighbor for which the suffering Savior was willing to die on the Cross. 

The faith which we profess and confess as Christian people, both individually and as a Christian Republic, is about faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love, summed up in the radical inclusiveness which we Christians are called to witness and live not only in the Christmas season, but also on every day of our lives. Instead, we seem to have embraced a faith based upon hate, radical exclusion, and ugly triumphalism.

In the new climate in Donald Trump’s America, we find ourselves emboldened to embrace the worst aspects of our originally sinful natures; to turn our backs upon the strangers among us, to ignore the clear command of God that we should have a preferential option for the poor, to belittle women, to treat queerfolk as some kind of dangerous, “icky,” Other, and to treat our Muslim brothers and sisters, Abrahamic People of the Book, as subversives within our midst, meting out to them the same treatment Adolf Hitler’s Germany meted out to its Jews.

This is much the same kind of world into which Jesus was born in a manger in Bethlehem, consigned there because his parents had no place lay their heads. And indeed, what would the judgmental partisans of Donald Trump have thought a teenage girl traveling through Roman Palestine in the company of an older man to whom she was not married?  Add to that the fact that Mary and Joseph were undoubtedly someone on the brown side, and you have a recipe for a terrifying application of America’s of original sin of racism.

For most Americans, confronting the Lucan infancy narrative without benefit of the context or pre-knowledge of 2000 years of retelling, would no doubt arrive at a number of negative, typically American, conclusions.  Our American would probably assume a “distinct hint of tint” in this teenage girl and her older boyfriend, whom he would no doubt assume to be the baby-daddy of her unborn child.  Our Americans would probably conclude, based on their itinerant status and inability to find lodging, that Our Lady and Joseph were some kind of homeless freeloaders, seeking to benefit from “the hard work of their betters.” In short, without the pre-knowledge and context of those 2000 years of Christian retelling, our American, whether a supporter of Donald Trump or, let us shame the devil and tell the truth, of Hillary Clinton, would probably see Our Lady and Joseph as common welfare cheats.

Yet, the same Jesus Whose birth is so poignantly recalled to us in the Lucan infancy narrative is nonetheless the same Jesus who shares with us the parable of Dives and Lazarus somewhat later in Luke’s Gospel, at 16:19-31, when he reminds us, in a rather pointed terms, of the dreadful fate that awaits those who are not prepared to do right by the poor.

For Christians who may have convinced themselves that there is no hell below us, and above us there is only sky, pace John Lennon, or who may have embodied Baudelaire’s now classic dictum that “the devil’s greatest trick is convincing the world that he does not exist,” the narrative of Dives and Lazarus, freighted as it is with an implicit command to do justice by the poor and to withhold invidious judgments against them, has become a truism devoid of any real meaning.

Yet, as we brace ourselves for the impact of an administration that proposes to govern America by, for, and in the interests of, the wealthiest among us, that believes that they are appointed by God to comfort the comfortable and to afflict the afflicted, the Christmas message could not be clearer or more pointed.

Jesus did not come into the world to comfort the comfortable. He came into the world to comfort the afflicted, and to call the comfortable, whom his prefigurer, St. John the Baptist, had called a “brood of vipers,” to repentance. Jesus did not come into the world to reaffirm in their fullest form the prevailing dispensations of the day. Instead, he came to upset the metaphorical applecart. He came to call the world to a new dispansation: a new commitment to love, a new preferential option for the poor, and a new commitment to works of charity and mercy.

For Jesus reminds us that he came not to bring peace, but a sword (Matt. 10:34).  For it’s worth recalling, in these days of self-satisfied, pharisaical Christians, that if the world had not been utterly lost in sin in those days, it would not have been necessary for God to become Incarnate that we might be reconciled to him.

In these last days, about which Jesus warned us “there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders,” (Matt 24:24) we must unhesitatingly bear witness to the true God and the true Christ, Who came among us at Christmas time in great humility to lead all the world to that passionate God Whose passionate love for us is never more passionately on display than in this holy season of the Incarnation.

The Savior of the world is at hand! Come, let us adore him!