Christmas Eve

Merry Christmas

Do you have some particular activity you turn to to cheer yourself up? Or maybe even in times when you don’t feel like you need cheering up, still it’s an activity that always makes you feel good, lightens your heart.

The cliché used to be that a woman would go out and buy a hat when she needed to cheer herself up. Women don’t wear hats as much as they used to, but shopping still works for many. Or maybe you eat a hot fudge sundae. Or call and talk to a special friend. Go to a favorite place. Watch a heart-warming movie? (Or depending upon your temperament maybe an action movie serves better to raise your spirits.)

Most of us have some sort of activity that our experience has taught us has the power to cheer our hearts.

Maybe for you going to midnight mass on Christmas Eve always raises your spirits. Hearing the Christmas story. Hearing the story from Luke’s Gospel has wondrous power to bring hope and cheer. Whether it’s me or, even better, Linus reading it…

And there are all of the traditions that have accreted onto the Christmas story. In theory, at least, we do them because they, too, have the power to make us happy. That’s why we do Christmas traditions. To cheer ourselves. Visiting the storefront Christmas windows. Watching reruns of It’s a Wonderful Life and the Christmas Story. Decorating the tree. Sharing good food. All of these accessories for the Christmas story… We do these things knowing—or hoping—that they will instill the “Christmas spirit” in us.

We look to the Christmas story to make us happy. Think of all the adjectives that go with Christmas. Merry Christmas. Happy Christmas. Have a holly, jolly Christmas. Even if the Christmas story and all of its accessories doesn’t always, in our experience, make us merry, we think it should. And we feel even betrayed by the story, betrayed even somehow by life is Christmas doesn’t cheer us. It’s as though we’ve been robbed of a tonic that we think of as guaranteed to work.

The power that this story has to make us happy is a wonderful gift. But Christmas is more than a story. And when we think of it as only a story—a story whose specific purpose is to make us feel better—we’ve robbed God’s action of its true power. We have reduced it to entertainment. Sacred entertainment, but still entertainment.

If Luke’s story is just a story we hear or watch, no different from Dicken’s A Christmas Carol or a holiday movie, then we are casting God as just an author. A damn good author, but just an author. And we have missed the real purpose of God’s action.

I’m reminded of a scene in the first Harry Potter book and movie. I remember it particularly from the movie. Harry is living with his Aunt and Uncle, the Dursley’s. They are all at the zoo looking at a large, exotic snake through the glass. Harry’s very obnoxious cousin, Dudley Dursley, is banging on the glass, trying to get the snake to entertain him. Harry doesn’t yet know he has magical powers, so everyone is astonished when Dudley magically passes right through the glass. To his immense distress he finds himself all-of-a sudden-actually in the snakes’ world.

So often we look at the Christmas story through the glass. Watching, observing, expecting to be entertained. What if we were to magically pass through the glass and find ourselves literally in the stable, next to the manger? I’m not sure that experience would be a merry one.

It would be dark, cold, smelling like animal dung. In the broader would we would find ourselves in a world where people struggling just to survive. A time of political instability and economic uncertainty. Kind of like the world we live in.

Dudley Dursley found himself wet, unhappy and face to face with a terrifying snake. We would find ourselves in the dark and cold, frightened and confused and face to face with Jesus. We would find ourselves in an unsettling situation, in an often unpleasant world. And face to face with Jesus.

Christmas is not a “story” designed to help us emotionally escape the trials of this world. Christmas isn’t about “creating” happiness.

Christmas is about coming face to face with Jesus. Here in the middle of the trials of this world. In good and bad times. Maybe especially when you we feel dark and unhappy, God’s actions at Christmas ensure that we are never alone. Our lives are shared with God. The whole point of Christmas is that we do not look at God through a glass or read about him in a story, or watch him at the movies. We meet God face to face and know God in the reality of our own lives.

Whether we are happy or sad, God is with us. Whether we are struggling or rejoicing, we are never alone. We are face to face with Jesus in times of wonder and in times of despair. Whether our hearts are filled with confusion or peace, still God shares our human lives with us. No matter what your mood, that’s immeasurably better than the alternative. And a life shared with God, no matter what the circumstances, no matter what your mood… a life shared with God is immeasurably better than one without God in it.

God chose to share our human lives with us. That’s what happens at Christmas. There’s one more way to think about what that means. In the proper preface for the Christmas season we say that Jesus, “by the mighty power of the Holy Spirit, was made perfect Man… so that we might receive power to become [God’s] children.” God’s action in becoming fully human gave us human beings the power to become full children of God. The African-American folk singer Odetta made a recording of Christmas spirituals. Not the songs you’re hearing at the malls these days. They come out of the African-American experience, not always a “merry” or “happy” life. One of them is called “If anybody asks you who you are.” If anybody asks you who you are, tell them you’re a child of God. It’s not always clear as Odetta sings whether her voice is Mary’s talking to Jesus… If anybody asks you who you are, tell them you’re a child of God. Or if she’s singing to us… or if speaking for herself… And that’s the miracle of Christmas. It’s all the same… Jesus, you, me, Odetta. If anybody asks you who you are… tell them you’re a child of God. This wondrous night, or any night. Any time, any place. If anybody asks you who you are, tell them you’re a child of God.