A Christmas Message In Support Of Gaza

"A Christmas Offering For Gaza" was the title of my message at the Zion Mennonite Church Sunday, where I served as pastor from 1965-1988.

This is a time of the year in which, instead of just saying “How are you?” we often ask “Are you ready for Christmas?” Most of us put a lot of effort into getting ready, finding just the right gifts for our loved ones and in the process helping give our economy a big year end boost.

Part of me sees a positive side to this, What’s the downside to spreading some winter cheer, making other people happy, singing some carols, being generous with Salvation Army bell ringers, and enjoying special family get togethers? I think it was Bart Simpson who once noted, “We get to celebrate Jesus’s birthday by getting lots of really cool stuff. Is this a great religion or what?”

But there’s another side of me that asks how all of that has anything to do with honoring the one whose birth we’re celebrating?

William Wood, a retired JMU prof and a member of the Beaver Creek Church of the Brethren, had a piece published in the Wall Street Journal some time ago lamenting the fact that our national celebration of Christmas (means Christ mass or Christ worship) has become so non-Christian that we ought to just call it a "Merry Excess-ment”, and call our celebration of Jesus’ birth something like "Holy Nativity" or a Feast of the Incarnation."

An organization called Simple Living Works promotes a freeing kind of more-with-less lifestyle, which for years has come up with an annual collection of alternative ways of doing Christmas under the heading “Whose Birthday is it Anyway?” suggesting that in the spirit of the real Saint Nicolas, a third century  bishop of Myra, that we make this a time of generous giving for the needs of our hungry and homeless neighbors around the world.

But maybe we can learn something from the way our culture has gone all out observing the season, and practice a similar kind of lavishness in honor of Jesus, the greatest of all givers, celebrating Jesus’ kind of Christmas giving year round.

Nearly 2000 years ago, the apostle Paul promoted something like this in his second letter to the believers in Corinth, asking them to take up a major collection as a gift in honor of Jesus, to help meet the needs of their fellow believers in far off Judea, which included present day Gaza and the little town of Bethleehm. 

In chapters 8 and 9 we have a first century example of what we would call "world relief" for people nearly 800 miles from Corinth by sea, and much farther by land. Comparing their means of travel with today’s, this would have far been more challenging and more remote than any part of the world would be to us today. We could get to the desperately hungry and bombed out people in Israel/Palestine in hours. They would have needed many days to get to Judea from Corinth if traveling by sea, and weeks if traveling by sea.

Missionary Paul makes the point that reaching out with this kind of Christmas-like generosity needs to grow out of a sense of first experiencing God’s generosity, of first realizing how much we have received. He notes the example of believers in nearby Macedonia, also mostly working class Gentiles, having already raised lots of money for their mostly Jewish fellow believers in far off Judea who were experiencing a drought and were in desperate need of help.  So you, too, he writes, need to excel in joyful generosity and a sense of heartfelt compassion for fellow members of God’s family. As Jesus instructed his disciples, “Give as freely as you have received!” In other words, "Give unto others as God has given unto you." Christmas is all about giving and receiving.

I’ll never forget this light bulb moment I experienced one Sunday morning here at Zion as I prayed the offertory prayer and the ushers took up the offering and brought the congregation’s gifts to the table in front of the pulpit. As a half time pastor at the church, it struck me that that half of our family’s income was from other people’s gifts in the offering plates in front of me, which meant I was living on charity, on church welfare. But then I thought, well, I do also have a real job like others in the congregation, in that I’m actually earning money as a half time teacher at Eastern Mennonite High School. Only to realize, when I checked the numbers, that the total amount of money in Zion’s budget for EMHS at that time, through its tuition fund and other support, was almost exactly the same as I was receiving for my half time work at EMHS. More charity.

But then I reasoned that maybe all of us are living off of other people’s gifts. That every time we receive more from our work or from something we sell for profit than we actually put into it, that that extra, above the expense of producing an item or providing a service is really a gift. In addition, we’ve all received the extravagant gift of having parents who fed us and provided for our needs free of charge, and from all of the people whose taxes provided us with a free public education and other benefits. Then there's the incredible gift of having been fortunate enough to have been born in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, all of which has made us very, very well off. If people’s wealth depended entirely on how hard they worked, multitudes of African women in the global south would be millionaires. Meanwhile, those of us who “earn” $50,000 or more are in the top 1% of the wealthiest people in the world. 

So maybe life is all about an amazing and humbling kind of gift exchange, and that many of these are involuntary “gifts” of field workers and sweatshop factory workers around the world whose cheap labor makes so much of our wealth and comfort possible. Only royalty and the very, very rich would have been able, in times past, to have access to the exotic foods we take for granted as we “fare sumptuously every day,” (exotic being the opposite of native and home grown) and having our wardrobes filled with garments made in places like Bangladesh, Vietnam, Taiwan, Pakistan by people earning near slave wages.

The more we move toward Jesus this season, your Advent theme this year, the more we will be moving toward justice, and the more we will find ourselves rejoicing with Mary, Jesus’ mother, who in the passage read this morning, celebrates the fact that Jesus’ birth means powerful people being brought down from their thrones, poor people being lifted up, hungry hordes enjoying their fill of good things while the rich are being sent away empty. So real Christmas-like giving isn’t so much an act of charity by us privileged folks, in which the poor get leftovers from our heavily laden tables,. Rather, those in need will be seated with Jesus around one common banquet table with all of God's children. Surely God, the host, would have it no other way, just as none of us would ever tolerate having some of our children or grandchildren having too much at our Christmas meals while others are hungry because they don’t have enough. 

So the apostle Paul, in arranging for a Christmas offering for God’s children in Gaza, doesn’t promote a kind of charity in which the well off still get to become ever more well to do every year of their working lives, but writes v, 7 of II Corinthians 8, ”Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. The goal is equality, as it is written: 'The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.'”  

In the next chapter he writes, “Remember this—a farmer who plants only a few seeds will get a small crop. But the one who plants generously will get a generous crop. You must each decide in your heart how much to give. Don’t give reluctantly or in response to pressure. ‘For God loves a person who gives cheerfully.’ (Greek word is hilarion!) And God will generously provide all your need. Then you will always have everything you need and plenty left over to share with others. As the Scriptures say of those who reverence God, “They share freely and give generously to the poor. Their good deeds will be remembered forever.’”

I close with a generosity story about our second son, when he was of early elementary school age. He was really into the Summer Bible School project at Zion one summer, raising money for Heifer International in order to provide some family in a needy part of the world a heifer that would become their source of milk and help them rise out of poverty. Our son never told us about his coming early to Bible School one of the last  evenings (we lived right across the road) and bringing everything in his piggy bank to help reach the SBS goal of buying that gift. 

He didn’t do this out of guilt, or because any urged him to. We certainly hadn't. He did it because he was excited about the delight it would bring to some family in some far off part of the world, and because he believed it was money wisely invested. H knew that a heifer’s first offspring would be given to another family, and that family’s to another, and so his gift would multiply. What joy! And he knew, as a part of our family, that he would be OK without his piggy bank savings, that would be well taken care of.

That’s my Christmas prayer for all of us, for a kind of worldwide shalom in which we are all around one table at which Jesus is the host, where nothing is marred and nothing is missing, and where all of God’s children everywhere are blessed with enough, and to spare, and to share. Enough is a form of wealth those in pursuit of material riches will never enjoy. We can!

So let’s make this Christmas a time of over the top giving to MCC or to some other ministry. You can go on their website and give Jesus and Gaza a generous Christmas present.