For The Seventh Day Of Christmas: Is This Any Way To Celebrate Christ's Birth?

The annual after-Christmas trash pickup is a major chore for city sanitation workers.

Walking through our neighborhood yesterday I observed street after street lined with piles of trash, the sad aftermath of another holiday celebration. 

It's not that some generous gift giving can't be a good thing. But how can this excessive waste of evergreens, bows, wrapping paper and UPS cartons in any way honor the birth of Jesus?

An issue of the newsletter “Whose Birthday is it Anyway?” produced by a group called Alternatives of Sioux City, IA, offers the following thoughts on Christmas gift giving: 

"The giving of gifts is essential for human relationships. The traditional purchase of gifts is essential only to our convenience and to the necessity of profits for business. The highest form of giving involves the giving of one’s self. So don’t look at catalogues or go to a mall to ‘get ideas’ for what to give. Make a Christmas list and a Christmas budget before the season arrives, and stick to it. If you do purchase some of your gifts, consider buying from local producers, or purchase hand made gifts from artisans from around the world who are preserving traditional crafts and skills and are working at becoming more self-reliant. With every purchase ask these questions:

Does this gift reflect the faith and values I want to share? 

Does the material from which the gift is made reflect careful use of the environment?

Does this gift encourage activity rather than passivity; self reliance rather than dependence?

Does this gift stimulate spiritual, mental or physical growth?

Who profits from the purchase of this gift?"

Surely anything associated with Christmas, which means Christ-mass, or Christ worship, merits our asking the question, “What would Jesus give?” as well as asking, “What would he most like to receive? 

For The Sixth Day Of Christmas: "Why Does God Come To Us As A Baby?"

Infants possess amazing power, but
without imposing control.

Seminary professor Ted Koontz, in an article entitled, “Why did God come to us as a baby?” made the point that while we see babies as helpless and weak, a baby in fact has significant power. For example, a baby can wake parents in the middle of the night from a deep sleep; a power many louder noises don’t have, and has the power to get them out of bed and respond to their needs when they would be willing to get up for few other reasons. 

Yet, he says, this cry of a baby is a power to which we can respond or choose not to. It can profoundly move us, but it’s at the same time a power which in no way robs us of our freedom. Some people might in fact be able to sleep on, oblivious to a baby’s cry. But there is something in our very natures that makes us want to respond. To refuse to do so would be to refuse to be who we know ourselves to be down deep. Something inside us knows that its the only right thing to do. 

So he says it is with the power of the cry of the divine. We can refuse it, block it out, but only at the cost of not being who we are most deeply. This cry, this “baby power,” is the kind God chooses at Christmas, a power that can be absolutely compelling and yet absolutely non-coercive. 

And that’s one of the ways the baby whose birth we celebrate this season truly deserves to be “King of Kings and Lord of Lords.” A strange but most compelling kind of power.

(This is from a series of radio spots aired on three local stations by the Center where I work.)

For The Fourth Day Of Christmas: An Innkeeper Makes Room

Dinah Donohue writes the story of nine year old Wallace Purling, who played the role of the innkeeper in his church’s Christmas play one year. 

Wally was big for his age, a little uncoordinated, and was still in the second grade, since learning was hard for him. But the play’s director thought his size would add authority to his refusing lodging to Joseph, and after all, there weren’t many lines he would have to learn. 

At the final performance Wally sternly informed the troubled Mary and Joseph that there was absolutely no room at the inn, period. Then poor Joseph implored, with his next line: “Please, good innkeeper, my wife Mary is heavy with child and needs a place to rest. Surely you must have some small corner for her. She is so tired.” 

For the first time, Wally relaxed his stiff stance and focused on Mary, so small and tired in her oversized bathrobe costume. Wally hesitated, as if he couldn’t get his words out. His backstage prompter whispered his lines loudly enough for everyone to hear: “No! Begone!” which poor Wally repeated halfheartedly, by rote. 

Joseph then sadly put his arm around Mary, she leaned against his shoulder and the two slowly walked away. 

Then instead of closing the door of his Inn as he was supposed to, Wally just stood there, his mouth open, as if about to cry. Then he broke out into a big smile and called after them, “Don’t go, Joseph, Bring Mary back. You can have my room!”

Most folks at Wally’s church left that night thinking that was the highlight of the whole play.

For The Third Day Of Christmas: Honoring The Real Saint Nicholas

Saint Nicholas Saves Three Innocents from Death (1888)
by Ilya Repin

Mike Sherer, a Lutheran minister, and his wife Kathe, a registered nurse, began celebrating Christmas without Santa Claus when their first child was three years old. They had come to see Santa as little more than a prop for the great North American Christmas Marketing Machine, and so decided to focus instead on his venerable ancestor, the real life St. Nicholas. 

This third century bishop of Myra, who lived on the southern coast of what is now Turkey, became legendary for his generosity in helping the poor and needy in his parish, according to stories about him that have been passed down through the generations. Because this real saint seemed to be a good alternative to the jolly old elf of recent invention, the Sherers began celebrating the Feast Day of St. Nicholas, which is on December 6, as an early part of their family’s Advent, and each year designate 5% of their December income to give anonymous help to a needy individual or family in their community, in the spirit of the good bishop of Myra. 

They Sherers do put up a tree, but cover the floor all around it with good books about Christmas instead of the many other gifts for themselves that used to accumulate there. The books they then put away each year with the tree decorations, to give them a rest and to make them “new” each Advent. The Sherers report that their giving up a fake Santa for a real saint they feel embodies the true spirit of Christmas has been a richly satisfying change, one they would recommend to anyone.

(This is from a series of radio spots aired on three local stations by the Center where I work.)

For The Second Day Of Christmas: When Does The Work Of Christmas Begin?

Writer Esther Gillette eloquently describes Christmas as “a candle with haloed ray, quietly giving itself away.” 

If there’s any one lesson we can learn from the Nativity event, it is that "it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; it is in dying that we are born to eternal life." 

Indeed, Christmas should inspire us all to so love the world that we make of ourselves a gift to our neighbors far and near. As one unknown author has written:

When the song of the angels is stilled

When the star in the sky is gone

When the kings and princes are home

When the shepherds are back with their flocks

The work of Christmas begins;

To find the lost,

To heal the broken

To feed the hungry

To release the prisoner

To rebuild the nations

To bring peace among people everywhere.

On behalf of all of us at the Family Life Resource Center, we wish you the very best during this special season. May the good work of Christmas begin in each of us.  

(This is from one of the radio spots aired regularly on several local stations by the Center where I work.)

For The First Day Of Christmas: Strangers Brought To Their Knees At Mangers

I had heard similar stories of a temporary truce in WWI, but not
about this one in the earlier Franco-Prussian War. 

"O Holy Night," one of my favorite carols, was written for a Christmas Eve service in 1847 at the request of a French priest celebrating the installation of a new organ at his church. He had his friend Placie Appeau write the words, and asked another friend, Adolphe Charles Adams, to set it to music in time for the occasion. 

The new carol, "Cantique de Noel," was an  immediate sensation, but when some church leaders later learned that Cappeau was a socialist and Adams a Jew, the song was banned from use in church services, though it remained popular among the French people.

Boston-based musician John Sullivan Wright, a Unitarian minister and an abolitionist, translated the song into English and introduced it to America ten years later. He was especially fond of the words in the third verse (Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother), and his English version of the carol became a favorite among many, especially in the North.

Some years later, in a lull in the fierce fighting of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, an unarmed French soldier emerged from the trenches and sang the French version of the song, and was briefly joined by some enemy soldiers responding with German carols. 

The Christmas story continues to be about bringing unlikely strangers together, on their knees. Gentile astrologers from the far east bow down, as do Jewish shepherds from the hills around Bethlehem. Socialist musicians are brought together with Catholic priests and Jewish poets. French and German soldiers lay down their arms, if only briefly, all bowed by the miracle of God coming to life in a most vulnerable way. Around one common manger we experience a foretaste of friends and enemies alike being born again into a revolutionary, upside-down reign of shalom for all people.

Truly he taught us to love one another

His law is love and his gospel is peace.

Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother

We know that through him oppression shall cease.

Note: I hope to again post something for each of the twelve days of Christmas, this time mostly from some of my radio spots aired each holiday season on a couple of local stations. 

In The Year Of The Rat, A Thrill Of Hope

In Chinese culture, the Year of the Rat is associated with
a time of fertility and abundance, quite unlike how most of
us have experienced 2020.

A thrill of hope,

The weary world rejoices

for yonder breaks 

a new and glorious morn.

        - from O Holy Night

January 25 of 2020 marked the beginning of the Year of Rat in the Chinese lunar calendar, a year their zodiac associates with wealth and productivity. Ironically, it began just days after the first case of coronavirus surfaced in the US, brought here by a US citizen who had just visited Wuhan, China.

The year 2020 has gone pretty much downhill ever since. Think volatile political and racial divisions and conflicts, apocalyptic wildfires and hurricanes exacerbated by global warming, and untold economic hardships the likes of which we have not seen here since the Great Depression. This has resulted in suicides and deaths by drug overdoses that have accompanied the dreadful death toll brought on by COVID-19. 

We hear the word unprecedented used a lot these days, even though there have been human tragedies and traumas throughout history that have been far, far worse than anything most of us have ever experienced. In the US we have been spared the kinds of hardships that many of our world neighbors have had to endure endlessly, while other parts of the world have enjoyed exceptional prosperity and privilege.

Such disparity was evident in the first century and in other dark times in history. The poor and dispossessed, often near starvation and without the most primitive means of healthcare, were typically in desperate straits, with blind, crippled and destitute beggars lining the streets for help. 

The Christmas story in Luke’s gospel begins with the familiar words, “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that all the world should be taxed,” and notes that this census was first taken when Quirinius was the tyrant governor of Syria. In Matthew’s account King Herod, head of Roman-occupied Judea, is a prominent part of the story as well. 

These were all ruthless, powerful men under whose occupation any rebellion was met with brutal force. Untold numbers of people were crucified, tortured, beheaded or raped as a way of intimidating their subjects into submission. And not unlike other monarchs of his time, Emperor Caesar Augustus, sovereign over all of the so-called civilized world of his day, claimed to be a divine son of God, and a god himself, with titles like "god from god," "Lord," "Liberator," and "Savior of the world." 

So the early gospel writers were taking their lives into their own hands by claiming divine birth for a child born of a peasant girl in an occupied country, and by announcing a new kingdom ruled by another God, Yahweh, whose anointed son was Jesus. This kind of treasonous statement could have resulted in Roman legions being dispatched to deal harshly with such political heresy. According to the Matthew account, Herod, in fact, commanded that all the male children in the area around Bethlehem be killed to eliminate any possible rival. 

All of which makes Christmas more than just about festivity and merry making. It is a bold announcement about who--and in the end, what power--is really sovereign, a declaration that still divides the world in two but that still offers the world a glimmer of hope. Hope that help will come, not so much from the top down, through political power players, but from unlikely places like dimly lit hovels where God chooses to give birth to "good news of great joy for all people."

The people who walked in darkness

    have seen a great light;

those who lived in a land of deep darkness—

    on them light has shined.

Isaiah 9:2 (NRSV)