More than meets the eye

I think Christmas is my favorite holiday despite the heavy aura of commercialism that permeates it. It has recently pushed Easter out of the number one spot. I feel like I have not maintained the importance of Easter like I have at Christmas. I have not been home and seem to be less likely to travel for Easter. I have also stopped fasting for it, something I used to do every year, maybe its time to bring that back…Christmas. The traveling and visiting are not really why I like Christmas. I feel like many of the things that we talk about at Christmas, particularly in Church, really remind me of how I can have hope for the future. In fact it also reminds me why the Church is important in my life. This year I missed two out of four sundays in Advent (the four weeks before Christmas) and it feels like I am missing something.We have the unmistakable action of God taken for humanity. One of my favorite movies starts out with the “The beginning is a delicate time…” so it was and continues to be here. Christmas is essentially the Genesis (literally and metaphorically) of Christianity. But the beginning it is hard for us to just let it be what it is, it was hard for the Biblical writers as well. Each of the Four Gospels had their own twist on what it meant and the best way to tell the story. Matthew went so far as to reinterpret part of his own tradition by including part of Isaiah, and tweaking it to fit how he wanted to tell Jesus’ beginning. We have carried on this noble tradition in how we see Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the “wise men,” and even the barnyard animals imported and anthropomorphized by imagination. I really don’t think there is anything wrong with this at all as long as we recognize it for what it is; european imagination. For us who have been saturated with these images for years and years it puts a familiar and accessible face on a powerful and cross-cultural middle eastern story. For those who find it hard to connect with Christianity it very well might be reason to distance yourself from the ‘obviously fanciful’ tradition and mythology.For me, recognizing that there is a fair bit of embellishment in our nativity scenes and Christmas hymns, signals to me that I need to do the work myself to parse out the Gospel significance from the imagined mythology. God took decisive action for humanity in Jesus, placing in this world a human being with a connection to God of a quality that has never been seen before or since. He was able to reveal to us the identity of God in a way that was more personal and (Christians believe) powerful than what had been revealed in the law, prophets and writings.It is also an opportunity for us to celebrate Jesus and (mostly) avoid the direct jump to atonement and salvation from sins. There are those who do it of course, those who jump directly to the baby to the man crucified for the sins of the world, in sermon or song. For me that is just a little more guff to filter out. Another european (and American) embellishment to the story. Jesus can be crucified and saving us the rest of the year, for this couple weeks I am happy to see that our hope for a better world, for God’s Kingdom to be made real among real people, for peace and justice and love are not in vain.

~ by ajdele on December 24, 2007.