To the Editor:
Thursday was the first day of Winter, or the winter solstice, but it’s pretty close to the day the Church chose to place Christmas, the birth of Jesus the Christ, and Epiphany when a star to lead Gentile stargazers to worship the newborn king of the Judeans. Here in central Indiana, the weather is cooperating this year, with a freezing temperature and some wind and a forecast of snow and bone-chilling wind to bring even daytime effective temperatures into the negative digits. I can’t help picturing W.C. Fields opening the door, declaring that the weather is not fit for man nor beast and having a fistful of snow pelted at him. While it has been some time since I bothered to look, I seem to recall that the Church chose this bleak, sun-deprived season to make its outrageous claim that God became incarnate in a baby boy as a way to counter the pantheist pleadings to the nature gods to bring back some more light. Light figures prominently in Scripture, and the Church thought it best to put a better light on the subject of real and metaphorical darkness to contest the pantheist notions. After all, the God who created the universe set the earth’s axis on a tilt relative to the sun and gave it a slightly oblong orbit, which created the rhythm of the seasons, pantheist pleadings or not, daylight thus waxes and wanes not according to whim but according to ingenious divine design.
You see, the problem with the world is not how the earth tilts, spins or dances around the sun, but that the crown of God’s creation, humanity, has chosen and continues to choose sin over the divine moral and relational order of things, between humans and God, between humans and humans, and between humans and the rest of God’s creation. To reconcile humans to Godself, others and creation, God did that outrageous thing: God sent his Son to become incarnate as one of us (the Christmas proclamation), demonstrated a bit of what God and God’s kingdom were like and called us to be part of it, and then himself made atonement for our sin by his life, death and resurrection (the Easter proclamation). Christmas calls us not to wonder at animated snowmen or jingling bells and horse-drawn sleighs or to watch out because Santa is coming, but proclaims a divine love that will not let us go: this is the embrace of a God whose love exceeds justice and righteousness even as we continue to reject God and God’s ways.
While we squabble over the ‘right’ to kill innocent unborn human lives (not so unlike a paranoid, jealous Herod who killed innocent baby boys in Bethlehem), God condescends to come to us as a human baby in order to give us life—life now as well as eternally. While we worship the economy as retailers go from the red to the black the day after Thanksgiving, we find the most unlikely people making great effort and sacrifice to kneel before a King who is not even their own. While we descend further into fractured families and fatherless homes, Joseph is told to wed his fiance even though she is pregnant by someone other than him.
The wonder is that God did this work during a time and place where that part of the Middle East was occupied territory, where most people fell well below what we would call the poverty level, where justice was more uneven than it is now, and peace was merely the absence of regional conflict. It was a time when folks thought the only way to appease God was to travel to Jerusalem, kill an animal and pour out its blood and barbeque it on an altar so that ones’ prayers could reach God in the smoke and past sins might be overlooked. It was a time when most people were ritually unclean—‘people of the land’—who did not have access to that altar. It was a time when many were without hope.
Yes, it is true that the Christmas story is found only in five chapters of the Bible (two each in Matthew and Luke and the first part of John), but the importance is concentrated and crucial for those who dare to believe it. In our fractious and confusing time, where both revelation and reason are disparaged, the story which never changes is read and sung and preached, so that perhaps some stargazers from far away and people of the land nearby might be visited by a star or an angel and cast off the darkness which the earth’s orbit and tilt can never illumine.
Peter Jessen
Franklin
