A Better World

Tag: Christmas

  • Christmas: Sentimentality and Self-centeredness

    Christmas has probably never been much about Jesus

    As important as Christmas Eve services were to many of my congregants across the years and despite my earnest desires to be creative and fresh while capturing the true spirit of Christmas lore, I misfired frequently, leaving some disappointed and others frustrated, even angry on occasion. My detractors might very well point out that if I had only stuck to “the basics,” everyone would’ve been happy or most everyone. (Complete congregational happiness is a nonexistent state.) Read on please, and decide if I deserve(d) compliments or criticism.

    During two consecutive annual Christmas Eve services, I was so heavy-hearted with the tragedies and catastrophes in the world (and this was long before Trump and his demons made things so much worse than I could ever have imagined), I turned a lessons and carols format into a lessons, carols, and current events service. For those who stay away from churches for whatever reason, let me explain very briefly.

    A service of lessons and carols alternates traditional biblical readings ostensibly related to Christmas with Christmas music—congregational carols and choral along with instrumental holiday music at its best. I simply tweaked that by working in readings from news stories about circumstances nationally and internationally that desperately needed to be transformed by, let’s call it, the Christmas spirit.

    I included readings about hunger and homelessness on our doorsteps and around the world, the ravages of active warring, neglected and otherwise abused infants and young children, among others. I thought I with long-suffering musicians created social justice masterpieces, which, after all, honor the life and teachings of Jesus more than a nativity scene. Following the second one of these two services, my deacon chairperson was sent as an emissary from the larger deacon board representing more than a few congregants to tell me that the “depressive approach” to Christmas Eve was not what they needed or wanted. I heard.

    The next Christmas Eve, I tried my hand, as I have done on a few occasions, at setting the dynamics of the birth of Jesus stories in a modern more or less parallel context. This first effort had Mary as a teen, unwed mother-to-be (which was exactly how Jesus’ mother found herself) with her presumptive husband desperately trying to find a place for their baby to be born after having been turned away by the absolutely overcrowded ER of a small city’s only hospital. The only place they could find at hand as the birth was imminent was an unoccupied crack house near the hospital.

    Some of my hearers were thrilled with the re-creation, envisioning (could’ve been wishful thinking) a career change for me to become a prominent writer of short stories. Others were unimpressed. And one person, who never attended any other services throughout the year, absolutely hated it and used my story as an excuse to declare that he would not attend services at our church anymore.

    In defeat, the next few Christmas Eve services I went back to those tried and true basics, even though I did not think re-hearing the same predictable scriptural texts did justice to what actually occurred or to the implications of being a follower of the adult Jesus. This approach was a lot less work for me at an already busy time of year, so fine—even though I felt I was betraying the original storytellers and the spirit of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

    Now retired from the pastorate, those tensions are no longer my worries. Christmas can now be an entirely innocuous experience without concern for anyone other than my family and myself. Alas, neither my brain nor my conscience allow that.

    My hunches during those depressive Christmas Eve services had been correct. A plastic or a wood-carved or a stained glass baby Jesus may stir our hearts to sentimentality, and as tender and touching as that may well be these absolutely do not honor Jesus of Nazareth or the life he lived or his powerful teachings that, against the odds, were preserved for centuries upon centuries after the facts.

    Can you imagine having a child of your own and celebrating nothing about that child beyond her or his birth? Can you imagine being the parent of an adult child who is working her or his ass off and taking all kinds of risks and dealing with enormous sacrifices in order to try to make the world a better place and still finding nothing to celebrate other than your child’s birth?

    There is absolutely nothing wrong with finding reasons to celebrate family and sharing gifts or not. There is certainly nothing wrong with singing songs about peace on earth. But if there is no concern with trying to bring the teachings of Jesus to bear on pressing national and international situations with a particular focus on the kinds of peripheral people for whom Jesus showed relentless compassion and concern, then we are not celebrating the essentials of Jesus’ life, including his birth. What we have on our hands instead is a Christ-less Christmas.

    When I first began hearing frequently slogans about keeping Christ in Christmas I was stirred. The concern behind the slogans was well taken as thoughtful people were noticing that, in the first world at least, Christmas was a lot more about consumerism than about Jesus. I rarely saw, even from those who created or repeated the slogans, much in Christmas celebrations that had anything at all to do with Jesus of Nazareth, and that hasn’t changed.

    If we were actually informed/challenged by the teachings of Jesus, at Christmas time we would redouble our efforts to demonstrate active concern (meaning, lip-service doesn’t count) for those suffering from overt injustice, as well as those who have been or are being neglected, ignored, swept to the edges of societal awareness. And preachers worth listening to, many are not, would be prophetically condemning the Trump/MAGAt/bipartisan political abuse of children, senior adults, immigrants and other ICE victims of all ages, the poor, the hungry, the homeless, targets of gun violence and war and genocide.

    Nostalgic Christmas carols and preoccupation with angels sweetly singing are literally ludicrous unless we first fight the evils Jesus fought. Maybe to keep us focused we should change our Christmas tree ornaments from Santas and candy canes and stars to Venezuelan fishing boats and miniature ICE detention cells and figurines of emaciated infants and homeless people shivering in the cold.

    —David Albert Farmer

  • Problems with Pageantizing–Starting with Christmas

    A plastic baby doll portraying the real infant Jesus accurately symbolizes plastic rightwing Christianity. And that plastic will pollute the environment and minds for generations.

    Not sure who’d be the parallel character to Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge if the key hater of Christmas celebrations would be in the context of religion rather than commerce and family. Some would nominate me, I suppose. And I do have excellent credentials including 35 years serving as a pastor of churches celebrating Christmases plus bonus experience portraying Ebenezer in my high school’s production of “A Christmas Carol.”

    Getting right to it, Cratchit, I must say that a pageant often becomes more significant in the minds of audiences and actors than the event being pageantized. I don’t want to take away from the countless hours invested by mostly-sincere committees and casts in planning, rehearsing, costuming, set-designing for a cause that they believe celebrates Jesus and their faith in him. I make this point despite the negativity that can rear its ugly head guiding people not toward cardboard Bethlehems but to competitive dynamics among those auditioning for plum-pudding-roles, to irritability and impatience among directors and crews, and to a complete loss of emphasis on good that might come from a program focused ostensibly on Jesus of Nazareth albeit in his infancy.

    Church groups can have lots of fun and derive meaning working together to build biblical sets, create costumes from everything—bathrobes to bedsheets—along with more elaborate textiles and accessories, and blocking for stage positions. Even with dollar store bargains the costs can really mount up.

    One item not splurged on, however, is the Caucasian baby doll who will be baby Jesus; typically, the most marked down bargain basement item on stage. The price tag on the doll at purchase reflects the relative insignificance of Jesus to the pageant and to the religion that bears one of his titles. How many people pretending to be concerned about keeping Christ in Christmas really are?

    There’s also this. Some parents will never have any other opportunities to think of their Virgin Mary teen daughters as virginal or their celibate Joseph teen sons as celibate.

    It’s hardly insignificant that the early church had no interest whatsoever in celebrating or even remembering Jesus’ birth itself. With that in mind, how about a set of scenes to reenact this year at Christmas Eve services in place of Nativity tableaus? I’m thinking a “Life in Pieces” format.

    1. Mary is a teen mom-to-be, nine months pregnant and riding on a donkey equipped with side saddle of some sort. Every uneasy place on the pathway the donkey had to walk over jarred Mary making her think her water was breaking. As every male had to return to his place of birth to register for taxes, all accommodations were full. The Innkeeper who offered them space in the stable adjacent to his home/inn really was not a callous villain but a kind and thoughtful person. His compassion and generosity are to be extolled in a our country with elected leaders and their faux-faith base who don’t care if babies are born without access to adequate nutrition or if mothers die in childbirth while the filthy rich get richer and filthier by the minute.
    1. Once, out of the blue, a rich young man humbled himself and put his social position aside by running up to Jesus in a public context and getting down on his knees, which Jesus did not expect or encourage, to ask a question. The young man was Jewish and hadn’t heard much about meaningful existence beyond death. Jesus taught about life “into the ages” (typically translated in Greek as eternal life), and word got around. The question was: “What must I do to be certain I can experience life into the ages?” Jesus told him he needed to keep all the commandments. He said, “Done that my whole life. That’s it? I’m good?” Jesus explained that the next step would be selling his considerable possessions and giving the proceeds to the poor. The conversation ended abruptly as the young man rose to his feet and walked away in sadness and silence—an indication he likely would be unwilling to give his money to the poor, thus choosing wealth over the opportunity to care for the poor and over life into the ages. The lesson was, and it stings or should sting money hoarders, that ignoring the poor and their needs, passively as well as actively, is not an option for anybody connected to God. No plastic baby doll needed for this Jesus-focused celebration of his life.
    1. Lepers in Jesus’ day were living with obvious terminal illness. Both to prevent the possibility of contagion and to keep unsightly illness out of sight and out of mind, lepers were banned from mainstream society and forced to live in leper colonies off beaten paths; they were very easy to avoid that way. Defying norms and expectations and risking illness himself, Jesus not surprisingly went out of his way to get to lepers to participate in the possibility of health restoration, which, in the case of this disease, was extremely rare. Sometimes, with Jesus’ interactions, healing occurred nonetheless. Even in cases where physical healing did not come about the presence of Jesus and his concern healed souls. In the United States, under present political godlessness, the sick are increasingly being treated like lepers in the time of Jesus, even with cures for many diseases readily available—that is, to well-placed individuals, Caucasians in particular. Followers of Jesus, though, would be embracing the poor and promoting healing for all of them.

    Finally, it’s beginning to look a lot like Jesus. Isn’t that Christmas?

    —David Albert Farmer