bert

Christmas is just too easy to believe in these days. Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas trees and the idea of giving and hot chocolate, but the original Christmas story leads in a very different direction. God becomes one of us in the form a helpless little peasant baby whose family is so poor that they end up placing him in a feeding trough. Despite his humble birth, however, this little babe presents such a threat to the king that the king tries to kill him and only succeeds in massacring all the other infants in the Bethlehem area. Merry Christmas everyone! What happened to my hot chocolate!? This story is both subversive and horrific, but you wouldn’t know it from the Christmas carolers and all the Holiday advertisements.

I’m not merely making an issue of the incongruity between our sentimental yuletide rituals and the actual content of the original Christmas story; I’m concerned about how this incongruity plays out in our society. A CBS News poll this past June revealed that a whopping 77% of Americans believe that the Bible is either the “inspired” or “actual” Word of God. That sort of widespread faith in the Bible would lead one to expect that one of Bible’s major stories might be taken more seriously, especially since our biggest holiday purports to commemorate it. Yet not only are its horrific details glossed over and its subversive thrust entirely missed, even the more popular Nativity lessons of charity and “peace to all” are sentimentalized into the innocuous décor of the season. The birthday of the peasant child who threatened, by his very existence, the power elite of his day becomes for us an occasion for shifting into high gear our over-consumption of the earth’s resources. Meanwhile our nation’s military attacks peaceful people the world over so that our over-consumption can continue for many Christmases to come. Our easy believism exacts a high cost on the rest of the world and on our own souls as well.

I’m not suggesting throwing out the Christmas trees and hot chocolate. Christmas should be a celebration. We should celebrate God’s entry into the human experience. In this peasant child, God experienced the poverty, the helplessness, and the wonder of what it means to be one of us. God entered into our world, our reality, and gave us hope, gave us faith, that things can change, that our world can be reborn. This gift of faith calls for tremendous celebration! But the faith that we celebrate is not an easy faith. Believing that the world can be different than it is, believing in a “new heavens and a new earth,” and living out that belief, means hard work, perseverance and sacrifice. It means letting everything we know and trust be challenged. It means standing up against injustice and war. It means being a threat to the power elite and possibly incurring the wrath of that establishment. Christmas may very well be the hardest and most costly thing we’ll ever believe in.

So let’s keep the Christmas trees and hot chocolate, but let’s also read the Christmas story more honestly and admit that it is not an easy story to read or believe in. God’s incarnation among us is no easy feel-good tale. The story of Emmanuel, God-with-us, brings us hope, turns our whole world upside down, and shakes the very foundations of our existence.