Unwrapping Christmas

Christian Century, Dec 18, 2002 by John M. Buchanan

HOW QUICKLY it is over. This issue may reach your desk a bit before Christmas, but I suspect you are reading it in the aftermath. After weeks or months of preparing to celebrate Christmas, the event is suddenly over. The lovely old custom of observing Christmastide, beginning on December 25 and extending 12 days to Epiphany, has largely vanished in our culture, especially with the arrival of the post-Christmas sales catalogs in the mail on December 26. Even the church often succumbs to the mood of anticlimax. It sometimes seems to be recovering along with everybody else.

W. H. Auden, in his Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, catches the mood of

   Having drunk such a lot,
   Stayed up so late, attempted--quite unsuccessfully--
   To love all of our relatives, and in general
   Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
   As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and
   failed
   To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
   Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
   Begging though to remain His disobedient servant ...

Jesus' birth story touches most people very deeply. But as the church knows, the baby grew up and became a man who, in William Placher's words, "changed the rules," taught a revolutionary ethic of unconditional love, practiced forgiveness and radical hospitality to those who were marginalized in his society--and got into a lot of trouble for teaching and living out his notion, of what God's kingdom looks like. Auden captures this part of the story too in the "Flight into Egypt" section of the oratorio, where he refers to the "unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought of Lent and Good Friday which cannot after all, now be very far off."

The church remembers the rest of the story, remembers that the story moves steadily from a manger to a crucifixion. The birth, we believe, is the beginning of God's strange project for re-creating the world. That project is celebrated when lives are transformed and those transformed lives go to work transforming the world along the lines of Jesus' priorities. His coming is celebrated when the hungry are fed, the naked clothed and the homeless sheltered--when the structures of society that oppress some and exclude others and deny justice to many are, in his name, confronted and changed.

Something has happened, and something has begun. Auden's shepherds describe it this way:

   Tonight for the first time the prison gates
   Have opened. Music and sudden light
   Have interrupted our routine tonight,
   And swept the filth of habit from our hearts.
   O here and now our endless journey starts.