Chaplain's Corner

“O holy night, the stars are brightly shining, it is the night of our Dear Saviors birth…”  These opening words of this beloved carol were penned in the French language in 1847 and translated into English in 1855.  In 2004 Edison Research polled Americans regarding their all time favorite Christmas songs; 600 song titles were offered, this hymn was number three and the only sacred Christmas song in the top ten.  So what?  So what!?!

This fact is but a small piece of an overwhelming body of evidence that indicates that secularism has co-opted this season, leaving it with vestiges of its original, sacred significance.  Now I am not the first to bemoan the secularization of Christmas, nor will I be the last.  But as I reflect on this reality I want to do so from a bit of a different perspective.  Those of you with some theological training or an interest in these matters may have encountered a book written by Helmut Richard Niebuhr and published in 1951 Christ and Culture.  In this book Mr. Niebuhr identified five ways that Christians have responded collectively and individually to the secular cultures in which they live.  For any who find the intersection of the sacred and the secular of interest, it is a good place to start in formulating a personal position.  One of the positions Christians have taken down through the centuries Niebuhr identified as “Christ and Culture in Paradox”.   This perspective envisions human history as a time in which faith and unbelief struggle against each other.  This “we against them” perspective has deep, deep roots in the predominant religious traditions represented in our region.  Many of us were raised in a spiritual context in which we were taught to view the culture in which we live as an enemy of the church, the faith, the religious tradition we were taught to embrace.
 
Soon another Christmas will be upon us.  For most of us who read these words this Christmas will be fraught with the same tensions and disappointments mixed with joys and pleasures as most of our Christmases.  The loving, happy family gathering out of a deep faith and a love for each other is a cultural icon that we may hold in our hearts, but this icon when compared to the reality of gift giving obligation, loneliness, family tension and dashed aspirations leave many of us wishing that we could some how circumnavigate the calendar without having to pass through this season altogether.

For many the Season is hardly one of peace and good will.  Nor is it a Season of faith, hope and joy; despite what the cards, decorations and songs proclaim.  We feel crushed in the intersection of our sentimental desires and the harshness of our reality.  So what are we to do?

I have been learning to lower my expectations considerably, recognizing that the expectations are unrealistic and impossible to attain.  I have been working to be rather clinically realistic about the fact that God never intended this Season to be what it has become and that most of the sentimentalism that I find so easy to embrace is just that.  I have been working to realize that even the church has muddied the waters sufficiently that the services I attend around the season will most likely leave me feeling at best conflicted and at most angry that the stark reality of God’s choice to enter our experience to save us from our selves and our sin has been treated so lightly, so casually, so pretentiously.

Instead I will ponder the paradox of God in the flesh and the infinite One encased in the finitude of an infant, remembering that the most holy faith is not something to be understood as much as it is a mystery that calls for me to abandon myself to God.  Instead I will remember that what God came into the world to save me from is the very craziness that the Season is defined by in our culture: the idolatry of materialism with it’s belief that a purchased object has the power to give joy; the obscenity of eating too much and drinking to much which indulges the flesh instead of crucifying it; and the insanity of believing that just because it is Christmas people who haven’t cared for one another all year long will magically care.

Instead, I will reckon with the depravity that I carry in my being and the depravity that every other person carries in theirs and I will acknowledge that the stresses of this Season: emotion, relational, financial and spiritual, will more than likely bring out the worst in us instead of the best that we hope for.  I will try to accept the less than ideal realities that will disappoint me one more time as realities to be embraced in the context of God’s grace instead of warred against in the context of what “I” want.

By now some of you have decided to read no more.  I understand.  But for those of you that have stayed with me through the first 800 words of this article I want to say, Thank You” for I am getting to my point.

My point is:  Maybe, just maybe, we need to let December 25th be a day we commemorate nothing more (for what more is there) than the absolute wonder that: “…Christ Jesus:  Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.  And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death— even death on a cross!  Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Phil. 2:5 -11)

My aspiration this Christmas: let the culture be what it is, let the gatherings come and go.  Participate with a realization that these are not what give my life joy or meaning.  But sharpen my focus on the wonder of that holy night when God’s plan to visit us and save us worked its way into the reality of our races time and history.  And if possible, in my jaded condition, ask that God open my heart to his purifying holiness so that I might engage Him in a way that will leave me speechless and in awe of the magnitude of his love.