If you had one word that least describes Christmas, what would it be?
I had the chance to see the SJM Kindergarten Pageant for the first time on Wednesday. It was lovely. And when it was done, I had about ten different adults come up to me and use the same word to describe the play. “Father, wasn’t that so cute?” And of course, it was very cute. What is not to like about a kindergarten-aged miniature Joseph and Mary walking side by side down the aisle as Joseph takes Mary into his home? What is not cute about the moment when the lector announced that Mary gave birth to a savior and our little Mary reaches behind her with one hand and with all the delicacy of a dockworker unloading a sack of cement, hurls the baby Jesus doll into the manger? What is not cute about stars and angels and shepherd’s singing Silent Night and O Come All Ye Faithful at the top of their lungs, with all the fervor and devotion of a child? It was indeed very cute.
THAT BEING SAID, by the time the 4th parent commented how ‘cute’ it all was, I found my inner “Lost in Space ‘Danger, Will Robinson, danger’” alarms going off. There was something within me that was completely resisting that word. What is the one word that least describes the heart of Christmas? In my mind is it “CUTE.” Cute!
You see, the danger with Advent pageants and Christmas stars and lovely carols and lights and trees and cards is that we tame down Christmas. We gentrify it. We make it something to be watched as spectators, ogled at from the pews and applauded when it is done, instead of something that we enter into. We make Christmas cute, when cute is the last thing that God the Father dreamed for the world in the sending of his Son.
If you look, really look into the heart of this story we celebrate – as proclaimed in our gospels – there is little that is cute about it.
• An unplanned pregnancy.
• The life or death choice of St. Joseph regarding Mary’s fate.
• No room in the inn, so Mary gives birth amid the cattle and sheep.
• The first people to greet the newborn are the outcasts of society – we call them shepherds – but think of the Hells Angel’s biker gang showing up to the hospital ward at the birth of your firstborn. They are not exactly bad people, but certainly rough around the edges.
• Then there Herod ‘the great’ being threatened by an infant and the genocide of the infants.
• Joseph, Mary and Jesus becoming the most famous political refugees
Murder and intrigue and a story fraught with peril at the outset. This is NOT a cute story, though sometimes I fear we have made it so…
What we celebrate at each Christmas is the amazing news that God has jumped right into the nitty-gritty of human life with all of it messiness and sorrows, ups and downs, politics and intrigue and become one of us. God has taken on flesh and walked among us so that we might hear his words from human lips, see his love and mercy in human acts of kindness and compassion, and so know the path to true happiness by learning from his very human life and death. And that God didn’t just do that one time in the history of our world, but rather continues to become incarnate, not as we watch from the sidelines, like spectators at an Advent Pageant, but as we choose to continue his story of sacrificial love by our acts and deeds.
Meister Eckart, a mystic of the church says it this way:
“What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son
if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture?
This then is the fullness of time. When the Son of God is begotten in us.”
Ahh… That is the core message of this feast. Because as often as we let the Son of God be begotten in us, then we won’t rest until all the world knows the glory that we know, the joy we know, the freedom from oppression we know, the dignity of being the sons and daughters of God that we know in our best moments.
Concretely – how might we let the Son of God be begotten in us? Donate your favorite toy to a child who has none. Match the costs of your Christmas dinner to a food pantry. Spend time with the shut in neighbor across the street who only sees the few family members remaining a couple times a year. Advocate to protect the environment with our new congress. Adopt a refugee family. Experience Christmas, not as a spectator, but as an active participant.
Certainly there are a lot of cute moments ahead of us this Christmas day – don’t get me wrong. Our Advent pageant was wonderfully cute. Enjoy those moments. Enter into them. But I wonder if this Christmas we might also develop a ‘cute reflex’–as often as we see something that touches our hearts, something that is cute and endearing – hear and live also this simple refrain: “Not spectators but as participants.”