DEVASTATING HUMILITY

This year, more than ever before, I’ve been wished “Happy Holidays”, instead of “Merry Christmas”. Sometimes it seems kind of silly. You don’t have to have a Merry Christmas, just because I wish you one. On the other hand, maybe it’s the ultimate Christian thing to wish someone “Happy Holidays”, because, like Jesus, that greeting is for everyone.

Secretly, I like the secular side of Christmas. I like Santa and candy and mistletoe and snowflake sweaters and Bing Crosby and Burl Ives (well, I could live without Bing). But while my sleigh bells are jinglin’, some of my religious friends are worrying about the secularization if Christmas. They get worked into a lather wanting Christmas trees and crèches on courthouse lawns. They break out the signs and march around; they threaten to sue and demand their rights. Secularists get exercised, too, waving their own signs and hiring with their own lawyers. In protests, loud equals right.

I’m all for a good protest, but what a contrast to the tale we tell at Christmas! It’s a story about lost rights, the noise is birth and over all, the hush of sleep. J. B. Phillips wrote of the “devastating humility” of the Christmas God’s actions.

Christmas is that humility devastating our power and our pretense and our pride. Jesus was born into a world that believed power comes in the ability to overwhelm with superior force, or in a beautiful body, or in witty popularity, or in possessions. It sounds like a familiar world. The angels’ words were, “This is the Savior, the Christ, the Lord,” and to anyone hearing the tale, those words would have been laughable. “Savior,” and “Christ,” and “Lord” were titles for emperors, not babies born in sheds. Brimming with irony, the angels didn’t just say it. They sang it.

The Baby Jesus Story changes everything. The incarnation of the Son of God is an underground stream eating away at the illusion of power from above. It’s very weakness sweeps out the foundations of the world-as-it-is and creates the world we used to dream of in fairy tales. War, disease, stress, fear, multinational corporations: none of these have the final say. These are phantoms with no real power. Devastating humility gets the last word.

I think we know that, implicitly. That (along with the tax deductions) is why we give to charities, why we believe we should be nice this time of year, why we send people we hardly know cards; it’s Christmas, for God’s sake. Invariably somebody says we need to keep the Christmas spirit all year long.
I won’t say that. I will ask you, regardless of your faith practice or your doubts, to allow the Story to sink into you. It’s a story bigger than all our religion and fear. Imagine a world where God’s wish of “Peace on Earth, good will to all,” is more than an empty slogan but a physical and spiritual reality.

Happy Holidays: Good Kwanza, Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Solstice. And Merry Christmas.