And a Merry Christmas to the whole world

Christmas celebration is the greatest celebration of the year. Every year! I cringe at the commercialization of Christmas. Rejoicing over a 5% increase in spending during the season is about as low as human beings can become. Obviously people do not understand what the celebration is all about. A typical human being associates Christmas with a check book and a credit card.

Christian churches miss the point of the celebration also. The world abuses Christmas with commercialization. Christians abuse Christmas by truncating the central truth of the Israelite/Christian/Muslim Faith. These dominant world-wide religions all embrace a God, who creates, shapes and sustains. This caring and loving God has his/her own ways of doing things. Simply stated, he/she gets involved.

The key word in understanding the Christmas message is incarnation. Of course, there is no word that adequately expresses the whole dynamic, but incarnation probably is the best we can do in English. Incarnation is the total joining together of the human and the divine. It is difficult to define. We human beings are bound by time, place, circumstances and language. God has no such bounds. God is without bounds. Every time we try to put boundaries on God, God avoids and escapes. Some say that God is a spirit, but I do not know how to capture a spirit. The intellectual dilemma is that incarnation joins the knowable with the unknowable. Incarnation escapes understanding and logic. To grasp the idea behind incarnation we resort to poetry, story-telling and mythology. History just does not fit and is of little value.

Walter Brueggemann is probably America’s finest Old Testament scholar. Early in his career he wrote “The Prophetic Imagination.” Brueggemann did not understand the importance of the book. Nevertheless the book took on a life of its own. Some years later he wrote an updated version of the book. That is the nature of good theology. It needs serious updating constantly. Brueggemann is often quoted. Pertinent to Christmas he left us with an enormously important comment. “God’s hopes are to be performed through human agency.” This is incarnation powerfully stated.

Christmas is about a lot more than the myth about a baby born to a virgin in a stable in Bethlehem in Judea. The Bethlehem myth is a single, powerful statement about the operation of a loving, caring God in an unwelcoming world. God’s hopes are performed through human agency! The world’s commercialization and the insistence of churches to make the myth into history have decimated the Christmas message. I do not object to the pageantry of the churches’ celebrations. Children should learn and parents should celebrate the story, but the greater meaning must be embraced to have authentic Godly practice in the real world.

God loves the created world! It is God’s deepest desire. He/she wants to be a part of it. It is difficult even for God to be a part of creation without compromising his/her own identity and integrity. God’s desire to be a part of the created universe is overwhelming and is the central story of the Old Testament. Israel did an inept job of incorporating the creative God into every-day life. They actually built a box and put their God in it. They carried the box around with them with detailed instructions for those who carried the box. The box was called the Ark of the Covenant. Under the kingship of Solomon Israel built a grand temple for their God. In the core of the building, they built a special room into which they put their God. A special priest was allowed to visit their God once a year. They called it the Holy of Holies.

The Christmas story never gets old and changes are constant. There is always a new Caesar making absurd claims about reality. That alone is enough to change the story. In the newest and latest version the creative God still comes looking. The creative God is looking for human beings who are actually willing to accept Godly presence. But God is not looking simply for one person who is willing to take on Godly presence. God will take as many candidates for service as are willing to take on incarnation as a permanent life style. God is looking for people who will be the human agencies to do the work and will of God in our world.

All throughout the Bible, New Testament and Old, God is pictured as coming to the world and speaking. His voice was clear enough for those who were willing to hear. Typically people did not want to hear. Except for an occasional prophet, people responded by putting God in a box or a locked room. Christian people have not done much better. Christians have assigned God’s presence to wafers and wine blest by a priest. Christians make things holy by sprinkling with water made holy by the right words spoken by the right person. Spirit baptism is evidenced by meaningless jabber rather than good works from a Godly heart. That is not what Christmas is about.

Christmas is a great celebration of a great spiritual reality. Incarnation! The work of God is to be done through human agency!

The Rev. Howard Bess is a retired American Baptist minister who lives in Palmer. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.