For the past few years I have picked up the reputation of being a Christmas grinch. I regretfully say that I have spent a lot of time griping about the fact that Jingle Bells starts playing before Halloween, that their electricity bill could feed a family for a year, or that everything is just over commercialized and not about Jesus anymore. The sad thing is that I spend more time complaining than trying to celebrate the holiday in the way I would want to. That’s usually how criticism works, lot of whining and no solutions offered.
But it has grown to even more than a slight distaste for that fat man with the red nose pushing Jesus aside to hawk coca cola, I don’t even like nativity scenes, Christmas carols, and many of the very things that are supposed to help me worship Jesus. What the heck is wrong with me?
I think part of it comes from the normalcy of it all. The incarnation of the Creator of the universe is a startling, outrageous, too-strange-to-be-fiction kind of anomaly. I feel weird singing songs about it or watching children reenact it because something in the back of my mind knows that I should be falling on my knees, but something about the familiarity of it all feels like I am just reciting the alphabet. Maybe it would be better if I only celebrated Christmas once every seven years, or if someone wrote a new freaking Christmas carol.
Because the story of when God came to town is messy. It’s about teen pregnancy, racial tension, displaced people and child murder. It’s about weird Spiritual interaction, a gifted boy, and prophecies thousands of years old. It is ancient and powerful and intriguing and disturbing. It is shocking and lovely and complex and perfect. And I just feel wierd when I mouth the words to Silent Night without even thinking about it.
“Holy infant meek and mild’ I’m sure the author of this song meant well but it has all become so familiar that my brain just shuts off. It doesn’t try to grasp the wonder of Emmanuel- God with us.
So I just sit back and complain instead of do what I should do; go back and reread the Christmas story with new eyes, revisit every poem Chesterton wrote on the incarnation, or rewatch the Nativity. Anything and everything I can do to reconnect myself with the reality of that event and disengage myself from the precious moments perfect retelling. Where cute shepherds show up at the same time as three kings and angels- everyone has halos and they break into a chorus for the newborn king.
It’s these kind of pictures we paint that make people have a hard time believing that any of this stuff happened. Everything in the Bible is plausible and actually happened, but if my only exposure to it was the songs we sing and the paintings I see, I would assume that it’s all a nice myth. Noah’s ark is a crowded little boat, Daniel is petting the lions, and Jonah looks like he’s in the whale from Pinocchio.
I believe that the God of all time and space entered his creation, made himself vulnerable, laid aside his glory, and that it was the single most incredible miracle of all history. Somehow I cant bring myself to talk about it with half my strength, so I stay silent. Something inside me has this major problem with nonchalantly passing over it, singing ditties about it, or setting out nativity sets reenacted by bears.
I want to wonder again. I want to ‘fall on my knees’ like the song says. I want to be caught up in the shock and bewilderment of the whole thing. When I reconnect with the reality of it all, I want to sing and dance and write songs about it. I want to just sit still in awe and worship. I want to spend my entire year dwelling on it.
I want to wake up every day and thank my God for become a man, tried and tempted like me. For getting down inside this skin and seeing things from my perspective. Jesus walked more than a few miles in our shoes and it is completely astounding. It merits way more attention and praise than I usually give it. I’m too busy whining about how much I hate the ‘hippopotamus for Christmas’ song. Man, I really hate that song.
