We think of Christmas as merry and bright. Yet we are living through two years of global pandemic with many people experiencing loss and hardship. Perhaps the Christmas story can help us rekindle hope for the future amid hardship.
The following is a text version of this posting.
Christmas: for many people, it’s a religious holiday. But for many people, it’s also a cultural holiday. And, yes: it’s also a retail holiday and the most important sales time of the year. The retail holiday business helps to make Christmas very confusing with lots of mixed messages.
Some years ago I was in Hong Kong, which is only about 15% Christian. Yet, I was overwhelmed with the elaborate Christmas lights and decorations and the importance of Christmas as a family holiday. That’s just one example of the significance of Christmas around the world.
But today, I want to talk about the spiritual and religious significance of Christmas. Yes, Christmas is a very unique season. Homes are decorated with lights, drawing on ancient customs from Winter Solstice observances. Trees are decorated much like northern Europeans did long before Christianity. People reminisce of Christmas past and look forward to celebrating happiness and joy. Traditional songs – Christmas carols – bring a sentimental feeling to many people as they experience deep connections with themselves, their customs, their family, and their friends through this holiday. All of that is part of the spiritual significance of Christmas.
But I find it important to consider some of the religious symbolism. That symbolism is usually lost to what we associate with the holiday spirit of a merry Christmas, a Christmas of joy and laughter.
Whether you’re Christian or not, consider with me some of the aspects of the ancient story. Today, I’m not asking whether anyone thinks the story is true but instead to consider the truth for all of us conveyed in the ancient story.
It begins with a teenage girl. She turns out to be pregnant and no one knows who the father is. The story assures us that the father is not the man she’s engaged to. She lives in a culture where being pregnant and not married is punishable by death. This teenage girl is in serious trouble. So her family sends her out of town to stay with other relatives while they sort it all out.
The man she’s engaged to agrees to take her as a wife. Things were tough, the girl is safe. Yet, in her third trimester, she and her new husband have to go on a trip to another city to fulfill a legal requirement that doesn’t make any sense. They go and the journey by foot with a donkey is rough. She goes into labor but there are no accommodations for her. They end up in a cave that serves as shelter for farm animals.
Clearly, these are folks who are poor and living on the edge. And forced to try to protect a new born from the elements in a cave.
As if this isn’t rough enough, out of the blue a bunch of shepherds turn up unexpectedly. Remember: shepherds live with their sheep. They live with them and smell like them. And staying out all night, they probably kept warm with a bottle of home brew or two. What’s a teenage mother, who just gave birth, to do?
And the magi? We often talk as though they were three kings, but we don’t know how many they were. They were kings. They were astrologers. They were probably from Persia. While they bring odd gifts, they also come with warnings that the child isn’t safe. The father understands that’s true. So, he takes his young wife and new born child to Egypt for safety. That’s a serious trek with a little kid. And escaping to another country, becoming a refugee? This is serious stuff.
This is not a heart warming story. We’ve made it into one. Instead, it’s a story about life’s hardships. These are people who are facing one catastrophe after another, who experience dramatic events any one of which would push most of us over the edge. This is a story of thriving in the midst of tragedy and persisting with the belief that life will ultimately be good.
We’ve spent the last two years in a global pandemic. We don’t talk about what that’s done to us. Instead, we focus on getting back to normal. I don’t know what normal is any more. I know that far too many people have died. Many of those deaths were caused by people failing to follow scientific advice. (I’m not saying the people who died are to blame. I know elders who died in nursing homes who were probably infected by people coming and going from the nursing home who brought COVID with them.) Many people have had their lives pulled apart with disruptions with work or with their children’s lives. While the economy is doing pretty well, more people are living with food insecurity, have died from drug overdoses, and have been diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorders. In the face of two years of this pandemic, we are not doing well. We’ve suffered and want to ignore that.
Perhaps this Christmas is a good time to look at what’s really conveyed in the Christmas story. The Christmas story is one of people having faith in the future, of goodness yet to come, in the midst of hardship and tragedy. If anything is born for us on Christmas day, I want it to be that kind of hope — hope that leads us onward to thriving and experiencing life’s goodness.
I want to wish you a Merry Christmas – not because all is well with the world and there is peace on Earth. There isn’t. Instead, I wish you a Merry Christmas so that hope may be born in your life and draw you towards greater wholeness and peace as we continue to live in troubled times.
