Christmas is about new life, and it is a sacred remembrance of family as the nucleus of new life. How often have I heard some too dogmatized cleric stand in a pulpit and prattle on about how Christmas is about this special child, this special birth, and by that intended act of reverence slam shut the door in the face of the multitude that has come to the church this day for their annual visitation. With such words Christ is not given to the world, but closed off from the world’s hearing and understanding. We must speak in the tongue of the people.
They that would preach ought look at the narrative elements—a child out of wedlock, the consideration of a divorce, a dislocation in the time of travail, homelessness, fleeting support from the lowest of classes, a faint hope of some stability with recognition from notables, but a false hope in that it brings the threat of death, and lastly, an exile. This is not a happy tale, despite “glad tidings”, angels, and sugar-plumed livestock. Christmas is about all the conflicts of being a family, about its trusts and mistrusts, its visions and its short-sightedness, about its rousing efforts and hopes and its false starts, about life coming into this world and being more strongly challenged than supported, and about the need to reverence that new life as something intimately connected with the font of all life. It is not about some child born two millennia ago. It is about every child born, about every new beginning to live. In the birth of that ancient child is the illumination, the icon, the image, the hope of what being truly human means, of what being a Christian means. And what it means to be a Christian is this: to understand oneself as not just a creature of a creator, but as someone intimately bonded to that creator, a child of the Most High, one whose reason for being, whose true dignity, is to be the presence, the face of the divine and creative power upon the earth, to set free the captives, to give healing to the dis-eased, to give light to darkness, to wrap in a curing and accepting love a world ever broken by everyone’s obsession with being “Me”. In Greek there is a word for one who acts thus on behalf of the Holy One, and that word is christos, in English we say “Christ”. Christmas is a festival to remind us of that: we, each and every one, are born to be Christ.
Have we, the family we call church, supported the living of such new life? Churches and attendance continue to decline all over the Western world. Why? Can it be that we have rarefied this truth, objectified the idea of the divine creative, and elevated it so far from earth and everyday life that it is become irrelevant? Is Christ someone to worship, or something we are called to be? (If you are inclined to argue it is both, how better to worship, obey, love then to imitate?) Religion is not primarily about going to some sacred place and doing some sacred actions, although such things have a psychic reinforcement role to play; religion is about taking on a role, a sacred role of being the vessel, the incarnation, of the divine for the sake of others. Christianity, as a way of life, has never hidden the truth about where that often leads, internally and externally, for a cross or a crucifix stands the central icon of every church the world round. But somewhere in our collective fantasies and fancies we have sloughed off the call to recognize ourselves as Child Divine and contented ourselves, often filled with emotions, to knell before some crèche as if it denote a Truth in-itself rather than the image of that which we are called to be.