Christmas

Have an Awful Christmas

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Another blog to which I subscribe introduced me to this letter written by a German soldier standing guard in the Russian winter in late December 1942:

“The most beautiful Christmas I had ever seen, made entirely of disinterested emotion and stripped of all tawdry trimmings. I was all alone beneath an enormous starred sky, and I can remember a tear running down my frozen cheek, a tear neither of pain nor of joy but of emotion created by intense experience.”’

Can you imagine how awful his Christmas was? How far this young man, barely out of his teens, was from his home and family? How cold he must have been to have tears freeze to his cheeks? How he feared that he would not live to see another Christmas?

Yet, that enormous starred sky created the most beautiful Christmas he ever saw.

It reminded me of Christmas on the farm in Southwestern New York where I grew up. It was a lonely place far from the city lights that I take so much for granted these days. The snow-covered fields and the woods that surrounded us were silent. The barn where we milked the cows steamed in the cold as the animals ate from their feed troughs, AKA “mangers”.

It was easy to imagine an awful Christmas when a young woman and her husband were denied shelter by their fellow humans and found refuge with the animals.

But above all this was the sky filled with stars, so it was also easy to imagine the stars that once began to swirl, like a Van Gogh painting, turning into angels who sang about peace on earth and goodwill for everyone.

Into this night, a baby is born. In some ways the most awful and most awe-full thing that can happen.

I don’t really wish you an awful Christmas, not like the one that soldier had; not like the one Mary and Joseph had. It’s just that awful Christmases are unavoidable.

Sometimes, it is in our awful Christmases that we see the real beauty of Christmas stripped of tawdry trimmings. Just as we are able to see the wondrous stars when it is really dark, so we are able to experience the awe-fullness of Christmas the most when Christmas is awful.

Christmas comes around every December 25th to ask us, “Do you get it, yet? Do you understand?”

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“Presents?” asked our 4-year-old grandson.

The word came up in a conversation between his parents and grandparents the day after Thanksgiving. We didn’t know that he was listening — and he probably wasn’t — until someone said “presents”. The very word “presents” conjured visions of wrapping paper and action figures for the 4-year-old and it grabbed his attention. He knew about presents.  The next month would go slow for a 4-year-old waiting for Christmas 2006.

It would go even slower for his Mom, who was eight months pregnant at that Thanksgiving.

I was one of the many adults in my grandson’s life who talked with him excitedly about the new baby that was coming. He listened to this chatter about a new baby respectfully because he loved the people who were talking to him and sensed their excitement, but it didn’t mean nearly as much to him as boxes wrapped with pretty paper under the Christmas tree.

Ten years later, our smart, articulate grandson probably couldn’t tell you what was in any of the boxes under the tree that Christmas, but he could tell you some of the differences the smart, articulate little girl that was born a few days after Christmas has made in his life. Furthermore, I’ll bet he’ll be able to appreciate her impact even more 50 years from now.

“Jesus is the the reason for the season”, probably sounds to most of us like “You are going to have a baby sister” sounds to a 4-year-old. We listen respectfully, because sometimes those who use such words have  internalized their meaning and speak with joy and wonder — just the way a grandparent speaks of the arrival of a new grandchild. But, most of us just don’t get it — and neither does the World into which He was born.

I have seen almost 70 Christmases and I am only beginning to understand what difference this Child has made in my life and in the world.

“Love your neighbor as yourself”

“Do unto others what you would want others to do for you.”

Yes, others said the same thing before Him and independently of Him, but because He said it, those words have a force that pushes back at the attitudes of privilege and hatred that threaten to tear apart our communities, our country and our world.

  • His story about a man of another religion and race stopping to help a stranger counters all of our fears about how those people are out to get us.
  • When we set His life of giving over against our lives of consuming, we cannot help but feel that there is a better way to live.
  • His mission of forgiveness and healing makes us question our military expenditures and our prisons and our vindictive sense of justice that is eroding our economy and our culture.
  • The story and songs about His birth to a homeless couple in a barn in the darkest part of the night at the darkest time of the year have helped hundreds of millions of people look for hope in the most hopeless situations.
  • The story about his family becoming refugees before he could walk have caused people 2,000 years later to show kindness to those that our current King Herods want to ignore or exterminate.

Those are my answers to the question Christmas 2016 is asking.

What are you discovering about Christmas this year?