December 22, 2013 "The Real War on Christmas"
Matthew 1:18-25
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah* took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. 20But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, 'Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.' 22All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:
23 'Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel',
which means, 'God is with us.' 24When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, 25but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son;* and he named him Jesus.
(video clip of Sarah Palin talking about her book about the war on Christmas)
It may be an oversimplification but, hey, I'm a preacher and what else are preachers really for? Seriously, it is not far from the truth to sum up life this way: If you are sad it is because you are thinking about the past. If you are worried it is because you are thinking about the future. The only time and place where you can actually be content and joyful is in the present moment, in the place where you are now.
The handwringing of conservative pendants about an alleged "War on Christmas," can be found only in the kind of sadness and anger they feel about having lost something from their personal past. Christmas isn't what it used to be. Fifteen years ago it would have been common for me to receive two or three hundred Christmas cards from family members, school friends, and church members.
Now, if we get one from anyone other than our insurance agent and the charities to whom we give donations, it is an anomaly. The advent of the internet leaves most of us without an address book with real physical addresses in it and finding a postage stamp in the desk drawer can turn into a "Where's Waldo" investigation.
But Christmas has changed in other ways as well. The world has become more polarized, more distant, less connected. Businesses don't spend money on office parties and they don't give bonuses. Neighbors don't know each other and are too suspicious or partisan to have an open house that might have people in your home who had political signs in their front yard this past year that were an affront to your own views.
And our world is more diverse. For most of us, that is a good thing, ethnic, racial, religious and national diversity makes the world more interesting and it has certainly given us many better choices in our local restaurants. But it also means that the dominant culture has to show some sensitivity in making room for our new neighbors. Most of what the Sarah Palins, Rush Limbaughs and Bill O'Reillys are really bemoaning is the loss of an unchallenged white, Christian dominant culture.
They are grieving the loss of a past in which they indulged themselves in the fantasy, recently articulated by the Duck Dynasty star, Phil Robertson, when black people were happy being share croppers and gay people either didn't exist or we didn't have to pretend to be nice to them. As the comedian Stephen Colbert said, "Of course blacks were happy back then, they even had their own drinking fountains."
Nostalgia is often not a longing for a literal past but for a cleaned up and sanitized past. Like watching an episode of Andy of Mayberry set in what had to be the only small North Carolina town where there was not one single black person and where even the alcoholics were absolutely hilarious.
The dominant class in any country or century can be blissfully ignorant of those who are oppressed. I would make the claim that I personally know more about the lives of the rural poor in Nicaragua than do two-thirds of the people who live in Nicaragua's capital city of Managua. Truly, there are none so blind as those who refuse to see.
The progress we have made in cultural diversity has forced America's dominant culture to open their eyes and recognize that even though Catholics and conservative Protestants still make up the majority of the religious landscape in America that they can no longer push the rest of us to the margins, either to coloreds only restrooms or to go stay in the barn out back and have your illegitimate baby with the cows and sheep and all of the other livestock.
The anxiety being felt by the traditionalists is that the future will find them even more un-empowered. Several states are now doing everything they can to either block the poor, blacks and Latinos from voting, or to Gerrymander them into majority districts so that the powerful can hold onto the throne for one or two more election cycles. These are fear based, desperate measures that are, essentially, admissions of their eventual defeat.
People used to complain about how Christmas had been commercialized. Sarah Palin thinks that commercialization is one of the best parts of Christmas.
And retail businesses no doubt agree with Palin. I have no particular beef with commercialization, in part because, even as suspicious as I am of our excesses in consumerism and capitalism run amok, I recognize that commerce is the root of all productivity and the engine of our economy. I want our economy to thrive.... I just don't want all of the profit to go to the dominant culture.
The real war on Christmas is not, in any honest biblical sense, the removal of the manger scene from the courthouse lawn or the subtle change in greetings at the cash register from "Merry Christmas" to "happy holidays." The real war on Christmas is the adamant fight of the rich and powerful to remain in unchallenged power forever!
We do not read the gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus as if they were historical. The stories told by Matthew and Luke are not literal accounts but they are, rather, essentially sermons...they are religious messages used to introduce their gospels. Though we have grown up with a manger scene that tries to combine the two, they are distinctly different stories.
Matthew tells us that the holy family lived in Bethlehem where Jesus was born in their house. They only fled Bethlehem out of fear of Herod after they were visited by some Babylonian astrologers who were apparently the only people who noticed the incredibly bazaar behavior of a star actually moving against the direction of all of the other stars in the sky and stopping over just one house. Luke's story is equally fanciful, saying that everyone in the Roman empire had to leave their homes at the same time to go back to the place of their birth for a census, an event that would have been nationally as disruptive as if the stars suddenly began to move erratically around the sky and stopping off in small town neighborhoods.
If you try to take these narratives literally they quickly start to look pretty stupid. If, however, you read them in the way that Matthew and Luke meant them, they become quite powerful.
In completely different ways, both Christmas stories introduce Jesus as someone who is going to turn the world upside down. The good news of his birth is not announced to the ruling class, or to the wealthy. The angels didn't gather at the mall and the Magi were not giving interviews on Fox News.
In very different ways, both Matthew and Luke interpret the birth of Jesus in images that were defiant of the dominant culture. The song Mary sang in Luke is something like the image we have recently been reminded of when Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison and he stepped out into the public after sleeping on the ground and having nothing but a bucket in a cell for a toilet, after 27 years in which he was allowed only one 30 minute visit every year and could write a letter only once every 6 months.... he walked out of the prison into a crowd of supporters and raised one black fist over his head and said, "Power."
I don't read the Christmas story as a record of history, of something that happened long long ago, something that I could never see or recover. I don't see it has a matter of anticipation of some eschatological return of Christ, as surely the Roman church intended the Advent season to be.
I read it in the here and now, in this moment, as a source of joy.... as a defiant fist raised in a nation where the poor not only are not guaranteed a living wage but where they may not even be allowed to vote next year, as if voting mattered much to the empire where, as Congressman Bernie Sanders has recently said, "No piece of legislation can be passed unless it has the okay of corporate America."
In this present moment, we read this story out here on the edge of town, below the radar of the big steeple churches. Our congressman couldn't care less about what we think or what we need. The Chamber of Commerce and the Council of Churches shake one another's hands and assure one another that we're just a crazy fringe group.
That's okay, because I know that the angels sang to us about peace and justice and even the stars are lining up to affirm that the weak and the powerless, the homeless, the ones who can't afford to go either to a university or to a hospital, that Jesus was born for us..... not back then, but now.... today, right this minute.
Merry Christmas.
