Is Christmas Nothing at All?

Through the years people have questioned my sanity about many things, but particularly when it comes to this business of Christmas.  They think I might be a little “touched” when I keep harping year after year on Christmas being about Jesus being born in some new way in us, or when I suggest that Christmas is not just a historical event, but rather something that is meant to happen again and again.  They also think I’m a little “off” when I talk in a similar vein about Easter.  Easter, too, is not just a historical event as Fritz Kunkel reminds us, “Easter, rebirth, the new phase of creation, is either a convincing inner experience which changes our character and our life, or it is nothing at all.”  And Christmas, too, in my thinking,  “Is nothing at all,” if it is simply a nice story from the past. Meister Eckhart said it clearly, “What good is it to me that Mary gave birth to the son of God fourteen hundred years ago, and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture?  We are all meant to be mothers of God.  God is always needing to be born.”

My suspicion is that most people prefer to think of Christmas and Easter in the past tense rather than the present.  It is far less costly that way.  The same is true in the way many Christians use the Bible, saying it is  “God’s Word,” thus implying that God hasn’t spoken a word since the last word of the Bible!  What silliness!  And yet, is it really?  Does anyone really want to hear what God or Jesus might have to say to us right now?  It is easier to make it all historical—another time, another place—and make our contemporary Christianity a matter of rules, behavior, and belief, etc.  The good Christian people of Germany in the late 1930’s voted for Adolf Hitler because he was a good Christian man—he did not drink or smoke!  We have made small what is meant to be large.  We have kept in the past what is meant to be contemporary.  We have made “American” what is meant to be universal.  We have substituted Churchianity for Christianity!  We have made a “book” our idol, our god.  

We need a contemporary Christmas desperately.  We must open ourselves to the annunciations (God’s demands and God’s promises) being sounded in the world today, hear the voices of angels singing now, follow the stars of hope and promise that shine before us, offer the friendly space of hospitality to the Marys and Josephs of our day, resist the Herods who by their power would destroy the babies, comfort the Rachels who cry for those babies who are no more.  Christmas is about our giving birth to the Son of God in our time and in our culture or it is nothing at all.

The tides flow out from the Inner Sea
At Christmastime:
They find their way to many shores
With gifts of remembrance, thoughts of love--
Though the world be weary and the days afraid
The heart renews its life and the mind takes hope
From the tides that flow from the Inner Sea
At Christmastime
(Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas)