My Take Away From Charlie Brown

I smile frequently these days as Bettyann, Michelle and Clair share their emotions about the “Christmas story” series on the Hallmark channel.  I razz the three, reminding them that the stories have no truth, only productions of someone’s fantasy writing.  But then, I was thinking the other day, that are some stories, that are not true; that move me whether I’ve heard or seen them when I was younger or now at seventy one.  An example is the release of the first Peanuts movie, A Charlie Brown Christmas.  That was three years before Michelle was born and was instantly loved by me at 23 years of age and a college student. Every time I have seen it over these 49 years, I enjoy it just as much. But it almost did not make it past the television executives who hated it. The movie was criticized for everything from being too contemporary in music, to being too religious in tone. But audiences everywhere confidently disagreed. Having aired every year since 1965, it is now the longest-running cartoon special in history.

One of my favorite scenes, which I share with many, finds Charlie Brown on a hunt for the perfect "great big, shiny, aluminum tree—maybe even a pink one" as instructed by Lucy for their Christmas pageant. At the tree lot, Charlie Brown walks through row after row of flashing, shiny spectacles of color, trying his best to choose well and please his friends. But then he sees a small, natural tree, nearly overshadowed by the flash and glitter of the rest. It is pitiful and loosing needles, but it is the only real tree on the lot. In a moment of confidence, Charlie Brown chooses the unlikely sapling over all the others and is thus the target of laughter and mockery by all. 

Watching that scene I thought, it seems to me that I have always seemed to know intuitively that there is something remarkable—perhaps something even sacred—about being selected long before I understood the implications of choice at all. That someone saw anything worth choosing in this sickly little tree is a turn in the plot that quiets me to the point of having a lump in my throat. Charlie Brown claims the unlikely, pathetic tree as his own, and there is a part of me that feels claimed too.

The story of God among the world is filled with the language of claiming and calling, gathering and choosing. Yet, stripped of the story and its characters, these words often offend some. There’s speak of the injustice of a God who claims anyone, who shows signs of favoritism, or calls anyone particularly. I think they forget what they felt deeply as children—namely, that being claimed among a group of the prettiest and the smartest and the fastest is not about deserving it at all.

In a country of wealth and grandeur, the people of Israel were slaves who were exploited and abused. They were overshadowed, inconsequential, and cast aside, not unlike the tiny tree in the vast lot of color. But God came near and claimed an unlikely people, picking them up, giving them a name, collecting them like a hen gathers her chicks. The book of Deuteronomy recounts the fledging relationship: "For the LORD's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance. In a desert land he found him, in a barren and howling waste. He shielded him and cared for him; he guarded him as the apple of his eye" 32:9-10.

God's gathering of the Israelites was not based on prerequisites. Yet it was far from passive and unfeeling, emerging from God's love, mercy, and wisdom. The prophets would later describe it as the selection of a bride for a bridegroom, and Christ would later describe himself as the bridegroom who came even closer to beckon that bride to his side. God's own are referred to as the "apple of his eye," an expression reserved for those who are most endeared to us. The original Hebrew for the expression can be literally translated as "little person of the eye." The idiom is surprisingly close to the Latin "pupilla," from which we get the word pupil. The word means "little doll," and was applied to the dark center of the eye because of the tiny image of oneself that appears when looking into someone's eyes. In these words, it is if God expresses, "If you get close enough, you will see that it is you who is held in my eyes." God's claiming is inherently personal, the story of the Incarnation a claim that God would gather every chick, every creature, every soul.

Father, God, I thank You for my claim on Christmas.  But I must confess that to often my choices are inherently the same.  When my spirituality is based on preference it fails to consider the one it rejects, which is particularly ironic when it rejects to a distaste of exclusivity. If You have come so near to choose a forgotten nation, to love them out of no merit of their own, and give them Your name regardless, can I not consider You behind all of the things I have to say about religion and exclusivity? And if You come even nearer, sending Your vulnerable son to reach a dejected me, to cleanse me and claim me out of no doing of my own, and give me Your grace regardless, will I not stop to consider the one I reject when I accuse him of injustice, tyranny, or favoritism? Thru all my struggles of choices I am eternally grateful for the incarnate God of the Christmas, Who’s story continues to give the weak, the unwise, and the forgotten a new place and name: "Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people."