I'm Staking a Claim on Christmas

I silently smile frequently these days as Bettyann shares her emotions about the “Christmas story” series on the Hallmark channel, especially with Clair. Over the years I have razzed her, Michelle and Clair, reminding them that the stories have no truth, only productions of someone’s fantasy writing.  But then, I was thinking the other day, there are some stories, that are not true that move even me, whether I’ve heard or seen them when I was younger or now at seventy two.  An example is the 1965 release of the first Peanuts movie, A Charlie Brown Christmas.  That was a year before Michelle was born and was instantly loved by me at 22 years of age and not a father yet. Every time I have seen it over these 50 years, I enjoy it just as much. But I didn’t know the fact, until I was reading, that 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 its debut in 1965, it is now the longest-running cartoon special in history.

One of my favorite scenes 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.

I’ve always found it interesting that 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. I found gold in my exploration when I found that God's own are referred to as the "apple of his eye." I think a wonderful expression reserved for those who are most endeared to me. More so, 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 the English word pupil is derived. 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. It seems to me, it’s like God expresses, "If you get close enough, you will see that it is you who is held in my eyes." Wow! Awesome! I see God's claiming as 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 new claim on Christmas. I confess that to often my choices are inherently the same. When I base my spirituality on preference it fails to consider the One it rejects, which is particularly ironic when it rejects to a distaste of exclusivity. When I consider Your choosing a forgotten nation, loving them out of no merit of their own, and giving them Your name regardless, how is it that I do not consider You behind all of the things I have to say about religion and exclusivity? I thank You for giving me the conviction that is needed to realize that You have come even nearer to me. You sent Your vulnerable Son, Jesus, to reach a dejected me, to cleanse me and claim me out of no doing of my own, and have given me Your grace regardless.  Thru all my struggles of choices I am eternally grateful for You, the incarnate God of Christmas, Who’s story continues to give this weak, unwise, and fumbling Bill Prather a new name: "the apple of Your eye!”  Amen

Lesson From the Shelves of a Hardware Store

It happened the other day, when I walked into Lowe's store for a hardware item.  "For goodness sake, the Thanksgiving Day has not even been celebrated," I said to myself.  Noticing to my chagrin, at age seventy two, time passes more quickly for me, my cognitive decay kicked in and it seemed that all this preparation for a forth coming Christmas celebration had been inadvertently left behind from the previous year’s Christmas sales shelves.  Then for a moment I cowered at the thought of digging through boxes in the storage area, we have rented for twenty years, containing dozens of Christmas decorating items we have accumulated over the past forty nine years.  At this point, it seemed better to be a month early in setting it up than ten months late in packing it away. I decided to make a note on that afternoon to begin planning the day after Thanksgiving as a full throttle day of commitment to assisting Bettyann in the joy of decorating, inside and out.

Strangely enough, my decision then coincided with a friend’s mentioning a good Christmas quote. Advent was suddenly all around me. In a Christmas sermon given December 2, 1928, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, who look forward to something greater to come. For these, it is enough to wait in humble fear until the Holy One himself comes down to us, God in the child in the manger. God comes. The Lord Jesus comes. Christmas comes. Christians rejoice!” To be early with my commitment to drag out the boxes of decorations and help in the process of decorating suddenly seemed a wise, but convicting thought. What about the sake of remembering? If Advent reminds me that I am  waiting in now, beginning the last week in November, what reminds me that I am waiting in October or February?

The story of the Nativity, though beautiful and familiar, and admittedly far-reaching, is as easily put out of my mind as Christmas decoration are put in boxes.  On certain sides of the calendar, a Nativity scene looks amiss. Sitting on my lawn in the fall or the spring, it seems somehow away from home, far from lights and greenery, longing for Christmas fanfare. But looking at it with thoughts of Advent near, I am struck by the irony that longing is often my sentiment amidst the glittering lights, greens, and fanfare of Christmas.

Bonhoeffer continues, “When once again Christmas comes and we hear the familiar carols and sing the Christmas hymns, something happens to us… The hardest heart is softened. We recall our own childhood. We feel again how we then felt, especially if we were separated from a mother. A kind of homesickness comes over us for past times, distant places, and yes, a blessed longing for a world without violence or hardness of heart. But there is something more—a longing for the safe lodging of the everlasting Father.”

Unlike any other month, these days begin weighing on my heart.  The Gift and the difficulty of waiting. The listening to Christmas songs and hymns, I remember that I am troubled in soul and looking for something greater; I remember that I am poor and imperfect and waiting for the God who comes down and I hear again the gentle knock at the door. I embody a strange hope, though. I see a home with tears and sorrow, but I also see in this home the signs of a day when tears will be wiped dry. Advent is about waiting for the One who embraced sorrow and body to show me the fullness of home. Really it is not December that reminds me I am longing for God to come nearer, but the Nativity of God, the Incarnation of Christ. For each day is touched by the promise that in this very place Jesus has already done so, and that he will again come breaking through, into my world, into my longing, into my sin and death.

In his sermon on Advent, Dietrich Bonhoeffer offered a prayer worth praying in this morning and really all year round: “Lord Jesus, come yourself, and dwell with us, be human as we are, and overcome what overwhelms us. Come into the midst of my evil, come close to my unfaithfulness. Share my sin, which I hate and which I cannot leave. Be my brother, Thou Holy God. Be my brother in the kingdom of evil and suffering and death. Come with me in my death, come with me in my suffering, come with me as I struggle with evil. And make me holy and pure, despite my sin and death.” Every day, despite its location on the calendar, a still, small voice answers my cry persuasively here and now, “Behold. I stand at the door and knock.”  Amen