Thoughts and Ruminations

“God made us in his own image and likeness and we have never stopped returning the favor.”

In a different shade of the same habit, we have recast St. Nicholas completely in our cultural image, ascribed to him God-like qualities, and religiously sung and spoken of our mythical cultural invention for generations.

If our mythical figures are reflections of our cultural values, what does this picture of Santa Claus reveal about us?

Last month, at the beginning of Advent, I wrote some troubling thoughts I had been having about Jesus’ kingship.  I acknowledged the struggle of Jesus setting an example of kingship that blows my (our) entire concept of kingship right out of the water.  My thoughts reminded of the writing of Richard Hays, who was the first to show Revelation as something different than the methamphetamine dream it always seemed like to me.  He showed how the Jesus of John’s Revelation is revolutionary and consistent with the ministry of Jesus. I can’t think of a better way to honor Christmas than to post an excerpt of Hays’ convicting writing.

As you read, remember
Jesus was born to a teenage mother
was revealed early to lower class shepherds
spent most of his life in relatively lawless, uncouth Nazareth
hung out with prostitutes, tax collectors, fishermen, and the diseased
He taught the powerless they were powerful without using the tools of the powerful
In a pampered society where we are tempted to curry favor from and long to be like the “wealthy” and “powerful,”how does the Incarnation challenge our idea of who we should desire to primarily “be with”?

I leave you with Richard Hays. Read through to the end. It’s totally worth it. Merry Christmas.

“In the book of Revelation, Christ’s lordship stands in flat antithesis to Caesar’s.  The fundamental political claim of this resistance document is shown in the hymn sung by loud voices in heaven at the blowing of the seventh trumpet: ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever.’  (11:15)

God’s kingdom is not some otherworldly realm; rather, Christ has taken control over “the kingdom of the world.”  Thus, unlike Luke, who presents the conflict between Rome and the gospel as incidental, Revelation makes it inevitable and necessary, for the lordship of Christ necessarily excludes all other claims.  No compromise is possible…No wonder, then, that John has been exiled and his churches are facing persecution; they really do stand against the Roman Empire.

The crucial difference between the Zealots of Israel and that of the church, however, appears clearly when we consider the central Christ-centered metaphor of Revelation:  Jesus is ‘the Lamb that was slaughtered.’  This image, used of Jesus twenty-eight times in Revelation, first appears in the heavenly throne-room scene, where someone is being sought  to open the scroll with seven seals.  John begins to weep because no one is deemed worthy to open the scroll, but he is comforted by one of the ‘elders’ who sits in the presence of God’s throne: ‘Do not weep.  See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that  he can open the scroll and its seven seals.’ (5:5).  The description leads us to expect Jesus to appear as a glorious figure…but when the ‘lion of Judah’ appears in the heavenly throneroom to open the scroll, he does not come in conquering kingly form; rather, we see his true aspect:  ‘Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered…’ (5:6).  The shock of this reversal discloses the central mystery of the Apocalypse:  God overcomes the world not through a show of force but through the suffering and death of Jesus, ‘the faithful witness’ (1:5).  The comments of David L. Barr accurately assess the effect of this image reversal:

A more complete reversal of value would be hard to imagine…the Lamb IS the Lion.  Jesus is the Messiah, but he has performed his messianic office in a most extraordinary way, by his death.  Yet his death is not defeat, for it is just this that makes him worthy to open the scroll revealing the will of God.  Jesus conquered through suffering and weakness rather than by might.  John asks us to see both that Jesus rejects the role of Lion, refuseses to conquer through supernatural power, and that we must now give a radical new valuation to lambs; the sufferer is the conqueror, the victim the victor.

Rome rules by the power of violence, but the one who is the true King of kings and Lord of lords rules by virtue of his submission to death- precisely the opposite of armed violence against the empire.  That is why he alone is worthy.

When, in the climactic battle scene in Revelation 19, Jesus appears as the conquering rider on a white horse, he is ‘clothed in a robe dipped in blood.’  Our first inclination is to see this as a mark of the divine warrior splattered with the blood of enemies whom he has killed, as in Isaiah’s symbolic vision of a figure who  comes in ‘garments stained crimson’:

I trampled down peoples in my anger,
I crushed them in my wrath,
and I poured out their lifeblood on the earth.  (Isa 63:6)

In Revelation 19:13, however, the rider’s robe is dipped in blood BEFORE the battle, and he is leading ‘the armies of heaven, wearing fine linen, white and pure’ (19:14).  Thus, once again we are dealing with a  dramatic symbolic reversal:  the rider is the Lamb, and the blood with which he is stained is his own.  He is called ‘the Word of God,’ and the sword with which he strikes down the nations comes from his mouth.  We are to understand that the execution of God’s judgment occurs through the proclamation of the Word…those who read the battle imagery of Revelation with a literalist bent fail to grasp the way in which the symbolic logic of the work as a whole dismantles the symbolism of violence.  Oliver O’Donovan perceptively describes the literary effect:

There is, of course, as has often been observed, something highly paradoxical about the picture of the Prince of Martyrs constituting himself at the head of an army of conquest.  It is an image which negates itself, canceling, rather than confirming, the significance of the political categories on which it draws.

A work that places the Lamb that was slaughtered at the center of its praise and worship can hardly be used to validate violence and coercion.  God’s ultimate judgment of the wicked is, to be sure, inexorable.  Those who destroy the earth will be destroyed (11:18); those who have shed the blood of the saints and prophets will find their own blood poured out on the earth.  But these events are in the hands of God;  they do not present a program for human military action. 

As a paradigm for the action of the faithful community, Jesus stands as the faithful witness who conquers through suffering.  The church follows Jesus by bearing prophetic witness against the violence, immorality, and injustice of an earthly empire that claims the authority that belongs rightly to God.

Truth be told, I’ve been struggling to feel meaning this year in Advent leading up to Christmas. I suspect it’s because I’m in the transition time away from a prior perspective on Christmas and toward something more hopeful. There’s always, always a period of blahdom between places of meaning.

But maybe I’m just not feeling it.

Maybe I haven’t done enough.

Maybe I don’t care enough.

Wherever all this shakes out, I am convinced of this;
Any celebration of Christmas that isn’t consistent with Mary’s song
which includes the poor, the marginalized, the weak being blessed
I will no longer value.

Therefore, a season being immersed in consumerism,
a season where gift-giving has been twisted to enslave us rather that free us,
I will no longer value.
I will need to remind myself of this 1.2 million times before I die
because I will keep forgetting.

I will value the heart of Christmas.

I believe it to be
God with us.
God surprising us.
Kingship and power shown in service and weakness.
Surprising honor shown to people without honor.
These things are worth valuing deeply and feeding our lives.

But what do they look like in practice?
In repetitive action?
In habits that form our character?
In practices that bend our wills out of rebellious ruts and into faithful pathways?
Three years ago, the Advent Conspiracy drew me out of what I would call a “holy discontent” with Christmas status-quo that had become a deep cynicism.
I knew what I was against….kinda….but I didn’t know what I was for.
The process continues.

What meaningful practices have you found for you and yours?

If you’ve been around as long as me (27 years), you’ve probably heard stories of “Christians” wringing their hands supposedly about our culture’s “recent” and widening lack of respect for Christmas.  Every year I hear another call to boycott store A or B (Wal-Mart or wherever else) that says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”  Notwithstanding the fact that most Christians go right back to shopping at whatever store it is on December 26th, I find Christian calls to retrieve the “reason for the season” pretty empty given that Christmas has been a worshiping at the altar of the God of Consumerism for a long long time now.  I have some empathy for people who long for the good ole days of “Merry Christmas” at the register and nativities on courthouse lawns I guess, since our pagan culture at least gave a nod to Christianity in those acts.

But yesterday, I had a little moment to reflect on how the old adage “Do as I say and as I do” applies when it comes to Christians demanding our culture respect Christmas.  I was in the office at the church this week, and on two different occasions, I happened to be mildly listening to the radio that was on over in the secretary’s office. Now, mind you, this is a “Christian” radio station.  I had already heard “Jingle Bells” earlier in the day, which is pretty benign I guess as far as having nothing to do with Jesus but not really pushing anything else other than loving sleigh rides and grandma’s house.  But later,  you could say that  in the other room there arose a strange clatter, and I sprang from my desk to see what was the matter.  I heard the strains of a familiar song  floating through the air, a song that goes something like this;

They know that Santa’s on his way
He’s loaded lots of toys and goodies on his sleigh
And every mother’s child is gonna spy
to see if reindeer really know how to fly

And so, I’m offering this simple phrase
to kids from one to ninety-two
Although it’s been said many times, many ways
“Merry Christmas to you”

Seriously, Spirit FM, seriously?  I must say that there is little to no hope for our culture regaining widespread respect for Christmas when Christians play “Christmas” songs about Santa and reindeer.  Evidently it’s “Do as I say, NOT as I do.”

And while I’m on my high horse, I’m gonna go ahead and say this.  If or when Bethany and I have children, I will tell them Santa is false from the very beginning in addition to instructing them to ruthlessly destroy other kids’ belief in that great figment of imagination.  In the spirit of John Howard Yoder*, I’ll bluntly say that Santa Claus is the bastard child of an actual, goodness-to-life Saint (Nicholas) and the Germanic god Woden and any “believer” in him (whether actual or just to perpetuate a cute cultural story) needs to be told he is not at all a harmless figure. To be fair, I would expect the same approach from any committed Wiccan or Muslim or atheist to tell my kid that Jesus is false/crazy/an-absurd-figure-who-certainly-was-no-God.  So I’m not crusading to knock off pagans who love their Santa stories and waiting in line on Black Friday to feed their feelies; I’m just advocating telling them they’re following an empty, sad life that removes the possibility of true joy.

*JHY famously said that Islam is the bastard child of Christianity and Judaism’s failure to love the polytheistic people group that Muhammed  was a part of.  In the absence of their caring, Muhammed came up in desperation with a monotheistic system to rescue his people from their hopelessly fragmented and ignored culture.  Now, maybe JHY could have used a different term, but I don’t think he meant it as an epithet, but just to illustrate that the child is the result of the unwise decisions of the parents.