Christmas 2007
Christmas. If you were visiting from a distant galaxy, you would conclude that Christmas is all about shopping, colored lights, and reindeer. But even the manger scenes in our living rooms and our churches do not capture the meaning of Christ’s birth. From viewing them it is easy to conclude that Christmas means warm fuzzies and, aw shucks, a newborn baby! But the Christmas story is just like any other Gospel passage. It is counter-cultural and offers us a challenge. And the challenge is for us to do what Jesus did. What was that? The first Christmas was about God finding out what it's like to be human.
And God found out very quickly: he learned it from birth itself, an event so traumatic that it is hidden from our memories, from the unpleasantness of being placed in a feeding trough for cows and donkeys and from the odors of animals nearby. He learned what it's like to be human when he was hungry, and cold, and tired, and afraid for his life. He learned what it's like to be human when he was tempted to sin. He learned what it's like to be human when he suffered pain and torture and when he died.
Yes, God found out what it's like to be human. God got as close as he possibly could to the human race so that he could know us better and love us better and care for us better.
So, what does Christmas mean for us? Christmas is our challenge to do what God did, to learn for ourselves more about what it's like to be in someone else’s skin, to learn what it’s like to be among the two thirds of the human race that suffers poverty, hunger, and disease. Christmas is our challenge to find out more about what some other people’s lives are like.
What is it like to live in a drug-infested inner city housing project, afraid for your life and that of your children going to and from school? What is it like being hungry, and cold, and tired, and having to spend Christmas eve/night on a sidewalk heating grate in New York City? What is it like being tortured because you helped organize a labor union in a third world country or because you were a Buddhist monk who marched against the government in Myanmar?
What is it like to live in a house with a dirt floor, no plumbing, no electricity, and no indoor stove? Seventeen of our parish teenagers will learn what it’s like when they spend a week in our sister parish, St. Anthony’s, in the Dominican Republic this coming February.
What is it like to live in a rural county in Appalachia where there is 25% unemployment, and where one in 10 adults have lost all their teeth from a poor diet high in sugar, and from smoking and chewing tobacco, and many of them cannot afford false teeth? Some of our adult parishioner volunteers will learn firsthand when they join me for a week of manual labor to help the poor in the Kentucky mountains next May.
Christmas is our challenge to venture out of our shells of comfort and plenty into the lives of the suffering, to know them better in order to serve them better. How in the coming year will you take up this challenge?
In doing what God did, in sharing the life of suffering humanity, we will all discover and live the true meaning of Christmas.