First Responders
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I strongly suspect I'm not alone when I say this: Christmas 2017 is one of the most difficult holidays I've faced in a long time. Not since my beloved father died on Dec. 4, 1971, just 20 days shy of his 46th birthday on Christmas Eve, have I felt less like celebrating Jesus' birth.
I could recite the litany of reasons why I'm so blue this Christmas, but there's no need. I've seen enough Facebook and Twitter posts and emails from friends and family to know that whatever our individually sad circumstances – and there are many – we're feeling like we have no energy, no heart, no motivation to engage in "Merry Christmas." Yet our feelings of profound sadness this season are the reason we must take heart for the Christ Child's coming.
One of my most beloved pastors, the late Rev. Wil Bailey, gave the best interpretation of reasons to celebrate Christmas I've heard. For starters, every year Wil stripped away centuries of sweet camouflage designed to rob Christmas of its subversive power. "Sweet baby Jesus meek and mild" was never part of Wil's repertoire. In Rev. Bailey's view, Jesus came into the world as a real human child through blood and sweat and tears in a stinking cave used to house animals. His mother labored to give him birth, and his earthly father worried for his safety. He was, and is, One of Us.
It's because of Wil that I was actually disappointed when I visited the cave beneath the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. I was disappointed because the mind's-eye picture Wil had painted for me of the sights and sounds, the danger and thrill of Jesus' birth had become buried beneath centuries of gilded enshrinement in that historic place.
Perhaps that's why I haven't yet put up many Christmas decorations. There's a wreath on the door, but inside our house there's no tree, no garland, no stockings and none of the Santa Claus figurines I inherited from my mother and my favorite aunt. The one decoration I've put on the mantle is a framed Christmas card from Florence and Lester Byerley, friends from long ago in Florida. The card depicts a homeless couple wrapped in rags, accompanied by a small wheeled shopping cart, kneeling near a sidewalk grate. Atop the grate is a cardboard box holding a baby, also wrapped in rags. The caption below the image says, "And still there is no room at the inn."
Flo and Les were spiritual mentors for my husband and me. They were people that some might call "ordinary Christians," but they were anything but ordinary. Author of an interfaith autobiography that she self-published under the title "My Favorite Jewish Mother" (meaning Mary), Flo's favorite hymn was "Living for Jesus." And live for Jesus they did. Every Friday, rain, shine, or scorching subtropical heat, Flo and Les could be found outside the security gate of the General Electric plant in our county, holding signs protesting the plant's manufacture of triggers for nuclear bombs. Eventually GE sold the plant to Lockheed-Martin, which closed it and moved nuclear-trigger manufacturing elsewhere. Flo and Les kept demonstrating for peace and nuclear disarmament.
The sacred resistance shown by my teachers in Christian faith prompted me to post above a short video featuring remarks by first responders to mass shootings. The video comes from a magazine's online project, "The Atlantic Selects." The film itself is out of date, because the June 2016 massacre at Orlando's Pulse nightclub has been superseded by October's Las Vegas shooting as the worst mass attack in American history. However, the anger and anguish expressed in the documentary are as real and relevant today as they were when the speakers were filmed.
It's no wonder we feel traumatized this year by tragedies such as those described by first responders, because our experiences so resemble those that Mary and Joseph faced at Jesus' birth. Their country was occupied by an empire, just as the United States has become in the past year. Joseph's and Mary's resources were stretched beyond limit, and only the barest of human kindness existed, despite Middle Eastern hospitality traditions that called for welcoming strangers. Jesus' coming was a threadbare, life-threatening event, yet still he came.
Heralding choirs of angels, adoring bands of shepherds, gift-bearing Wise Men from the East are the gaudy supernatural trappings added to the narrative to raise the Christ Child to divine status equal to pagan gods. Underneath, however, it's entirely possible that rumors of his coming could have galvanized those in power to massacre innocents in hopes of removing a budding threat to oppressive authority. If we think such oppression does not occur today, we are willfully blind to black men shot down by police, to women assaulted sexually by powerful men, to cutthroat money-lenders preying upon poor people, to leaders who build walls and ban immigrants because they happen to share a religion with extremists. Centuries have passed, and still the evils of the first Christmas remain.
In such times, authentically celebrating the birth of a baby long ago in Palestine – long before tinsel and glitter, before expensive gifts and garishness – becomes an act of defiant hope, like Mary's Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55). Sister Miriam Therese Winter paraphrased it best in her adaptation "My Soul Gives Glory to My God" (United Methodist Hymnal No. 198):
"Love casts the mighty from their thrones, Promotes the insecure, Leaves hungry spirits satisfied; The rich seem suddenly poor."
Perhaps the only decoration we need this Christmas is defiant hope, like that of Mary, of Wil Bailey, of Florence and Lester Byerley, of all our faithful forebears. May we all have a hopeful Christmas.
Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, which she founded in 2011.