Do They Know it’s Krissmiss?

“We Have Seen His Glory, the glory of the one and only Son…”  from John 1:14

By the time you read this is will have long since begun.  As a matter of fact, I suspect it will be nearly over.  Christmas…  (or Krissmiss, as it is often pronounced!).  It seems that every year it begins earlier and earlier.  And by the way, it also seems that every year the talk about how it starts so much earlier begins, well, earlier.  This year, my first seasonal sighting took place just before Halloween. Right there in the drugstore, next to a bright green Frankenstein monster mask complete with perfectly flat head and what looked like carriage bolts protruding from the neck, a bevy of Little Mermaids and a few other things I was pretty sure were cultural icons I’m a little embarrassed to say I couldn’t quite identify, was a shelf full of hundred-pack ‘mini-holiday blinking lights’ and next to that, were boxes of gold tinsel, and then some truly lovely glass ornaments.  Some time during the week before Thanksgiving I came across a local radio station proclaiming itself “Your home for the holidays” and all of a sudden we were seated next to Miss Fanny Bright while Jack Frost was nipping at our noses and Rudolph was being maligned by his unsympathetic cohorts.

Now I know what you are probably thinking: “Oh, here we go again with another “Shameful Commercialization of Christmas” diatribe. 

Well, the truth is, like nearly everyone who’s spent time serving in America’s churches; I have found myself railing against the corporate co-opting of the Nativity of our Lord.  Yes, I too have scoffed at giant inflatable Santa’s and snowmen in stovepipe hats in suburbanite yards. I’ve found myself muttering all too self righteously, “Gee, nothing says ‘birth of Christ’ like 140,000 kilowatt pseudo North Pole tableau that, along with the great wall of China can actually be seen by astronauts residing in the international space station.”

The society into which God chose to send His Son was in many ways like our own:  It stood in the midst of economic crisis and political upheaval.  People were losing what little faith they had maintained in the tried and true practices and institutions of old. But there was also most definitely a cultural zeitgeist of searching… searching for something to provide meaning and direction.  There were promises and prophecies handed down from of old – poorly understood, often misinterpreted, but nonetheless part of the common consciousness.  Everyone from the scholars in the synagogue to the prelates in Roman palaces to foreign practitioners of arcane astrology were looking for, indeed, were expecting something to happen.  Though the message was warped by politics, greed and fear, and the profound Grace of God was frequently obscured by blind adherence to long dead traditions,  there remained a grain of truth that some, however imperfectly, might find quickened to their hearts.  Or, to put it another way, no matter how hard man’s world might try, the still, small voice of God would not be overcome by the clatter of human endeavor.

Fast forward 2000 years: Those who lived during the moment of Christ’s entry into human history are a lot like us, and we are a lot like them.  We too are fearful.  We too are in the midst of trying and fearsome times. And it’s all too clear that the world around us is frantically searching for something – just walk through the mall, or better yet, New York City’s Times Square.  A proliferation of lights and sights proclaim the potential answer to all our earthly woes, all while the national debt clock declares each families share of indebtedness to be well beyond the means of an average lifetime to repay, and the news media proclaims wars and rumors of wars.  All of this to the accompaniment of fully orchestrated, frequently pop-rock versions of Christmas hymns and ‘seasonal songs’.  The words of Isaac Watts, and the music of Handel blend with Gene Autry’s flying reindeer, Eartha Kitt’s Santa Baby, and once again, for reasons known only to the late great Charles Shultz, the ‘bloody Red Baron’ refrains from blowing Snoopy’s ice besotted WWI biplane out of the Teutonic skies when he hears the bells from the village below.  Some measure of God’s truth is found amidst the glitter, consumerism and frantic quasi-traditionalism.  Beyond Dickens’s ghosts and Seuss’ Grinch, in a world that has not advanced very far from the one where there was no room, save a stable, for a very pregnant woman to have her baby, and the leaders of the government insist that ‘all the world should be enrolled’; in a world where the day after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday and the celebration is marked by stampeding a mega-store shop clerk to death in order to be the first to score a good deal on a plasma screen television; in that same world  the Lord of Life waits to be born.  The same Word that moved over the face of the primordial waters is waiting to be born in our hearts.

When you hear Bing dream of a White Christmas, Band Aid ask if “they Know it’s Christmas”, The “Barenaked Ladies” (yes, that’s the name of a rock group – they’re all men, and they perform fully clothed!) mash God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen with We Thee Kings, perhaps pause, and give a moment of thanks that our Lord is speaking as He always has – in the most ironic places and through the most unlikely people. Be mindful that as the stars in the heavens – mute soulless balls of fire a trillion miles away, declare the glory of God, as a rogue star that had no business shining in the light of day announced the arrival of the world’s Savior, so too God is speaking today, in spite of, or maybe even through the superficially luminous ‘stars’ of our little space and time. Take a moment to look into the manger of your heart and see that it’s ready for Christ to be born there.