Let's Take Christ Out of Christmas!

            Let’s take Christ out of Christmas. It would solve a problem for us religious types.

            I’m speaking, of course, of the commercialization of Christmas. Sometime between Canadian Thanksgiving and American Thanksgiving, say in mid-November, Christmas as we know it now begins in earnest. North Americans make pilgrimage to their malls to shop or to visit Santa and his elves in their pretty crimson miniskirts. We fire up Amazon and exercise our credit cards. We scan the papers for this year’s version of Starbuck’s coffee cup, and wonder what President Trump is going to say about the War on Christmas. None of us is very surprised when the little kids ask if the shepherds took a sleigh pulled by Rudolph to Bethlehem.

            The bottom line is that Jesus comes in a poor second to our office parties, presents, and partridges in pear trees. And, frankly, I like all that stuff enough so that I don’t want to spoil it by feeling like I’m shorting Jesus when I’m having fun.

            So, I say, instead of fighting the war on Christmas, let’s turn the other cheek and take Christ out of Christmas.

            People who still want angels and shepherds can pick some other date to celebrate Christmas. December 25 was always sort of suspect anyway. The Roman Emperor Constantine picked that date for Christmas because he wanted to replace the traditional pagan solstice celebration with something from that new-fangled Christian religion he picked up to boost his dictatorship. Constantine guessed that Romans would be okay with giving up paganism, but he knew they wouldn’t want to give up partying. Ergo, Christmas!

            It has been a nice experiment, but one that has run its course. It’s finally time to take Christ out of Christmas and give it back to the solstice or the North Pole or Father Time or something like that. That way we can party in December without guilt. We can give and receive gifts without having to drag the wise men into our justifications.

            I think we Christians might do quite well without a faux birthday for Jesus. However, if not, if we really missed singing the Messiah and our favorite carols, we could celebrate Christmas on June 25, instead.

            Christmas in the summer would be less hyped. We would probably pay a bit more attention to the real heart of the religious calendar, Easter—assuming we can hold the line against Easter bunnies and chocolate egg hunts, of course.

            But it would be worth the effort! Let’s take Christ out of Christmas!

Three Clergy Go to a Bar (Luke 24:13-33)

After the crucifixion, Cleopas and a friend left Jerusalem and made a run for it, much like we might make a run to the cottage after the funeral of a friend. They were on the road to Emmaus because they wanted to get seven miles and a lifetime away from the horror of Golgotha.

On the way Cleopas and his friend met a stranger who talked a lot. The stranger explained why he thought Jesus had to die, especially if Jesus was the Messiah. Anyway, the stranger talked like that right up to dinnertime. And then, says Luke, while the stranger prayed for a blessing over the meal, they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.”

What do we make of this story? What really happened on Easter?

            Well, it’s like this. Once upon a time three good friends—a Catholic priest, a United Church minister, and a Jewish rabbi—met at a pub. They liked to get together to talk theology.

            Anyway, the priest ordered a Molson Blue. The United Church minister ordered a virgin cocktail called La Boheme Noir. And the Jewish rabbi ordered a glass of red wine—a 2011 California North Coast Pinot Noir, actually.

            The topic for the day was, “Jesus’ resurrection.”

            The priest begins. “I like my resurrection plain and simple. Just like my Molson Blue here. The straight goods. Low in the grave he lay, but then Jesus’ wounds closed up, his heart started ticking again, he shoved one leg first, and then the other over the ledge he was lying on, he stepped down, and up from the grave he arose!”

            “No, no, no” said the United Church minister, a teetotaller. “It has to be much more complicated than that. Like my virgin cocktail. This La Bohème Noir is made of lavender-infused honey, elderflower cordial, and black pekoe tea. It has a spicy, pungent aroma. The resurrection is like that, complicated but lovely. Sweet. I think people saw visions. They saw Jesus walked through solid walls and disappeared with the breaking of the bread. Of course, no real ‘body,’ could do such things, just as no aroma can be cut with a fork and knife. Still, I think God was in it.”

            So finally the Jewish rabbi got her turn. She said, “Well, I certainly don’t believe Jesus rose from the grave. And if there were people who saw visions of Jesus after his death, I’d say that sounds more like post-traumatic-stress-induced hysteria than a god-thing. The resurrection stories are probably an invention of the early church—even many Christian scholars think so. No, just as this red wine will soon give me a headache, the judgement of history is that Jesus and his followers have been one long migraine for Jews, and Jesus’ death an excuse to scapegoat and persecute us.”

            And while this didn’t change the priest’s and or the minister’s mind about what actually happened at the resurrection, they both nodded their heads in somber, sober agreement.

            How do we take our resurrection? Straight up, like the priest? As a complicated but sweet mix of visions and God, like the minister? Or as the occasion for great pain, like the rabbi’s red wine?

            This is what I think. We will never resolve the argument about what “exactly” happened at Easter. How could we? Too much time has passed. Even Mark, whose resurrection story we read to start the service off with—even Mark wrote forty or fifty years after the events he tells of. He wasn’t an eyewitness to most of them, either. And by now it is nearly 2,000 years later. No physical evidence. No DNA. Not even a crack Miami CSI team could recreate the events surrounding Jesus’ resurrection 2000 years later. But, what’s more, I really doubt that it matters to God whether or not any of us get the bare facts of the resurrection right.

            For, if it really did matter to God that we get the bare facts of the resurrection exactly right, surely God could have done a lot better than giving us the four contradictory accounts of the resurrection that we find in the Bible. If it really mattered to God that we get the facts of the resurrection exactly right, as if they were the answers to a cosmic math or science quiz that we need to pass to advance, God could have moved the stars around in the heavens and spelled it all out for us with his or her finger, so that there was no mistaking the truth. But God didn’t do any of these things. We have nothing but these complicated, mysterious, lovely twice- or thrice-told tales found in scripture.

            So what, then, what is the real point of Easter, if it can’t be making sure that we get the facts exactly right? Well, I can think of a few possibilities. But this morning I want to focus on just one of them. Repentance.

            You see, the story of the walk to Emmaus has this lovely turn in it. Cleopas and his friend were running away from Jerusalem, but their vision or encounter or whatever it was turned them on their heels. Luke says, “That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem.”

            Cleopas and his friend changed direction. They were headed north, seven miles to Emmaus, but after supper they slammed on their brakes, reversed, and headed south, straight back to Jerusalem. Like a driver who turns his car the wrong way into a one-way street does a quick 180. That’s repentance.

            Repentance. Remember the priest I told you about earlier in the sermon? He knew all about repentance. When he graduated from seminary and got to his first parish, he came as a snotty, self-absorbed, pie-in-sky rookie, all books and no common sense. But a wise parishioner saw that there was more to the young priest than this protective shell, and so he took him to a pub to talk about real life, every week, over a Blue, for four years, until the priest finally figured out his job was not about parsing Greek verbs but about loving his sheep. The priest turned it around, he repented.

            Remember the United Church minister I told you about? Well she knew all about repentance too. Alcoholism destroyed her marriage, her friendships, and her self-esteem all before she was thirty. But after she hit rock bottom, she repented. With the help of her AA friends she eventually turned her life around. Along the way, she learned how to love virgin cocktails and discovered spirituality. Went to seminary. Became a pastor. Reversed her downward spiral and started over.

            Repentance. Remember the Jewish rabbi? I don’t know much more about her except this. After going home from the pub with a splitting headache, she repented of ever drinking red wine again.

            Easter is many things. But among them there is also this invitation to each of us to join Cleopas and turn our lives—or maybe just parts of our lives—around. This sort of repentance doesn’t have to be a remorseful, dark, depressing fight with guilt or depravity—though God knows, sometimes this sort of tragic struggle may also be necessary. Mostly, by repentance I mean repentance as Cleopas experienced it, repentance as hop-skip-jumping joy all the way to Jerusalem because whatever happened to Jesus, exactly, Jesus’ hope, his teachings, his example, his priorities all burned inside of Cleopas, transforming him from a refugee with his tail between his legs into someone who is going to seize life and live it the way it was meant to be lived.

            Repentance. The Greek word literally means “changing your mind.” Turning it around. Big things or small. Your relations at work. Your commitment to the planet. Your exercise routine. Your reasons for voting for the candidate you do. Your focus on “me, myself, and I.” Turning it around. Your recycling. Your volunteering. The way you treat the bar tender or door person at the club. Your charitable giving. Turning it around. The promise of Easter is that today is the day to repent, and go hop, skip, jumping into the rest of your life.

Easter Runs On Empty

A large watercolor hangs in my wife's home office. On it you will find a dark mulberry bush, a few nightingales, and some Chinese characters. But mostly the painting is empty white space. The painting was a gift to us from a Mainland Chinese exchange student. Her mother painted it.

Emptiness is usually experienced as a quality devoid of happy associations. For example, Samuel Butler once said, "an empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed." Woodrow Wilson was of the same mind. He noted that, "in the Lord's Prayer, the first petition is for daily bread. No one can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach."

But my painting, for all of its empty space, is beautiful. I purchased a frame for it, and when I went to pick it up, the painting was hanging on display on the most prominent wall in the store. The manager said that she just had to put it up because it was so stunning. So perhaps emptiness does not always have to be negative.

John Calvin, for example, knew about the positive power of emptiness. He said our faith is an empty vessel that God has given us so that we can be filled with God's grace.

I've read that in Eastern cultures like China's emptiness is actually prized for its positive potential. The emptiness of a cup, for example, invites water. An empty room invites entrance and so welcomes the guest. The empty spaces in bamboo are what make it a strong construction material.

When I look carefully at our painting, I'm pretty sure that the artist spent more time planning her empty space than filling it up. Emptiness gives my painting its unique power. And in a small way, this helps me understand the Christian season of Easter with its commemoration of both Jesus' death and resurrection. With respect to death, Paul says Jesus "emptied himself . . . humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death on a cross." (Phil 2:7,8). That is, Jesus demonstrated his love for us humans, says Paul, by pouring out his divinity rather than hanging on to it.

And with respect to resurrection, both Jesus' and ours, who could ever fail to note that three days later the tomb was empty too!