After watching “A Sanders’ Family Christmas” over at Derby Dinner Playhouse with the Under the Hill Gang this week, I believe that we American Christians are still just as perplexed about Christmas as Mary was about Gabriel’s astounding message to her.
The play takes the form of a Christmas Eve service in a little Baptist Church in rural Kentucky, a service in which we, the audience, become the members in the pews. There are some fun songs and some good comedy, and I am not here today as theater critic. What boggled my mind, however, was the confusing and contradictory hodgepodge of Christmas that completely filled the script for this play. Secular songs and down-homey Hallmark sweetness were seamlessly interwoven with talk of the Baby Jesus and Salvation. And as a crowning jewel, there was a number about Santa’s elves--the bad, lazy little elves, and the good hard-working ones--with an injunction to the audience from Santa/Jesus for us to be like the good elves, doing our work and behaving, so that we would not burn in Hell. The trouble with this play was precisely that one could not tell if it was a parody of such hell-fire religion or whether it was preaching these beliefs. The trouble with this play was that it was perfectly OK for the authors to offer up all kinds of mix-and-match Christmas theology, all kinds of looks at Christmas, as if none of them mattered or made sense at all …. And all of the many church groups in attendance sat there and clapped for every one of them.
Truly, I understand the confusion. One minute we are watching the cute little messages in Rudolf and Frosty the Snowman, and the next minute we are falling on our knees for “O Holy Night” and breaking the chains of oppression. One minute we are drinking eggnog at the office party, and the next minute we are lighting candles in a darkened church. One minute we are wondering how to understand the idea of a Virgin Birth, and the next minute we are putting out milk and cookies for Santa Claus’ arrival down the chimney. The religious and the secular, the mundane and the mysterious--It does all just kind of blend together, doesn’t it, so that it is hard to know which is which? Pretty soon, it all starts sounding like one big trivial story.
In the play that we saw, the only overarching message that emerged from this confusing Christmas collage was that we had better behave ourselves. “Be Good!” “Work hard!” we heard, loud and clear. Well, I was waiting to start chapel in the preschool last week and was chatting with the children in the pews, when one four-year-old raised her hand. I called on her, and she blurted out for all to hear, “My mommy says that my daddy is on the naughty list!”
“What does that mean?” I stuttered, not sure where this conversation was going and buying time to think of a way to divert it.
“He’s going to get coal in his stocking!” she said with great disdain.
Trying to help me out, one of the teachers offered, “Well, he still has two weeks to improve his behavior …”
Indeed, the song that the children sang with the most gusto at the preschool Christmas program was “You better watch out … You better not pout… Santa Claus is coming to town.” It seems that, everywhere I look, all that we can salvage from our Christmas confusion is the solid little nugget of reputation and reward.
The message of our Gospel reading today seems to be just the opposite, however. If the message of Christmas were that the good, hard-working ones are to be rewarded, then wouldn’t the angel Gabriel have paid a visit to a nice, respectable Roman matron, searching out a married mother of good standing, to bear God’s Son? Would he really have come to Mary, who is as powerless and as insignificant as any human being can be? After all, she is a woman in a patriarchal society; she is young in a world in which age brings social standing; she is unmarried and has no children to give her worth; she is poor and belongs to a powerless, oppressed people. If God’s love is not poured out generously upon every single one of us, why call this young girl, “Favored Lady of God?”
And Mary, she doesn’t turn out to be much of a good rule-follower for her society, either, does she? In accepting God’s plans for her, she turns away from all that is respectable in her world. All of Gabriel’s promises for her son’s future must have seemed like distant dreams in the face of a present that would be filled with scandal, risk, and reproach, as an unmarried pregnant girl. Yet Mary lets go of her respectability and her reputation to accept what God has placed upon her. She gives up control over her life and opens herself up to God’s vision for the world. The annunciation hints at the same kind of scandalously self-giving, world-loving sacrifice that the Baby himself will show upon the Cross.
While I was studying today’s lessons at my desk at home, I happened to catch a glimpse of a photo of Michangelo’s Pieta that my daughter had brought me from Italy. Reading Mary’s trusting reply to the angel, while looking up at her grief-stricken face as she holds her dead son on her lap, brought home to me the magnitude of the heart-breaking risk that she took as a mother. Faithful, naïve Mary did not ask the angel how her son was to save his people. She didn’t ask for details on what kind of king he would be. Could she ever have imagined that he would be a crucified King, a savior who would love and forgive a world that could only send him to a shameful death? Would she have said “yes,” if she had known, I wondered. Of course she would have. For, deep down, we all know that Love is always worth the risk and the pain that comes wrapped up in it. The powerless young girl holding a divine baby to her breast, and the sorrowful young woman with her grown-up child sprawled lifeless in her lap, both proclaim the sobering paradox of God’s love in our lives. Rowan Williams describes incarnation as “the utter strangeness of God that waits in the heart of what is familiar.”[1] God’s love abides quietly, patiently, enduring risk and obscurity, waiting for the chance to transform the familiar into the strange and to make strange the familiar. It waits to turn a poor, unmarried girl into the Mother of God, a mother whose own heartbreak gives life to the world. It waits to pour out divine favor in all of the places that one least expects such favor, to spread incomprehensible love over all those whom we are certain do not deserve it, including ourselves. “A virgin giving birth?” we gasp with Mary, rolling our eyes. “Nothing is impossible with God,” responds our text. “The likes of me entering the kingdom of God is about like a camel going through the eye of a needle,” we mumble with the crowds around Jesus. “Nothing is impossible with God,” responds Jesus.
Frosty and Rudolf and eggnog and Santa are for us the familiar. Abundant love poured out upon us is the strange. Our task this last week before Christmas is to listen for the divine strangeness within the familiarity of our culture—to welcome the divine strangeness that turns our focus on reward and reputation upside down and inside out. God is just waiting for us to utter the risky words: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word,” the burning, hidden word of Love that melts away all triviality like candle wax.
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