Sanitizing Christmas

This evening my pastor, Gil, spoke on the "Magnificat"-- the song of Mary, who is to give birth to Jesus. It spoke about how it wasn't just this sweet song, it was sort of feisty-- coming from this young girl who grew up in a small town, oppressed by a foreign empire, and was about to give birth to the Messiah who would change everything-- so much so that in the 1980's the Guatemalan government wouldn't allow it to be read in public, for fear that it would incite unrest against the government. The image he gave was the young mother Mary, not cradling a sweet silent baby in a perfect Hallmark Christmas moment, but the young mother Mary cradling the baby that held the hope of all people, and giving the world-- the Way Things Are-- the finger.

He also talked about a God that comes into the middle of our crap (quite literally, in the stable) and how that was an intentional statement by God about Who He Is and what he is willing to go through with us.

This got me reflecting again on a commercial I heard in the past week or so. I rarely listen to the radio in my car, more often relying on my ipod or-- since my ipod transmitter has gone kaput-- CD's (this being the first car I've had with a CD player, it's a convenience I appreciate fully), but during Christmas season I make an exception. I love Christmas songs. So anyway, I had the radio on and a commercial came on-- I don't even remember what the business was, now. Car sales or insurance, or something random like that.

Anyhow, here (roughly) is what the representative on the commercial said:

"Merry Christmas! Yes, I'll say it, even if it's not 'P.C.' to say 'Merry Christmas.' But whatever your beliefs, the message of Christmas still rings true, and we wish that to you and your family in the coming year: health and happiness, safety and security."

And I just thought, Actually, I don't think that's what the message of Christmas is about, at all.


Jesus is not about our health-- he in fact sometimes asks us to do very risky and even dangerous things in the course of bringing about his kingdom. He is certainly not about our happiness, at least not in the sense that we think of it-- joy, perhaps, but not the happiness of everything's-going-ok-and-I-have-no-worries. Safety? Psh. See answer to "health." (Also, I was reminded of the line from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe-- I looked this up for the exact wording: "Safe?... Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.")

And security? Security?


I understand why people seek security. I seek it too. We all do, it's quite natural. But it is not at all what Christmas is all about, sorry Ms. car-sales-or-insurance-company-lady.

Jesus was revolutionary, in every sense of the world. He shook up religion, angered the religious, changed how we access God himself, so concerned religious leaders even in his infancy that they ordered massacres just to get rid of him, associated with ruffians and low-lifes, and was eventually executed as a criminal.

When I think of "American Christian," I picture people in sweaters and khakis in a more-than-comfortable suburban home. Carefully groomed, SUV in the driveway. Seeking security at every turn. They're not bad people, but they're sanitized. This sort of makes me sick. (And frankly, they don't sound like the sort of people Jesus hung out with, either.) I know it's not true of a large portion of American Christians, but it is of too many. We have gotten too hung up on security.

So at Christmas of all times, this is the time to remember that. How completely and wildly radical it was for God to send his son as a human, into the most scandalous and humble of human circumstances, to reach hearts in a whole new way and restore our relationship with God. What!? Revolutionary.

So let's leave the sanitization of Christmas to the good people at Hallmark.