On Friday night my son, Ian, complained bitterly about how bored he was. Usually, when he's home on a Friday night he's glued to his PS3; shooting at things and people that have been framed as "the enemy." But on this Friday he was observing a request made by his school not to engage in any video games that involved the firing of weapons in act of respect for the 26 shooting victims of the Sandyfork Elementary School on the previous Friday. Just the day before he asked not to go to school because there was a threat of a shooting made against his school on Facebook and picked up in the local newspaper. There was also a lock-down drill this week in case such insanity should bear fruit in our own small town. The drill was followed by classroom discussions between the teachers and their students. I later ran into one of the high school teachers in Wal-Mart who said that she was amazed at how much the kids had thought through the possible scenarios of what-ifs. Also on Friday morning, at 9:30am, to mark the one week anniversary, our church rang our bells 26 times in concert with all the bells of all the churches in town. It has been a week filled with funerals, and raw, terrible sadness. Despite all this and so much more, it is now two days before Christmas. It seems discomfortingly surreal when our glittery celebration of Christ’s birth runs up against the unflinching, cruel edges of life.
Christmas and its annually repeated litanies of activities seem oddly, artificially fixed in an otherwise unpredictable world. Every year we do many of the same things, though the people we share those events with may come and go, or simply grow up into different people, as the case may be. But Christmas Eve is always on the 24th and Christmas Day is always the 25th. And in its fixedness, it has become statuesque - an inanimate object of sorts to which we give a nod each year through the various rituals and habits that surround it. The result is that these rituals and habits have taken on a life of their own, with a highly personalized and individualized nature. In this way, Christmas itself has become highly personalized and individualized with only the slightest tangential connection to the birth of Christ for those of us who observe it in its enormously secular context. And so we re-enact the sacred event of Jesus' birth every year, not just to remember it, not just to honor it, not just to teach it to our children, but to break it out of its fixedness. To free it from the bonds of the rituals and habits that we have created in order to preserve its delicate sacredness but which has ironically rendered it silent. The sweetly enduring strength of Mary's song, Elizabeth's joyful exclamation and the singing host of angels are now as mute as Zechariah. It falls upon the church, on you and I, to proclaim: It is for all the Newtowns and for all the Adam Lanza’s in this world that Christ was born.
Much as it warms my heart, our Christmas observance is intended neither for the opening of gifts on Christmas morning nor the discovery of Santa’s generosity; it is not to get an extra day or two off of work; and it is not to ensure the stability of the American economy which depends heavily on the annual average influx of $20 billion holiday dollars. No, Christ was not born in a shopping mall or under a glistening Christmas tree. Jesus was born amid farm animals in a cold barn in the middle of the night. Within days of his birth, upon hearing of it, King Herod ordered the death of all the newborn boys across the land. It was for this that Christ was born. Not for all we do out of the goodness of our hearts to relieve the suffering of the millions from disease, famine, starvation, human trafficking, war, genocide, poverty, random shooting sprees, and the destruction of natural disasters, but for all we do not do. Christ was born into a world of sin, not to reward the righteous, but to save the rest of us.
That is why to shun the soul of Adam Lanza and the hundreds like him is to deny the power of the incarnation. To hate and to reject, even one so deserving, is not our place. Adam Lanza and his mother, whose life he also took, are the neighbors Jesus demands we love as much as we love ourselves. Is it any wonder they nailed him to the cross? The world Jesus was born into was a broken and hard place; and it still is. There is a reason that the glitter and fanfare of the Christmas celebration runs counter to the world we live in – and we would do well to pay attention to its dissonant chord. It rings out the truth that Christ was born to redeem all that is wrong, not to dismiss it or ignore it, but to take it on in a way you and I cannot or will not do. Jesus’ birth is meant to awaken us to God’s ongoing redemptive work –which is not fixed - that can only be perceived by those with eyes to see it. The good news is alive and well but only to those with ears to hear it.
And so may your Christmas be filled with joy, the true and enduring joy of God’s redemption through Christ our Lord, our Savior, born for us.
