A lot of noise has been made about "putting Christ back into Christmas." Truth be told, Christ never has had much to do with our modern celebrations of Christmas, which began in the earlier nineteenth century after the celebration of Christmas had fallen out of favor after the American Revolution because it was considered "British" (see the Wikipedia article on Christmas). Christmas today is a secular, social holiday.So, it's not a matter of putting Christ back into Christmas so much as reclaiming the biblical birth narratives from the sentimentalism of our social and secular Christmas. As mentioned in yesterday's posting (here), the story of the birth of Christ told in the Gospel of Matthew actually teaches at least two things about Christ: that he was the messiah and thus worthy of our worship and that he was from the beginning in conflict with power. The birth stories in Matthew set the stage for the story told in the rest of the gospel. The same is true of Luke. Again, we have clear evidence in the birth stories of Jesus' special origins and the fact that he is worthy of praise and worship. "Angels from the realms of glory" (Luke 2:13-14) are witness to that spiritual truth. But where Matthew emphasizes Jesus' conflict with power, Luke impresses us with Jesus' humble beginnings. His mother was a peasant woman. He was born in a stable "wrapped in swaddling clothes." His birth was gloriously announced to a bunch of shepherds. Luke, that is, uses the birth stories to highlight a central Christian truth that God isn't just champion of the poor and dispossessed but actually became God With Us as one of them. The Old Testament term is anawim, which in its Old Testament context means the poor.
God's special love for the anawim is one of the key themes of both the Old and New Testaments. It is not a sentimental love but one lived out in the hard world of poverty and oppression—the world Jesus lived in. It is best exhibited not in our lovely manger scenes but in the Arab Spring, in the struggle of Thailand's red shirts, and in the 99% movement emerging in the United States. In our churches, then, one way we can put Christ into Christmas is by engaging in a faithful reading of the original stories, seeing in them God's struggle with power and God's special love for the anawim, the poor so clearly demonstrated in the opening chapters of Luke's Gospel. Amen.
