Return to Sender

                Despite what I think of Christmas (see previous post), I’ll admit, it does present an excellent opportunity to evangelize, being the one time of year when friends and relatives, rosy with home-made eggnog, might be willing to listen.

                Unfortunately, the venue Christians usually choose for this mission is the mass-mailing of  Christian greeting cards depicting the “traditional manger scene.” We have all seen (or sent) some variation of these:  the evening is blue, The Star is in the sky; The Three Kings approach on camels from the left (or the right).  In the center of the composition lay the Lit-tle Lord Jesus asleep in a hay-filled box just his size, as if he were the littlest of the Three Bears, while an adoring Mary kneels next to him, calm, clean, and dry, as if she hasn’t given birth any time recently.  On the periphery, usually behind them, apparently irrelevant but needed for artistic balance, stands Joseph, peering down at Jesus over Mary’s shoulder.  An array of un-smelly barn animals surrounds the three, all gazing upon the haloed babe, all smiling.  Even the animals are smiling.  Above the scene, in glittering letters, floats some standard exclamation: “The Miracle of Christmas!” or, “A Savior is Born!” or, not uncommonly enough, this inanity:  “Softly, ever so gently, He comes.” 

                And you wonder why your unbelieving friends remain damned?  

                Tradition, like formaldehyde, preserves the outward appearance of something formerly living, so that the inanimate semblance of the thing comes to substitute the thing itself, only in distorted form.  (This is why wakes are so weird: you gather around to gaze upon the body of your loved one in the coffin, all stuffed and put back together and made up, nestled in a white satin-lined box, like – well, come to think of it, like some dark parody of a manger scene.  For heaven’s sake, shut the lid.)

                (But I digress.)

                The event of Yeshua’s birth, thanks to Christmas, has, sadly, devolved into a tradition.  By elevating it above its scriptural context and preserving it in isolation, it now hangs suspended in a seasonal specimen jar.  The “manger scene” has become a graven image, an idol to be annually worshipped at the winter festival, a stage-set to be spot-lighted on lawns at night alongside the eerily-lit inflatable Santas, and then put back in the closet come January.  (No?  Did you ever hear a sermon on Luke 2 in August?)

               The message of these cards, stated or implied, that the birth was a “miracle,” is erroneous anyway.  The “miracle” was not in the birth, but in the conception;  the Word had been flesh for 9 months by the time Mary and Joseph got to Bethlehem.  Yeshua’s exit from the womb was in fact quite ordinary, happening in the usual way, and there was a reason for that:  it was the first visible event in a thoroughly human life that was almost exaggerated in its fleshly experience -- as if to emphasize the point that his connection with us was intimate.  Born into the filth and smell of a barn, with nothing remotely like the amenities of our modern hospitals – or even of our modern barns – Yeshua (Jesus) grew up working with his hands for a living and traversing the rocky countryside of Israel on foot, to finally suffer a vicious and wholly unjust death by physical torture.  This – the bloody death, the Great Substitute for you and me –  was the purpose of his human incarnation, not so that he could be resurrected annually as a cute baby.   Does the unbeliever get that from these cards, the revelation that he’s saved by the blood?  Do they even HINT at anything un-cozy?

                Don’t get me wrong, Christmas cards, like the rest of the season, are an industry, and I’m all for free enterprise.  I am happy that people in this country are free to express themselves in what they choose to buy and send, even if confused or inaccurate or plain ridiculous.  Manger scenes are not the only idol.  Taking its cue from Christianity, secular culture has leaped on the lucrative seasonal bandwagon by sales-pitching its own idols and obscure promises.  We have all seen the illustrations of a glittering globe with a flying dove and the single word, “Peace,” etched somewhere in the composition.  The source of the “peace” is nowhere hinted at, nor is there any suggestion of how it is to be achieved.  It is just a mindlessly suspended, free-form “thought,” serving no other purpose than to make the sender feel warmly superior for expressing such a beautiful ideal.  Practical meaning is unimportant. 

                That’s why Christian Christmas cards irritate me so.  In the Luke chapter 2 account, there is a gold mine of practical meaning, all of which has become encrypted in manger-worship.  If “A Savior is Born!” what is a Savior?  It is God – YHWH –  come in the flesh in order to bleed to death for the sins of the people.  Christians might make that connection when looking at a picture of a donkey smiling at a baby, but does anyone outside of the club?

                I realize Christians don’t want to hear this.  I never did at first, either.  Tradition is a beloved habit, and habit is a choke-hold.  Breaking a habit is a fearful thing –  ask any alcoholic.  But think: if you are defending against the scriptural particulars of salvation because of its threat to the cherished traditions of man, what is your message to the unbeliever going to be but one of watered-down confusion?  (Question: who in the spiritual realm would love that?)  Consider that more unbelievers see the origins of the season more clearly than Christians do – because Christians just get angry when the subject comes up and refuse to see it, as if their whole faith would crumble and disappear if the holiday were proven a fraud. 

                But Christian, take heart:  Yeshua can overcome anything, even bad art and sappy sayings!   It is not a matter of what you have to lose by facing the truth, but by what you have to gain, and by what you’ll then have to give away that is of eternal, rather than mere seasonal, significance.