the holiday

This holiday season I have already been given time and opportunities to reflect on the holiday season and why we celebrate the way we do. I think before coming to mission year I had already prepared myself a little bit for a shift in my thinking in several areas. Two of the areas I feel the holiday speaks most clearly to me are in the forms of money and materialism, and how often they go hand in hand.

My experience with money during mission year has already been challenging. Being given $70 a month to meet all my needs is while not impossible living, very different than what I am used to. I have adapted somewhat well, but I still sometimes feel like this is just a game I am playing and not a real lifestyle. My first real opportunity to have this challenged came the day after thanksgiving when I participated in buy nothing day. I was presented with the facts of the gross over consumption of the US and Europe and was appalled by them. (www.adbusters.org) I took this newfound passion and joined the US anti-heroes and the simple way on the streets of Downtown Philly on black Friday and tried to encourage people to buy nothing and to find worth in the holiday itself, not the money and materialism that goes with it.

Black Friday of course is a lead in to Christmas, the biggest gift giving holiday of the year. Everywhere I have gone this month I have been presented with ideas of advent and the deep beautiful truth of Christmas that is very different than the ones seen on the television. I have heard more about that Christmas is a season where we should be anxiously awaiting the coming of Jesus. That our souls should be longing for him….longing. For me in the recent past Christmas has been more about longing for a break from classes and deeply desiring a new gift to entertain me. I think the way we have formed for ourselves a Christmas holiday that focuses on so much other than the actual person of Jesus has completely robbed us of the truth and deep meaning of the holiday. In me this is changing. I know that I am letting go begrudgingly of lots of the things about myself that I know are wrong, but that are so comfortable or natural in my life. Most of these things are tied up in how I view money and my possessions.

On Saturday I had another wonderful opportunity that I am beginning to feel is one of the best things about being in Philadelphia. I was able to take part in a presentation given by the http://www.alternativeseminary.com called Peace on Earth and the Politics of Christmas. The talk was amazing, and it completely deconstructed many of the thoughts that I had about Christmas and why I celebrate it the way I do. We mostly looked deeply at the birth narratives in the books of Matthew and Luke and saw how both of the stories are ones of intense crisis and scandal, not really the fuzzy feel good nativity scenes we see every year. I knew that I knew some of this in my head, but I had never taken it to heart.

One of the parts of the story in Matthew that I know I always breeze past is the part when Herod kills all the children under the age of two, trying to get rid of Jesus. This calculated infanticide was brutal and nasty, and is embedded in the “Christmas story”. It talks about how the mothers of these children wept and could not be comforted. We talked about some of the repercussions of this event. Like, did Jesus know that his birth had been the cause of all of this destruction? We asked the question what if the rest of the story that Matthew lines out in his gospel an answer to these weeping women telling them that there is hope. That the violence they experienced in an ancient and perpetual violence that the messiah had an answer to. The beatitutudes speak to the counter-cultural-ness of Jesus. Blessed are those who mourn.

We also talked about how the birth of Jesus completely upset the governmental power struggles of the day. Jesus was born and people were telling Herod that this baby was the king of the Jews. Herod was known to be a nasty ruler and was not going to take this. The infanticide that Herod mandated gave a feel of threat in this story that is definitely not warm and fuzzy. In the story that Luke tells we see the ‘divine’ power of Cesar in taking a census of the entire world. The nature of the census is that it would benefit Rome, who were occupying Israel at the time, in the forms of taxation, control, and military conscription. So in administering the census Cesar is only making his rule more powerful and controlling and the Jews hated this.

Joseph and Mary, we know, had to travel to Bethlehem for the census. Because of the census Bethlehem was in chaos with more people there than usual being there. This situation put Joseph and Mary into a form of functional homelessness squatting in a back alley somewhere, seeking refuge in a cave. Mary gave birth in this cave, probably alone, and put Jesus in a manger wrapped in swaddling clothes. We have heard these words a thousand times, but what do they really imply. Jesus was wrapped in cloth because the stable was so nasty and Mary was doing whatever she could to try and keep him clean. He was put in a manger not because it was perfect for a baby and full of fresh smelling hay but because there was no other option. The fact that they are in such nasty circumstances shows us that they are marginalized by the powers of their day stuck, homeless in an alley with no medical help, giving birth. This is not romantic.

The angels then appear to sheppard’s to tell the good news of the birth of Christ. This would be like today going to sanitation workers and telling them this news first. It was a slap in the face to the imperial system showing that in God’s kingdom the first come last and the last come first. The heavenly hosts of angels that appear are more like a squadron of angels that are announcing the peace of Christ, Pax Christi in direct opposition to the Pax Romana that Cesar had initiated. This story is really a call to allegiance in asking the people the question who really runs the world?