Searching For The Reason For The Season

December 17th, 2011  |   

What child is this, who laid to rest,

On Mary’s lap is sleeping?

Whom angels greet with anthems sweet,

While shepherds watch are keeping?

William Chatterton Dix

William Chatterton Dix, the author of this lovely carol set to the music of Greensleeves, was an Englishman who lived in the nineteenth century. At the age of 29 he suffered a near fatal illness that put him in bed for a number of months. During this period of his life, he went through moments of severe depression. Miraculously, it was during those difficult moments that he wrote a number of beautiful hymns. He found his faith in those dark-night-of-the-soul moments—the bleak midwinter days of December.

Living with Judy all these years (whose favorite hymn, by the way, is In the Bleak Midwinter) I have come to prize what she does in the mid-December preparation for Christmas. Our home comes alive with a tree, holly, magnolia leaves, ribbons and bows, and a whole host of Christmas decorations collected over the years that bring back memories galore. And always there is the crèche with Mary and Joseph, the animals, shepherds, Wise Men, and the baby Jesus.

Opening the kitchen cupboard, I see mugs unpacked for the season, ready for hot beverages. They’re alive with seasonal symbols. One, given to us years ago, reads: Jesus Is The Reason For The Season. I’m not particularly fond of that phrase because the season belongs to more than folks who adore Jesus. Jewish friends celebrating Hanukkah will attest to that fact. Nevertheless, the little mug gives me reason to pause and ponder.

Jesus is the reason for the season. But who is this Jesus, who, as the familiar carol says, is sleeping on Mary’s lap while angels are singing and shepherds are glaring?

That’s the question someone asked me recently over a cup of coffee. That’s the question I’d like to explore in this issue of Notes. I have carried His Cross on my forehead since I was a baby, sworn allegiance to Him over the years, studied His life, attempted to follow His teachings, and been forced to redefine Him in my daily encounters in an often times confusing world.  And sometimes I have had to apologize to people for the way the Christian Church has been responsible for violence, anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and a host of other less than admiral sins.

I shall utilize some of the familiar and traditional Christmas carols to define my own understanding of the Babe of Bethlehem. Give credit to those who have taught me about Jesus since I was a child, and blame for any distortions of mine that cloud the radical message birthed in a manger in that far-off land still longing for a Prince of Peace.

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For know a blessed mother thou shalt be,

All generations laud and honor thee;

Thy son shall be Emmanuel, by seers foretold,

Most highly favored lady. Gloria!

Basque Carol

This Christmas I choose not to confine Mary, the “most highly favored lady,” to a crèche or a church doctrine that insists she had no sex with Joseph because she was a virgin. Of note is the fact that the Biblical word for virgin also means young woman. I see Mary incarnate in a young woman who lives in Afghanistan. Her name is Gulnaz.

Gulnaz is a 19-year-old woman who was raped by a man who broke into her home, tied her up and then raped her. Charged with a “moral crime,” she has spent almost two years in a prison cell, like some 600 women who languish in prison charged with a similar crime. In Afghanistan, a woman goes to jail for have sexual intercourse outside of marriage. These women are seen as a disgrace to their family and tribe. Virgins are favorite targets for the officials who administer the law.

Gulnaz appealed her case and lost. The court of appeals refused to accept her accusation of rape and raised her sentence to 12 years. The court said it was impossible for her to get pregnant after her first sexual encounter, so the sex must have been consensual.

Assisted by an American lawyer, Gulnaz has now been pardoned by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and released from prison but not until she is forced to marry the man who raped her, a man she cannot stand to look at.   

Mary and Gulnaz are disgraced for pregnancies considered outside the custom and law of their particular tribes. Of course, Joseph was no rapist, and Mary wasn’t forced to marry someone who had violated her. But both women were isolated from their community over their subject of their virginity. In Joseph’s case, he does not abandon Mary. He becomes a model for manhood out of his respect for Mary and their newborn child.

On the world scene, not just in Afghanistan, large numbers of women are not treated as equal to men, live in poverty, and are treated violently. In our own nation, where women have made great strides in matters of equality, new statistics reveal that one in four women are the victims of severe violence. We still have a long way to go.

One of the most profoundly radical passages in the Bible is the one in which Mary refuses to be disgraced and, instead, claims her “low estate”—a term which by definition means she lives in poverty as part of the lower class. As humble as she is, she proclaims a message of liberation boldly in what has been called Mary’s Song—the Magnificat. The message: God will pull down the mighty from their thrones; send the rich away empty while feeding the hungry. It is a revolutionary message fit for today’s world scene where the rich control the power and resources, and the poor eat dirt and grovel for crumbs that fall from the world’s economic table. It fits well with the 99% and the 1% message proclaimed by the Occupy Wall Street movement. The protest in the streets could very well serve as the clarion call for believers who celebrate Christmas, as well as those who do not bow down to the figures in the crèche. Mary speaks for the one percent.

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Good Christian friends rejoice with heart and soul and voice;

Give ye heed to what we say: Jesus Christ is born today;

Ox and ass before him bow, and he is in the manger now.

Christ is born today! Christ is born today!

John Mason Neale

John Mason Neale was born in London in 1818, an Anglican priest, he wrote numerous hymns, like O Come, O Come Emanuel, Good King Wenceslas, All Glory, Laud, and Honor. I have a fondness for him, perhaps  because he was not afraid to stick his neck out. He loved to challenge the powers-that-be, once making trouble for a bishop who inhibited him from serving as a priest for 14 years. His ox and ass in the manger are essential characters in the carol Good Christian Friends Rejoice.

The traditional Christmas story says that Jesus was born in a stable with observant animals. I have always loved this link between Jesus and creation—the link between human beings and the animal world. But I am unwilling to wallow in a romantic view of that manger when I know the stinking smell of poverty and the stench of lies that try to mask the smell of death. Those smells do not resemble the fragrant smell of myrrh or the sweet incense in a sanctuary church or amidst the perfumed worshippers.

I smelled the stench when I watched Senator John McCain on television speaking about the so-called end of the war in Iraq. He described the war as a “noble cause.”

Look, I’ve spent my time over the past ten years organizing in every way possible to keep our nation from going to war in Iraq, and then, after we did go to war, working to get our troops back home. My civil disobedience in my congresswoman’s office, and the penalty  time spent working on a stinking garbage truck, were part and parcel of my passion devoted toward getting troops home from a rotten, stinking, unnecessary war.

God knows, I certainly celebrate the return of our troops, even though some will remain in Iraq, but it is blasphemous bullshit to call the war there a “noble cause.” If John McCain had a scintilla of integrity at this point in his life, he’d say the whole shooting match was a dreadful episode in our nation’s history. He could do that without disparaging the more than a one million men and women who served; the 4,409 troops killed; the 30,000 plus wounded; and $1 trillion American dollars flushed down the toilet. In fact, he would honor them with the truth. But he won’t. I’d suggest he forgo a cup of Christmas wassail and, instead, swallow a chalice of shame.

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While shepherds watched their flocks by night,

All seated on the ground,

The angel of the Lord came down,

And glory shone around.

And glory shone around.

Nathan Tate

Nathan Tate, the son of an Irish clergyman, was born in 1652. He lived a tragic life. His father attacked and robbed, his home burned to the ground, Nathan eventually became a playwright and later the Poet Laureate of England. Unfortunately, he died an alcoholic in a debtor’s prison in 1715. Despite all of this, he gave us the beautiful Christmas hymn, While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks, which concludes with the hopeful words, “All glory be to God on high and on the earth be peace; good will henceforth from heaven to men begin and never cease.”

My mind goes back 39 years to a 1972 Christmas Eve when I was the minister at Trinity Episcopal Church in Martinsburg, West Virginia. I cannot remember what the weather was like or what I preached, but I do recall what was gong on in the world. 

What I remember quite clearly was the fact that while angels flew from the hymns and the Christmas manger story, American planes were conducting bombing raids on North Vietnam. Hanoi and the port city of Haiphong, in particular, were pummeled. Between the 18^th of December and the 30^th, American pilots few nearly 4,000 sorties. That included more than 700 B-52 flights, “area bombers,” capable of dropping bombs from a height beyond the sight of the flight crew. It was the first time we used these planes in an outright attack on cities. It was a terrorist attack by any definition of the word terror.

I was 37-years-old in 1972 and now I am 76. And still the bombs are falling. I have no church to tend to or pulpit from which to preach. But if I did, I would call attention to the fact that as we find ourselves this Christmas singing about angels heralding the arrival of the Prince of Peace, U.S. drones are hitting targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan with weaponry that is killing men, women and children—the kind of folks that fill church pews to hear the Christmas message—“peace on earth, good will toward all”

I know very well that I would also call attention to the shepherds who are a part of every Christmas pageant and placed in every crèche. They were the very first ones who received the message about the birth of Jesus, not from a gaggle of drones but from a flock of angels. Heavily romanticized, shepherds were, in fact, as one Biblical scholar puts it, “lower class.” They were considered by the upper class as “the scum of the earth.” Shepherds were thought of as thieves, “Reputed to steal as many sheep as they could during the night, out in those hills.” They were “known for their vulgarity, foul language, and lack of moral integrity. Shepherds were the lowest strata of Jewish society.”

This choice by God—the chosen ones taken from the bottom of the social and economic barrel—reminds me of the words from the old hymn Amazing Grace. “Amazing grace!  how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!”

It is a message about the so-called wretched of the earth, the disenfranchised—written about by Frantz Fanon— who will redeem the earth. It’s an appropriate Christmas message. I would only add, redeemed by the grace of God found among the meek who will inherit the earth– the same grace I see operative in the Occupy Wall Street folks, and the revolution taking place in the Middle East and parts of Asia where people, so many young people, are rising up to challenge the abusive power.

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Herod the King, in his raging,

Charged he hath this day;

His men of might, in his own sight,

All children young, to slay.

Coventry Carol

Three days into the 12 days of Christmas, the church calendar takes a sharp turn in a dark direction. December 28 is Holy Innocents Day, a sobering day set aside to remember the children slain by Herod. In the same way that Pharaoh had set out to kill all the male babies in order to do away with the newborn Moses, so too did Herod—Caesar’s representative—kill all the male babies in order to do away with the newborn Jesus.  

The Jews were under the boot of the Roman Empire when Jesus was born, as they had been under Pharaoh’s imperial rule. Occupied and oppressed. The holy people of God looked for the arrival of a messianic figure, like Moses, who would lead a revolution capable of overthrowing the conquering colonial power headquartered in Rome.

Three days into the 12 days of Christmas gifts will be exchanged at the local mall, Christmas trees will already appear in street gutters, there will be a rush to start a new year, life will go on its merry or not so merry way. Our nation, emulating imperial Rome, will continue to reward power with more power, bigger and bigger military contracts to support a militarism that contradicts all that the Prince of Peace came into the world to challenge and overcome with his nonviolent love.

The birthing narrative begun in a wooden manger in Bethlehem is an invitation to a story that will inevitably lead to more wood, the hard wood of a tree in Jerusalem. In between the birth and crucifixion of Jesus will be a story that invites all who are able to recognize nonviolence as the resurrecting power required to address the wounds of a war-weary world.

“O come let us adore him” are words from the much-loved hymn, O Come All Ye Faithful. They will be sung with deep emotion by Christmas Eve worshipers. But this adoration will be meaningless if it fails to lead to a discipleship willing to engage the conflict inevitable for real change to take place around our priorities and the priorities of our nation.

Frederick Douglass put it well when he said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” That could well be the clarion call for Christians, and non-Christians alike, to engage and challenge the powers-that-be which are based in greed and hell-bent on the use of violence to protect a selfish way of life. The message of a confrontational Jesus must be preached, taught and lived by Christians or else the Babe born in Bethlehem will be stillborn, unable to be the source of rebirth for people yearning to be freed from the greed that spawns poverty and relentlessly and inevitably leads to war.  

It is said by some that God writes with a crooked line. Lawrence Ferlinghetti writes poetry with a crooked line. I give you a few lines from  his poem Christ Climbed Down as my way of pointing to what I’ve so feebly been trying to say in this issue of Notes.

Christ climbed down

from His bare Tree

this year and ran away to

where there were no rootless Christmas trees

hung with candycanes and breakable stars.

 

Christ climbed down

from His bare Tree

this year and softly stole away into

some anonymous Mary’s womb again

where in the darkest night of everybody’s soul

He awaits again

an unimaginable

and impossibly

Immaculate Reconception

the craziest

of Second Comings.

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