December 19, 2010

There’s a lot about Madison with which I am unfamiliar yet. Oh, Corrie and I know how to get around town, of course, and we certainly have our favorite restaurants and shops, and after a year and a half our circle of friends and acquaintances continues to grow. But there’s a lot that I still don’t know, a lot that takes getting used to. One of the most interesting things for me is exploring Madison’s curious relationship toward religion and specifically toward Christianity. I had one of those encounters this week that reminded me I’m not in the south anymore.

I ran into an acquaintance this week on the street. It’s someone I’ve gotten to know through some of the work I do with downtown businesses and residents. Our conversation turned as conversations do in this time of year, to holiday plans. At one point in the conversation, her voice became rather tentative, and she asked a question, fearful of my response. She wondered whether her family would be welcome at our services on Christmas Eve—if that was allowed. I was taken aback by her question. I assumed it would be obvious to anyone that they were welcome to attend services anytime, but especially at Christmas. Apparently that’s not the case.

As I thought about that exchange, it occurred to me that it is another example of how Christianity is perceived by many in our culture. It may be that for some of our neighbors, the thought of attending church is as exotic as going to a mosque or a hindu temple. Or perhaps, the shrill voices of conservative Christians have so alienated many, that they fear how they would be greeted if they entered a church.

This brief encounter is a reminder of the hard work we have to do to get our message—no, the message of the good news of Jesus Christ—heard in the cacophony of our culture. It’s not just that secularism runs rampant. No, the greater problem is the way that Christianity has been hijacked for political purposes, taken over by people who want only to consolidate their own power and marginalize other points of view. It’s quite a far cry from the message conveyed by the gospel writers. But even that message has been hijacked to some degree, reinterpreted and repackaged to strip it of its power and its challenge to us.

The Christmas story is so familiar to us—indeed, the church and Christianity are so familiar to us—that the prospect of looking on them in new ways, with new eyes, seems impossible. How many times have we heard the story of Jesus’ birth? Is it possible to visit them anew? Moreover, for many of us, looking at them with too close scrutiny is threatening, because our scientific and historical worldviews challenge many of the details of these stories.

In fact, our tendency is to conflate the nativity stories told by Matthew and Luke into a single narrative, even they differ in most details. There are only a few details on which the two stories agree. One is that Jesus is born in Bethlehem, even though he is called Jesus of Nazareth. Another is of course the virgin birth, through the Holy Spirit; a third that the conception occurs during the engagement of Joseph and Mary. The fourth is that Jesus is brought up by Mary and Joseph.

In Matthew’s telling, Joseph takes center stage. It is he who is visited by an angel and told that the child she is carrying is the Savior. Matthew describes Joseph as a “righteous” man. We can take that to mean that he was a good, law-abiding Jew. He knew Torah and he knew how to keep the commandments. We want to know more about Joseph and Mary. They capture our imagination, just as the shepherds and wise men do.

But none of them are the focus of the story. It is the one who is born, not the characters in the pageant who should be the focus of our attention. Matthew shapes the story to put our focus on the Christ child in a number of ways. First, he uses a framing device that is present in the Greek, but not in our English translations. His story begins, “Now the birth of Jesus took place in this way. The word translated as birth is the Greek word “Genesis.” And it appears here in 1:18 for the second time in Matthew’s gospel–. Genesis is actually the second word of the gospel.

So Matthew wants his reader to think of Jesus’ birth in the context of the creation story. But there’s another important structural link in this story with the gospel as a whole. When the angel tells Joseph about the child Mary is bearing, he instructs him to name him “Emmanuel—God with us.” The gospel ends with Jesus words to his disciples before he leaves them and ascends to heaven: “Lo, I will be with you always, even until the end of the age.”

Matthew’s gospel, beginning and ending, is about God’s presence in our midst. Matthew is not just proclaiming a miraculous birth of a savior, as powerful and important as that is. He is also making a claim about the nature of God’s presence among us. To link Jesus’ birth with creation is to make a claim about what kind of God is present among us. That is to say, we experience God as creator. But unlike those who want to believe God’s creative activity took place only once—and they often want to place that creative act 6000 years ago, God continues to create. We can see God creating and sustaining the universe around us every day.

But that’s still not enough for Matthew. For by linking creation with incarnation, he is confessing that we can see God’s creative activity most clearly in Jesus Christ. That’s the mystery of the incarnation and the mystery of our faith.

Christmas has become a battlefield for the culture wars. It has also become a frenzy of consumerism and tea leaves for our economic health. But before and beyond all that, it is also about God, about God’s relationship with the world and with us.

Whatever else we do in the next week—whatever celebrations and parties and shopping—let us remember that. To see God in the manger in Bethlehem, to believe that God has come among us and remains with us.

Joseph had a choice. When he discovered Mary was pregnant, he could have done the right thing—the right thing in Jewish law being to divorce her quietly. But when the angel came and told him that she was bearing the Messiah, he said yes. He opened himself to the possibility of God’s ongoing creative activity in the world. He opened himself to the possibility that God might be doing something new.

We cannot know, we cannot even fathom such a thing as confronted Joseph. But we can, like him, open our selves to that some possibility, to look for God’s redemptive presence among us, in the world and culture that surrounds us. We can also offer that redemptive presence to all those we encounter, in the coming days, and throughout our lives. When we do so, we participate in God’s great ongoing creative work in the world.