Christmas 2019 Meditation

by Bill Lyons

“We are all meant to be mothers of God . . . for God is always needing to be born.”

Meister Eckhart

One Christmas I ventured into the kitchen at Grandma’s house. She and my mom and my aunt were scurrying to clear the table, put away food, and wash dishes, all while chattering about this church friend, that neighbor, or some distant relative’s Christmas letter. Their movements were fluid, fast-paced, and well-rehearsed from years of repetition. I could only imagine their energy before dinner. 

Until that particular Christmas, I had only known the “living room” side of family holidays. The guys sat lazily on comfortable furniture, predicted outcomes of college bowl games, avoided politics (it wasn’t safe then either but for different reasons), and stared at the tree. We kids piled presents neatly at everyone’s traditional seats, so as to be ready the moment our hostesses emerged. How different these two distinct experiences of the same day were!

The Nativity narrative sounds very “living room” to me this year, telling the tale from the guys’ point of view. The Holy Couple’s journey seems to be all about Joseph. The innkeeper pointed to the stable from his establishment’s doorway. Shepherds (almost always males then) experienced the wonder of an angelic birth announcement. Privileged Magi decoded a star’s mysterious meaning and called on the king of Judea before delivering beneficent gifts to a different king’s impoverished family. Yes definitely, a carol-inspiring guys lens on Christmas. I imagine Mary describing Jesus’s birth quite differently.

There can be no question that she was uncomfortable at that point in her pregnancy. Her mother tried to hide her worry while Mary smiled through her own fear and anxiety at the prospect of leaving the familiarity and support network of her hometown. The shifting backbone of a walking donkey is no friend to a widening cervix. We aren’t told exactly when Mary’s water broke, if she thought her back pain was just from the 4- to 7-day trip, or just how long she was in labor. At some point, the contractions got closer together, lasted longer, and wrenched a first baby through a virgin’s birth canal. Where was the epidural, the episiotomy? Were there any experienced mothers or midwives at the manger?! Or was it only an inexperienced Joseph holding her hand, telling her to breathe, that it would be OK, sweating beside her albeit for different reasons. 

Not all births had happy outcomes then – or now. But when they did, when they do, a feeling that ‘everything is right with the world’ arrives too.  Sometimes it comes after the first cry and baby turns pink, or after the last push and the placenta’s exit, or maybe even after the OMG moment that this baby is beautiful and ours. Sometimes it settles in after the relief that baby has latched onto mommy’s nipple and is nursing. It’s the realization that a miracle just happened. And with that moment, everything that mommy’s just been through yields to the joy of what’s just happened and what can happen next.

All of that had to have been part of Matthew’s, “Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way,” (Matthew 1:18) but no one recorded it. We have trouble remembering it.  And we need to remember – especially in these days – we need to remember how the birth of Jesus happened for Mary if we are going to live into our roles as “mothers of God.”

John’s never-read-at-Christmas account of Jesus’s birth makes our ‘mother of God’ role crystal clear (Rev. 12). And no wonder we don’t read it! An expectant mother is about to give birth while an incarnation of evil waits to catch and devour her baby the moment the child is delivered. For John, we (the Church) are that expectant mother, the agent through which Jesus arrives in our time and our place. And just like Mary’s experience, our delivery of the Christ in the world is fraught with fears, painful and exhausting, and includes blood, sweat, and tears. But we don’t really want to hear that version of the nativity on Christmas Eve. 

Neither do we want to hear the after-birth Gospel accounts about the Holy Family fleeing for their lives and seeking asylum in Egypt, or the ensuing slaughter of Bethlehem’s children under age two. Still, those stories are part of the Holy Family’s Christmas experience. Tragically, stories like those are the Christmas experience still of too many families in poverty, facing violence, being trafficked, at our country’s borders, separated, and in detention. 

I wonder exactly when Christmas became the story of Jesus coming into the world to deliver individuals from personal sin. That wasn’t Mary’s experience. Mary’s song about Christmas (Luke 1:46-55) was about bringing down the mighty and filling up the hungry. Delivering Jesus into the world was a painful, messy, labor-intensive task. But the outcome was, and is, new life in our midst! Mary’s lens on Christmas promised a time when everything would be made right again. As long as we are willing to be “mothers of God” and deliver Jesus into our world, Christmas still holds that promise. 

When Jesus does arrive through our acts of charity, advocacy, generosity, solidarity, or justice restored, we can experience, like I imagine Mary experiencing, the truth of John’s words: When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. (John 16:21) May these Twelve Days of Christmas revive and renew you, strengthen and encourage you, empower and embolden you as mothers of God in our time. May joy be yours every time you bring Jesus into the world, joy so profound that everything you just went through in the process melts into God’s forgiving forgetfulness.  And be assured of this: everything in that moment is right with the world. 

This Unholy Christmas

by Abigail Conley

This Christmas seems to be a Christmas of lasts. An aunt is dying and this will be her last Christmas by any reasonable account. My mom was diagnosed with dementia earlier this year, and while medication is staving off some symptoms, that won’t last forever. “Rapidly progressing” was added to the diagnosis. In less than six months, she went from working full-time to not making sense in phone conversations. Hindsight says there may have been earlier signs, but no matter what, I imagine she will be much less of the mom I cherish by this time next year. I’m walking with lay leaders snagging moments with loved ones, knowing this is the last Christmas together. 

All of that is terrible, and brings some wonderful with it, and is exactly what we expect from life. Some years and seasons are better than others. But as I read the story of the Magi’s visit with a bible study a couple weeks ago, I was reminded of the strange and profound re-writing of history that Christians did. Matthew, the only Gospel writer to tell of the Magi’s visit, does all sorts of acrobatics to tie this experience of Jesus to the Old Testament. He cites verse after verse, assuring us, “This is what those people were talking about.”

If you go back and read the original texts, what Matthew says is about Jesus is never about Jesus. Read Isaiah all the way through at face value if you don’t believe me. Yet, here he is, re-writing, re-telling, certain of God’s faithfulness in the quoted texts and in the experience of Jesus. Facts are being rewritten in favor of Truth. 

One of my rabbi friends was appalled the day I told him that many Christians’ understanding of redemption is that a ransom was paid by Christ or a purchase made. Redeemed ends up wrapped up in the cross. With all the horror still on his face, he said, “You mean it’s not that God can take something terrible and make something good out of it? Like the holocaust?” I liked his definition better for sure, but I readily admitted that was a definition that would have to be supplied and agreed upon. It was not the assumed definition. 

I say that because Christians do not have a corner on God’s ongoing work in the world. Sometimes we think we do for sure, but we are not alone among the people who believe God still intervenes in this place. Nor are we alone in our understanding that we participate in God’s work. 

We are a bit alone in the Trinity, though. Even those of us who reject the notion of the Trinity are still wrestling with it. I can go most ways on the Trinity, but I do like that one of the claims of the Trinity is that the prophetic Spirit that was with Isaiah made its home with the church. We are always Spirit-led, Spirit-breathed people. I wonder about what it means so many years later for our Jewish family, but I am still amazed by the permission given by the Spirit for Matthew to rewrite history. 

And I said all the Spirit stuff to come back to this: lasts are still holy. We have permission to figure out the new thing. We do not sit back waiting for God to do God’s thing. We make choices, and we do so with prayer and discernment trust the Spirit remains with us through that. Some of God’s best work even seems to come in impossible interruptions that are made holy. 

So as we sit in these days with the prophets roused by the Spirits, and the Magi called by a star, and the Shepherds beckoned by angels, and a holy family that definitely wasn’t feeling so holy to start with, keep deep hope even through the lasts. For God still calls and leads, even you.