Spikenard Sunday/Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut

Ponderings for Christmas

We start with the ridiculous and move toward the sublime. Or maybe it’s the other way round. Or ,maybe, even, the sublime is found in the ridiculous. Decide for yourself.

Christmas with Calvin and Hobbes

Does God “ever show himself and prove his existence”?

Nor do I!

Seems to work for Christians in the US, huh?

Martin Luther and the Christmas Tree

According to tradition, Luther may have also popularized the tradition of the Christmas tree as a way to express and teach theology to his family. The story goes that, while he was on his way home one evening, he became overwhelmed by the incredible beauty of a fir tree positioned against the backdrop of the brilliant starlit sky. He so desperately wanted to describe what he had seen to his family, but the words failed him. So he ventured back outside and chopped down one of these trees, bringing it home to share with his family. He even decorated the tree with candle tapers, mimicking the stars that hung over the manger where the newborn Messiah lay.

                And we need some kind of light in the kind of world we live in, don’t we?

                Oscar Romero, the Homily for the Second Sunday of Advent on the fourth of December of 1977: “Christ, the Center and the End Of All Human History.”

Without images to express it, my brothers, now our world seems like a jungle where we men are wild animals for other men. We beat each other up, we bite each other, we eat each other. But when we are converted, when we allow the Reign of God to enter into our hearts, there will not be wolf against wolf, there will not be a lion against a lamb. We will all be brothers and sisters who eat together, rich and poor. We will feel the fatherhood of the Reign of God. This is the Christmas that the Church desires.

Indeed!!

And there's much to distract and hinder us from embracing God’s wisdom!

                

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas

“God travels wonderful ways with human beings, but he does not comply with the views and opinions of people. God does not go the way that people want to prescribe for him; rather, his way is beyond all comprehension, free and self-determined beyond all proof. Where reason is indignant, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps us away: that is precisely where God loves to be. There he confounds the reason of the reasonable; there he aggravates our nature, our piety—that is where he wants to be, and no one can keep him from it. Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.”

The lack of mystery in our modern life is our downfall and our poverty. A human life is worth as much as the respect it holds for the mystery. We retain the child in us to the extent that we honor the mystery. Therefore, children have open, wide-awake eyes, because they know that they are surrounded by the mystery. They are not yet finished with this world; they still don’t know how to struggle along and avoid the mystery, as we do. We destroy the mystery because we sense that here we reach the boundary of our being, because we want to be lord over everything and have it at our disposal, and that’s just what we cannot do with the mystery…. Living without mystery means knowing nothing of the mystery of our own life, nothing of the mystery of another person, nothing of the mystery of the world; it means passing over our own hidden qualities and those of others and the world. It means remaining on the surface, taking the world seriously only to the extent that it can be calculated and exploited, and not going beyond the world of calculation and exploitation. Living without mystery means not seeing the crucial processes of life at all and even denying them.”

Dorothee Soelle, On Earth as in Heaven

“the boot of the empire crushes everything in its way in the narrative from Bethlehem to Golgotha.”

Yet grace surprisingly and unexpectedly stills finds us in our darkness.

Frederick Buechner from Whistling in the Dark

Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it in and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeedas a matter of cold, hard factall it's cracked up to be, then even at best our efforts are misleading.

The Word become flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not touching. It is not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space/time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God . . . who for us and for our salvation," as the Nicene Creed puts it, "came down from heaven."

Came down. Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see. It is the Resurrection and the Life she holds in her arms. It is the bitterness of death he takes at her breast.

In all this theology takes on human flesh in the midst of the very lives we experience together.

Athanasius, The Incarnation of the Word

“He became what we are that we might become what he is”

The Miracle of Christmas – Karl Barth

1)      The inclusion of Bethlehem, Caesar Augustus, and Quirinius in the Christmas narrative reminds us that this not a myth, a legend, or fairy tale, nor even a morality tale of “peace and goodwill to all men.”

2)      Not only is Christmas a mystery of God with us, it is a miracle of God with us.

3)      “The message of Christmas already includes within itself the message of Good Friday.”

Born to Die, Died to Live, Lives to Reign – Lee Wyatt

Born to die – that’s Christmas. Emmanuel – God with us. All the way down to the grave!

Died to live – that’s Easter. God for us. All the way beyond our life and death to new life!

Lives to Reign – that’s Ascension and Pentecost. God in us. All the way. Every day. Forever. New Life for us!

Merry Christmas!