| In the rather tacky, slapstick comedy movie Talladega Nights, comedian Will Ferrell plays a NASCAR driver named Ricky Bobby. Some of you know I love NASCAR. It's part of my Sunday afternoon ritual. So I had to see the movie.
There is a scene where Ricky Bobby is saying the blessing at the family dinner table. He starts the prayer with the invocation, "Dear Lord Baby Jesus." And after he has given thanks for all the fast food on the table and offered thanks for everyone gathered there, he continues, "Dear Lord Baby Jesus, we also thank you for my wife's father, Chip. We hope you can use your Baby-Jesus powers to heal him and his horrible leg." As he warms up for his next intercession, continuing, "Dear Tiny Infant Jesus..." his wife interrupts him saying, "Ah sweetie. Jesus did grow up. You don't always have to call him Baby. It's a bit odd and off-putting to pray to a baby." "Well, look," says Ricky Bobby, "I like the Christmas-Jesus best, and I'm saying grace. When you say grace, you can say it to grownup Jesus, or teenaged Jesus, or bearded Jesus, or whoever you want." So Ricky Bobby continues his prayer, "Dear Tiny Jesus, in your golden fleece diapers with your tiny little balled up fist..." and the whole table launches into an argument about what kind of Jesus is the right kind of Jesus.
It seems that our culture might agree with Ricky Bobby. Our culture likes the Christmas-Jesus best. Christmas is the most accessible of our Christian feasts. What is more universally appealing than a newborn baby? Defenseless and innocent, every infant is a symbol of hope, a new beginning. Christmas is a celebration that is easily embraced. It's the only time of the year when all of the radio stations sound alike. We hear Christmas carols in our cars, in our shops, and on our commercials.
It's not like that at Easter, although for our faith, Easter is a far more significant event. But you don't hear Easter hymns played on the radio. And most of the commercial attention focuses on the coming of spring and the coming of the bunny. It is easier to like the Christmas-Jesus than the Good-Friday-and-Easter Jesus.
What we find as we live through the whole Church Year is that there are many pictures of Jesus, many different aspects of his being.
At Christmas we celebrate the wonder of God's coming to us in such gentle and humble grace as through the birth of a child to a peasant couple in Bethlehem. The images of the story lend themselves to the warm fuzzies of romanticized nativity scenes with kneeling shepherds, angelic choirs, peaceful animals, and the exotic magi. Underneath is a more complex picture.
This family is displaced. They have returned to their tribal hometown because of the census ordered by the Emperor. Such a census allowed the occupying Roman authorities to tax the people more thoroughly, and so fund their own oppression. The family is temporarily homeless, and must count on the charity of others. There are dark overtones here. Earlier this morning we listened to the song attributed to Mary, the Magnificat, which imagines a reversal of power and economics in which the mighty are cast down and the lowly are lifted up, the hungry are filled and the rich sent away empty. It is a revolutionary text. Soon this family will become refugees fleeing the political violence of their home. There is so much more in this picture than "Dear Tiny Baby Jesus in your golden fleece diapers."
When this Jesus grows up and wears a beard, he will be a complex and complicated figure. He will challenge the social, political, and economic conventions of his day. He will touch and heal lepers and unclean women whom it was illegal to touch. He will declare a kingdom that is greater than Caesar's. He will open his table fellowship to people who do not even try to be good. He will treat foreigners and those from other religions with the same compassion and generosity he offers his own kindred. He will reject the expectations for a military Messiah who would punish and drive away the unjust and the enemy by force. Instead, he will turn the other cheek and go the extra mile with courageous nonviolence in the face of abusive power. He will expose the religious corruption of the Temple and challenge the authority of the state. He will demand daily bread and a full day's wage even for those who work but one hour. He will freely forgive the prodigal and call the most-righteous-ones hypocrites. This is not a child's story.
But it is a life-giving story. It is a story that does not shrink in the face of tragedy, injustice, exploitation, and alienation. It is the story of God embracing everything -- everything that happens to human beings -- from birth to death. It is God with us, healing brokenness, overcoming oppression, and reconciling estrangement.
In the fourth Christian century, St. Ambrose gave word to this sentiment with this prayer:
Lord Jesus Christ, you are for me medicine when I am sick;
you are my strength when I need help;
you are life itself when I fear death;
you are the way when I long for heaven;
you are light when all is dark;
you are my food when I need nourishment.
So on Christmas we pray happily and expectantly, even innocently, to our "Dear Lord Baby Jesus," singing with joyful angels and wondrous shepherds, knowing that this is only the beginning of the story. Later, when we need something more than the "Dear Tiny Infant Jesus," we know there is a grown up, fully mature Jesus who has confronted everything that can threaten us, and has triumphed through it.
Fourteen centuries after Ambrose, in 1868, as a wounded United States struggled to recover from civil war and from the assassination of its President Abraham Lincoln, the Rector of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia, Phillips Brooks wrote this:
O holy Child of Bethlehem descend to us we pray;
cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel!
Merry Christmas! |
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