Advent, Christmas, Epiphany

I have never simply re-posted something on my blog site, but this is a new year eh?  A pastor from Rochester Hills, Kenneth Tanner, whom I read on FB periodically, wrote this meditation on Christmas as practiced/envisioned by the Church.  With his permission, I reproduce it here.

I have fortunately been married to a Jew for near 40 years.  Our household reflects that wonderful tradition---no Santa’s, fake trees, and Black Friday storms. I just find it kind of, at best, superfluous --- especially when accompanied by appeals to “Remember the reason for the Season.”

For the last couple of years my own devotions have carried me toward celebrating Advent, Christmas in 12 days, and Epiphany.  So, this essay by Tanner says a whole lot about Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany that warms me.  Enjoy and be filled.

I love it when the retail-driven cultural Christmas draws to a close and the ancient, worship-oriented celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas begins.

Yet below the tinsel and lights and shopping malls and parades, there is a genuine longing in many (most?) to connect to the deep hope offered by the real Christmas.

And this anonymous desire for Christ, these pursuits of joy in disguise, indicate that many still understand that something authentic needs to be celebrated even if they cannot name the hope and peace and love they long for, and Christians need to rejoice that this is so.

When the rest of the world—and too many of my brothers and sisters in Christ—moves on, when the hustle and bustle of pre-Christmas frenzy comes to an abrupt close on December 26, then the church can get down to the authentic work of worship, of communion, of contemplating the unfathomable mystery that God has become human so that humanity might participate in the divine life.

An angelic messenger. A conception. A visitation. A prophecy. A census. A journey. No place to shelter the virgin. A cave. Oxen. Sheep. Shepherds. More angels. A birth. The profound humility of God in coming among us as a helpless, silent baby in obscurity and poverty, amid shit and straw. A woman clothed with the sun. A child with an iron scepter to rule the nations. A dragon. A cosmic battle between Light and darkness. Three Maji. Herod. Warnings in dreams. A slaughter of innocents. The flight of a refugee family from political terror.

Christmas is an endless story with innumerable chapters and yet an earth-bound event of blood, sweat, labor, dirt, and breath—of struggle with evil and glory in the highest—that changes everything in the cosmos, changes all times and spaces.

G.K. Chesterton understood a hundred years ago that we humans want to distract ourselves by ornamentation and sentimentality and kitsch from a life-converting, dramatic encounter with the deeper meaning of the Incarnation, from a meaningful encounter with Christmas, one that requires *everything* about us to change.

And part of the great rush to busyness and distraction is precisely that the real Christmas imposes serious challenges.

Real Christmas asks humanity to at last comprehend what manner of God made the world—One who discloses their eternal community in the weakness of a human child placed in a feed box—instead of projecting false gods from our vain imaginations, making idols of envy and anger and vindictiveness and hate and coercion and power that look all-too-human.

Real Christmas asks humanity to understand what it truly means to be human, and we are not human until by grace we become human as God is human.

Real Christmas answers both challenges with a person, with a Son, Jesus Christ, in whom the world encounters its genuine God and—for the first time—an authentic humanity.

Real Christmas challenges our politics. It says that all self-seeking rule, our tired struggle for domination of others, our desire to be “great” is at an end.

Real Christmas tells us that genuine authority and power is others-directed and self-sacrificial; that the real king does not seek his own, does not keep a record of wrongs, is not jealous or envious, or boastful or coercive but patient and kind and gentle and long suffering.

Real Christmas names Love as the very essence of the Creator and tells us that this God has become human, become flesh—forever—in Jesus the apprentice carpenter from Nazareth.

Real Christmas challenges our economics, our national identities, our international borders, our ethnic and family narratives, our sense that our tribe and way is the best and says there is now no distinction between rich or poor, young or old, male or female, Jew or Greek.

Real Christmas announces a new kingdom where everyone is welcome and cherished by the Father as co-heirs of an everlasting rule of love governed by a profound humility beyond description, that chooses to reveal itself to the cosmos it loves in unimaginable, surprising vulnerability and contingency.

Real Christmas challenges our violence and announces the arrival of a king who is not a warrior god but a peacemaker. Swords are beat into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks and humanity must now get back to creation care and koinonia, our true vocations.

Real Christmas is about God becoming flesh so that humanity can participate in the divine life. God becomes part of the human story, so that we might become part of the divine story. He shares in our blood so that we might share in his.

Real Christmas challenges us to leave our distraction, our endless activity, and enter the mystery, to slow down long enough so that we not only approach in utter awe this great Love lying in the feed box alongside Mary and Joseph but that we cease being mere spectators and *enter* this great revelation by contemplation, by meditation on this new way of being human that participates without disruption in the divine life on the pattern of Jesus Christ.

And then this real Christmas challenges us to get down to living this new humanity *now* for the life of the world, for the life of *this* without end world that God cherishes, on the pattern of our helpless infant God.

And so we mark time by the Word made flesh and this reorients us, helps us truly live our days on the pattern of his great humility.

A blessed Epiphany to all my Western Christian brothers and sisters, and a blessed Christmas Day to all my Eastern Rite Catholic and Orthodox Christian brothers and sisters. Christ is born! Much love and grace now and always.