By Bishop Paul V. Marshall
December 2008
[This is Bishop Paul Marshall's December 2008 column for secular newspapers throughout our 14 counties. It is published by The Morning Call, Allentown, on the first Saturday of every month. It usually appears also in ten additional papers. The combined circulation of papers that publish the column regularly is more than 400,000. More than 130 columns have been published over the past 12 years. If your paper does not publish the column and you would consider bringing it to the attention of the editor, please email Bill Lewellis.]
Oscar Levant once said that if you look behind the phony tinsel of Hollywood, you will find… the real tinsel. I was struck by that remark because I like a lot of tinsel on my Christmas tree. When I hold my tinsel aside, however, I see not more tinsel, but the challenge of Christmas.
Christmas always brings me a challenge to belief and to sentimentality. I cannot see this birth as a mere symbol. Take the poverty of manger scene. The adult Jesus did not ever, even once, identify with the poor. He was poor, all the time, from the nativity on. There's quite a difference, the difference between interest and commitment.
Similarly, Christians do not look at the manger and think of God identifying with the human condition: they believe that God enters the world and shares our lot. Believing that is the challenge.
I see a challenge to belief because the horrors of human evil are as real now as they were when Jesus was born. The mysteries of disease, pain, and suffering remain the greatest unsolved philosophical problems. The world is populated then as now with liars, cheaters, bullies, and bureaucrats. It is a world where then as now everybody has to die and there is plenty of suffering.
In that world, Christians saw God appearing not as the avenging warrior for whom some ancient sages had looked, but as vulnerable as one can be: as a baby, gently subverting the strong, the loudmouthed, the manipulators, the arrogant, yet appearing in simplicity, totally dependent on those around him.
It is always something of a privilege to be invited to "hold the baby" when they are new and properly waterproofed. Holding and trying to communicate with a baby, perhaps hoping it will hang on to a finger, is a moment when we, too, enter a different, less guarded, state. The point of telling infancy stories about the one who was to die bravely and rise mightily is to remind us that we are invited to a relationship with the divine that is never built on force. It is built on vulnerability, intimacy, and complete trust.
This is not to reduce the Christian religion to a club for innocuous ne'er-do-wells whose integrity is fulfilled only when they fail or someone uses them for a doormat. Intimacy, trust and vulnerability take lots of work. Christians must engage what is amiss in our culture, and do so non-violently. Vulnerability requires courage. The starving and undereducated children of the world need our constant care. Liking babies requires sacrifice.
The sacrifice is bearable because we know the rest of the story. As we watch the story begun at Christmas, it will reveal the living of unsentimental, faithful, and consistent love in the face of evil that is offered at Calvary and vindicated in Joseph's lovely garden.
Governments and individuals sometimes fear that sort of committed love because it cannot be controlled — and because it answers to a standard higher than expediency. Some tough guys, "real men" and "high-T" women heap scorn on the message, because acknowledging it would expose the fear and anger that so often produces their aggression.
In vulnerability, there can be community. In trust, the power of God. In simple honesty with ourselves about ourselves, grace can flourish. In swallowing pride and accepting acceptance from God or one another, a new creation can take place. That’s the news at Christmas.
When, in our Spirit-led imaginations, this child reaches up for us to hold it, we realize what Adam and Eve forgot for just one fatal moment: what God wants from us before all else is love. The rest will follow.
[The Rt. Rev. Paul V. Marshall is bishop of the Diocese of Bethlehem, 14 counties of eastern and northeastern Pennsylvania. His recently published book, Messages in the Mall: Looking at Life in 600 Words or Less (Seabury), is a collection of ten years of his monthly columns for newspapers. Additional columns and sermons by Bishop Marshall are available at www.diobeth.org.]
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