It’s a little after 2 in the morning in Christmas day. We’ve just gotten back from midnight mass at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in downtown Columbus, Ohio. My nieces and nephews are squealing and have a third go-round at the Christmas desserts in the dining room. The fact that they range in age from 19 to 31 does not diminish their childlike enthusiasm.
During Mass, I couldn’t help but think, “Who is this guy whose birth we’re celebrating?” The facts of His life stood in stark contrast to the comfortable audience with whom I was worshipping Him tonight: born to a working man (a carpenter), an unwed teenage couple, literally homeless (no room at the inn, the manger, remember?), who would grow up to hold no official positions of power, and would eventually be executed because His beliefs were so threatening to those who did hold power. A life that I imagine was quite a bit different than the bulk of folks who gathered in His name tonight in the lovely cathedral, built 126 years ago, a middle class crowd in the middle of America, would today deem respectable.
I am truly blessed to have such a lovely home where I can spend my Christmas (quite unlike a cold and drafty stable), a family to share my holiday with (not in an unfamiliar city, far from home, surrounded by strangers), and a level of material comfort beyond the wildest dreams of the overwhelming majority of people on this planet (2 billion of whom live on less than $1 dollar a day). In other words, my life – like most American lives – bears little resemblance to Jesus’ life.
I often hear that we need to put the “Christ back into Christmas.” What exactly does that mean? For the right wing “culture warriors,” it means an inane campaign to “Save Merry Christmas” and save us all from the oppressive demand that we say “Happy Holidays’ or “Season’s Greetings.” I can’t imagine anything that the man named Jesus would have thoughts was a bigger waste of His followers’ time or bigger perversion of the meaning of His Gospel than this nonsense. He would instead be asking us to think of these born into the kind of circumstances He was – circumstances totally lacking in privilege – and to rededicate ourselves into extending the privileges we take for granted to those for whom they represent unimaginable luxury. I hear little about that at Christmas. It’s too bad.