While I work on #4 in the Word Series, if you have time, here’s this:

REPRISED from December 20, 2018

“A CHRISTMAS THOUGHT NOT SUITABLE FOR A CARD”  

This isn’t Christmas card suitable,” I wrote in 2018. It’s more like, “Merry Christmas. Let me mess up the message.” I confess, like math, cosmology, and my mom’s recipe for baked green-beans, the traditional, mythical, Christmas story may well benefit from an honest review.

Here then, my revisionist’s view of Christmas. Like my sourdough starter, the content actively expanded as I wrote, so for your reading ease, I’ve added chapters (of a sort). Take a break between. You know, turn to the twenty things yet not done but should have been—yesterday. Then, come back to think about Christmas. 

CHAPTER ONE - It Wasn’t Easy

Slip your mind back to about 3BC (or BCE if you prefer). Most of the world’s 200 million people were settled around the Ganges, Tigris, Yangtze, Nile and Po rivers. My mind moves toward the Po, to the one million or so people that benefitted from its irrigation near Europe’s number one city, Rome. The bulk of its inhabitants were slaves crowded in kitchen-less, multi-storied fire-trap dwellings. Next to being a slave? The worst jobs there? Butcher, doctor, or dog dung collector. 

In filthy Rome, the well-bathed Augustus Caesar ruled, Livy, the historian wrote, gladiators fought animals or other guys to the death before cheering, bread-chomping crowds of thousands, mostly the poor. More than half the children born in Rome died before the age of ten and newborns, by a father’s choice, were either kept or discarded by being abandoned at city walls. Slave-makers or wild dogs kept the walls cleared. The childhood mortality rate in the ancient Roman empire, is calculated, at least 40% of births. 

 

Meanwhile, in Roman controlled Israel, fathers also ruled families, but babies were not thrown to wild dogs. Children were kept. Kept but not coddled. This was not the 21st century. Female people were less valuable than oxen since oxen earned income. A father could, and by his daughter’s twelfth birthday usually did, give her over to marriage. And marriage, if rightly managed, meant children. 

 How old was the mother of Jesus when she was betrothed to an older man (tradition says, a widower with children)? How old when her first child was born? 

As if the youngster, Mary, didn’t have enough to worry about, about the time she was to deliver, she was perched on a donkey’s back for a ninety-mile trek alongside the Jordan River, and over Jerusalem’s hills before entering besieged Bethlehem where, well, where her child will be born.

If we have our Christmas story right, Mary may well have feared delivery along the way, but fear rarely comes unaccompanied. The truly crappy command of Rome’s Caesar Augustus required this barely-into-womanhood girl to travel with her husband, Joseph, and hordes of others, from Nazareth town (where she might already have installed nursery necessities), to the census-counting-crowded town of Bethlehem, a town that offered not a nudge of care concerning her need to rest, or for heaven’s sake, to deliver a child an angelic visitor said would “be great.” God only knows how many outsiders were now in town. What we know is that by the time Mary made it, “there was no room.” Great. 

Like she wasn’t uncomfortable enough. Add the fear all travelers traded among themselves—of radical Jewish terrorists, the Sicarii, the “dagger-men,” who moved through crowds, set on throwing off Rome’s control, who slipped up on perceived traitors among their own people, stabbed stealthily, fatally, then sneaked off to erase that name from their kill list.

Let’s remember this, especially we who call the Christian Christmas Story a celebration. Let’s remember that this girl’s story was in its time, an inconvenient, perhaps even terrifying reality. I don’t hear jingling bells. That which we call Christmas wasn’t very Merry for Mary.

 CHAPTER TWO - It Wasn’t December

It certainly wasn’t December, this holy birth we celebrate as rain falls in the PNW and snow covers my daughter’s yard in NYC (2018). If I read rightly, shepherds didn’t work Judaean fields in December. Nor did calls for census occur in winter when temperatures could drop to freezing and roads of Judea were ridiculously wet with persistent rainfall and nearly impossible to travel.

Cut to the chase: it is likely that Jesus was born in late summer or early fall. Why then, December? 

Very early on, well not so very early, 4th century likely, around the time of Christian emperor Constantine, it seems that The Church borrowed the raucous, wild, way out of control pagan celebration time as a safe time to quietly celebrate the birth of God’s son. Pagans were, for the most part plowed, plastered, partying big time; plenty distracted and paying little attention to what their sober neighbors were doing in small house gatherings, remembering and retelling the story of Jesus birth. Ah! So, December celebrations first belonged to pagans? Solstice and the Sun, the world’s light appearing; the Roman week of honoring the agricultural god, Saturn—feasting, drinking, giving gifts, hanging sprigs of mistletoe, being joyful. Oh, those trees with ornaments? Romans did it first. They hung ornaments of gods on festive trees. Caroling: thank you Anglo-Saxons who went a’ “waes hael” ing,  singing their hearts out, wassailing, wishing “good health,” loudly singing to banish evil spirits, and that, not without plenty mulled ale. If the report is right, Saint Francis borrowed this good practice, baptized it, sometime in the 13th century.

We could go on, but why? Seems we’ve borrowed more than a date, and pagan trappings. We’ve added lots of shopping, our own styles of sipping, movies, and Charlie Brown’s Christmas. We love it all, and we should. It’s just that we need to be polite about sharing the season.

CHAPTER THREE - SHEPHERDS

Back to Mary’s delivery of a boy-child. Back to Bethlehem, back to “shepherds in the fields.” Back to our Christian tradition of casting shepherds as outcasts, low-lifers barred from Temple worship or from witnessing in a court of law. The very idea that angels brought those guys the good news brings pleasure. “Unto you is born this day . . .” We like that God honored the unqualified, the wet-wool smelling, ceremonially unclean guys. We like the idea—until it comes to our personally caring for people such as that. God can. Often, we’d rather not.

Here’s a Think About It: In the Jewish Bible, shepherding was an honorable, family way of life (Abraham, Moses, King David, guilty of much, but not of shepherding. Even God (“The Lord is my Shepherd”). And in the Christian Bible, Pastors, Elders, even Jesus, get assigned the gentle role of shepherding. Matthew writes that out of Bethlehem will “come a leader who will shepherd my people, Israel.” And, Saint John, well, John refers to his dear friend, Jesus, as the “Good Shepherd.” Case made.

True, Aristotle had a low opinion of shepherds, calling them “the laziest, . . . those who lead an idle life.” They “get their pay from tending tame animals that wander around, looking for pasture.” The shepherds (stupid, in his opinion) “simply follow them around.” Aristotle was no friend of shepherds. But that was the fourth century BCE. Apparently, much later, long after the time of Gospel writing, Jewish opinion of shepherds also drop below the “I want this guy as my friend,” social level. But, at the time of Jesus’ birth? Angels sang to shepherds and while their work made them ceremonially unclean, they were essential workers, and the people who heard their report were “astonished.” That’s about all we know about the shepherds. 

CHAPTER FOUR—LUCKY LOSERS

Recently, I was reminded by a pastor possessing powerful preaching skills, of another part of the Christmas story mostly ignored yet highly significant, and certainly worthy of mention. No, not that among the first to worship Jesus were unnamed and unnumbered pagans, wise though they were, bearing gifts, and traveled afar. Rather, what I want to call attention to is what many people work to cover up, to hide, to outgrow, to deny: family history. 

Matthew, the gospel writer committed himself to convincing worshippers of Yahweh that Jesus fulfilled the role of the longed-for Messiah. You know—a king, a restorer of Israel’s glory, the destroyer of oppressors, one to usher in and re-establish King David’s throne, granting Israel the right to thumb its nose at oppressors: Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Syria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and one particularly hated Idumaean then reigning over the Jews. You know, all those powers that brutally trod upon Jewish history. To exalt Jesus, Matthew began his writing with an important but embarrassing rollcall: Jesus’ family history. Matthew lays it out. Fourteen generations—all the way back to Abraham. It’s not an altogether pretty review. I doubt Jesus would win admittance to some of our finer private societies by waving the branches of his family tree. 

Trust me, in the family tree of the One of whom we sing “Oh Come Let Us Adore Him,” and to whom we dedicate December 25th, we find pagans, cowards, rapists, rotten parent, misogynist, harlots, foreigners, murderers, connivers, major betrayer, sniveling sneaks, bullies, and scandal-makers. And they are listed by name! I’ll admit that not now do I, nor have I ever, much liked Jacob (he’s a major limb); or, for that fact, his mother, Rebekah. I prefer the fine man, Esau, but Esau got lopped off. 

“Oy vey,” I would think, were I a first century Jew listening to Matthew the tax-collector (now, that was a truly despised job—tax-collector) as he tried to convince me to celebrate what he found highly significant—the very incarnation of deity. Some of the characters in the family tree ought to have stopped listeners, even those who listen today, in their tracks. But I, we, don’t have stop time. 

We are hurrying into Target to finish up our pagan shopping; decorating our pagan trees, hanging lights, placing elves and stuffed stockings, humming our secular Christmas tunes as we scratch an uncle off the dinner list and add the unexpected girlfriend of our kid coming home from college. We have turned this incomprehensibly holy happening into a happy but harried, and mostly unholy holiday. What the heck? How do we explain “God with us” to our children who sit on Santa’s lap for a photo? It’s not an easy thing, this secular/spiritual December event we Christians and non, busily, blithely celebrate.

 We don’t have time to imagine Mary’s misery, or the fright brought upon sleepy shepherds in a dark field by the racket of voices from the sky. We sure as heck don’t want to ponder whether God accepted the reverence of pagans come from, and returned to, “afar.” Or, what about King Herod—why would we remind ourselves (at Christmas time!) of this interloping Idumaean’s insane fear of losing his rule—to the point of slaughtering boy babies in his attempt to “off” baby Jesus. Or this, do we take time to regret that the honored “holy family” was forced to flee to Egypt? I mean, enough is enough. 

No. We are Dreaming of a White Christmas, longing for at least one Silent Night before travels by air or automobile; or at least before chasing off late for an hour given (reluctantly—we are so darned busy) to a Christmas Eve church service, after which, finally, the grand finale of gifts and gadgets, eggnog and mistletoe, music and mischief, friends and families, goose or ham or turkey. You know, the important stuff.  

I’m thinking about Christmas. I do love much of what occurs around this time of celebration, even while acknowledging the presence of sadness alongside joy. But it is Christmas, celebrated in both secular and spiritual ways by both Christians and non. I think it’s all good, so I wish you a Merry One.