(credit: Simon Law, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                               A Hopeful Christmas

Good day. Thank you for dropping by. I have one small announcement: the chamber of commerce has asked me to remind you that there are only three shopping days left till Christmas. Just kidding. I enjoy Christmas shopping like I enjoy drinking bleach.        

          But it is the meaning of Christmas for moderns that I want to write about today. And I promise from here on to be more serious.

What conclusions do we come to if we apply a moral realist model to the cultural phenomenon called “Christmas”? What do I see in this man who probably lived from about 4 B.C. to about 30 A.D.? I think harder about this question at Christmas time, as most of us do. We get fed up with how commercial Christmas has become.

The ads sometimes start before Remembrance Day, and I find that very hard to take. The men and women who fought in the wars that the nations of the world have been drawn into in the last century or so deserve a special time that is set aside just for them. November 11 is supposed to be that day. The rest of us ought to be setting aside time for them and showing respect, gratitude. Greedy merchants crowding into that time by advertising their Christmas junk infuriate me. I make a quiet vow when I see Christmas ads anytime before November 12 to be sure that I do not buy whatever it is those ads are trying to sell – ever again.

What I don’t like about Christmas right off is commercialism. I add to that, gluttony and drunkenness. We eat so much food and drink so many kinds of alcohol that we don’t need or even like.

 Feast of the Bean King (credit: Jacob Jordaens, via Wikimedia Commons)

Can anything save me from total disillusionment during the Christmas season? Yes. I couldn’t have said that for many years, but I can today. Ten years ago, I figured something out.  

The way of humans on this world for the most part has been to take as much as they can as often as they can. In our era, the philosophy of greed has even begun to threaten what once was taken for granted, namely the ecosystem of this planet. Perhaps in what I have to say today, I can give some hope to those of you who are beginning to despair at the indifference of our leaders toward environmental issues. But my main focus will not be on environmental issues because they weren’t issues in Jesus’ time. His main gift to the human race was something else.

The worst consequence of human greed for many centuries of our history on this planet has been the biggest crime that we do to each other. War. When earthquakes or hurricanes hit an innocent town or country, we grieve for the people there, we send help, and we do what we can. But basically, we can handle natural disasters. The horrors that people do to each other are in a different category altogether. A child can tell you that we have more than enough resources on this planet to feed, clothe, and shelter everyone in comfort. Our leaders’ sending us to war is not about making sure that people have enough to live in reasonable dignity. Wars are about vain people gaining face. It is realizing that simple truth that makes us feel so disillusioned with our own species.  

And let me not mince words or be vague here. Historians estimate that of the horrors that have happened to people because of the aggression of other people, more than ninety percent have been caused by governments, not by criminals. Wars and concentration camps, mostly. Mafia thugs are disgusting human beings, but they are small fry compared to the Hitlers and Stalins of the world. And the Shaka Zulus, the Genghis Khans, the Caesars, the Alexanders, and the Joshuas.

                    Gulag prison camp in Stalinist era (public domain) 

Where, then, does Jesus fit in?

War had been ugly and pointless for centuries before Jesus ever came on the scene. Everything any war ever accomplished could have been accomplished without any bloodshed at all, if the people involved had agreed to debate the issues openly, negotiate, and compromise. He saw that. He also saw even in 26 A.D. that humanity was on a course of self-destruction.

The ways of greed, politics and war and the improvements in our killing technologies can be thought of as lines on a graph of time. As the two lines climb forward across the graph, we watch in horror. We know that inevitably one day they will touch. At that point, we will finally make a weapon capable of wiping out the human race at the same time as the sea of politics casts up a leader who will use it. There is a kind of paralyzing, mathematical certainty to this graph. The lines are converging. Jesus saw this two thousand years ago: we are doomed to someday destroy ourselves if we do not change our very nature.

But then he put into his world a new way of seeing ourselves. He left us this: love one another as I have loved you. If you remember nothing else that I told you, remember this: love one another as I have loved you. You can do this. You really can. Just love your neighbor. Then all the good you can imagine will follow.  

In the middle of the Roman Empire, Jesus’ time was a time when war and the way of life that it forced people into were considered natural. Almost every person in that empire would have thought debating the matter was childish. If you had begun to argue that war might not be necessary, they would have told you, “Oh, grow up!” Many would have looked at you like you had just grown donkey ears. The main thing they prayed to their gods for was victory in battle.

Every one of the conquered peoples in the Roman Empire was seething to get even with the Roman conquerors. And of all of them, this was true especially of the Jews, the people among whom Jesus had been born and grown to manhood. They had secret group after secret group plotting sabotage and assassination all the time.

In this social milieu of rage and hate, people paid to go to arenas all over the Empire and watch men kill each other, right there in front of their eyes. 

And then he came along and said: “It doesn’t have to be this way. If a man hits you on one cheek, turn the other to him. If he grabs your jacket, offer him your shirt. If he wants to force you to walk a mile with him, walk three.” And he lived his values, all the way to his death. Others had said similar things, but Jesus, by the actions of his life and by his dramatic death, caused people to listen and remember.

Since those times, heroes all through history, even modern ones like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, have borne out Jesus’ simple philosophy. They have shown that with enough courage, the way of non-violence really can work. The rest of humanity has been less sincere in observing Jesus’ simple rule, but we have still gotten gradually kinder every century since Roman times.   

At first, the Romans didn’t consider Jesus’ ideas important. They thought his ideas were just stupid. But well after he was gone, his cult – and a cult is what it was to the Romans – kept growing. There was something about it that caught human feelings. Worst of all, it began to steal some of the sons and daughters of the Romans right in Rome. Many converts were young people, even teenagers, fed-up with the materialism and emptiness of their parents’ way of life.

The Roman Empire is long gone, as are so many others too numerous to list; Jesus’ words are still here.           

Was he divine? Was he who the churches claim he was? No, not to me. Or, to be exact, I believe he simply had a lot more of a quality that all of us have, the spiritual quality that can’t be explained by material forces alone.

But whether he was divine just does not matter. How would you ever prove such a proposition anyway? What matters is that he put into the mix of ideas that are passed back and forth by the human race, the simple notion that we really can solve our differences without fighting one another. And to me, therefore, he injected a new variable into the equations of human history. We may – may – if we can learn to love our neighbors …we may make it through the era of greed and violence and finally grow up. Emerge as a new kind of species, a differently-programmed species that no longer needs to keep itself fit by being its own predator.

Before him, our destroying ourselves was a mathematical certainty. Now there is that tantalizing little maybe. Maybe ...we can learn to love our neighbors.

For me, just seeing the truth of that one big principle is more than enough to keep me from cynicism at Christmas time. And it's that that I celebrate. Love your neighbor as yourself. Christmas, for me, is the time of year when I celebrate the fact that this gentle man entered into the flow of human history in the most warlike society that had ever existed, and changed the way human societies move across time. 

In short, he changed – everything.




                                 Plenitude of a Winter Stroll 
            (credit: Miguel Virkkunen Carvalho, via Wikimedia Commons)

So what if the lying, greedy politicians won this round? My struggle against them will go on. They can’t stop that as long as there is breath in my body. We have free will, and we have a truth to live by. The rest is up to us.  

Let materialism and greed fill the shopping malls to the roof with junk. They can’t discourage me. I believe in something real that is beyond all of that. 

We keep trying; we win some and we lose some; the struggle goes on. But there’s hope now. Before one guy, as I see human history, anyway, there was none.

Merry Christmas, lads and lassies. Enjoy your family and friends.

Quote by Marianne Williamson, often attributed to Nelson Mandela:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant or talented? Actually, who are you not to be? Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the spiritual glory that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our very presence liberates others.