By Ken Sehested
We have a problem. On the one hand, gift-giving is not only fun but is also a reflection of our most cherished convictions. Maybe the deepest current of Scripture is God’s gift-giving character, with the parallel notion of recipients being transformed into givers themselves, partners in God’s gratuitous drama. Gratitude is the root of our piety, gift-giving its flower.
On the other hand, the spirit of consumerism — particularly around the Christmas season — is choking the life out of us (literally so, given the environmental impact of accumulated trash). “Shop ’til you drop” is more than a populist parody. It is a prophetic judgment.
In North America we are entrapped in an economic system whose very success depends on waste, gluttony and overconsumption. In the final months of each year major media are dominated by holiday consumer-spending forecasts.
Like all systems, consumerism is driven by a kind of spirituality — in this instance, one that is in direct competition for our souls. “You get what you deserve” is its invocation; “you have what you hoard” its doxology; “you are what you can buy” its benediction. It bootlegs an atheism — an implicit rejection of God’s gratuitous nature — more potent than any mere philosophical statement denying God’s existence.
Quite naturally, many gift-givers recoil in the face of this travesty. In overreaction, we begin to disdain extravagance. Like Judas, grumbling over the wastefulness of a woman’s expensive anointment of Jesus, we begin to begrudge lavish gifts. Like Scrooge, we grow cynical about festivity. It is an understandable response to the commercialization of life and the monetizing of familial relations.
But such cynicism is wrong.
Maybe you’ve seen the cartoon depicting two monks in a darkened monastery hallway, one holding a candle. The other monk says, “Sometimes it’s more emotionally fulfilling to simply curse the darkness!”
All of us — every last one of us — are caught in this system, often in ways we don’t realize. Simply opting out, refusing to celebrate Christmas, seems more like cursing the darkness. A life devoid of festivity is no way to live.
I’m the last person wanting to rev up the annual culture war over “putting Christ back in Christmas.” The “holiday values” crowd seems oblivious to the fact that, for many decades, the early Pilgrims (and other religiously dissenting immigrants) refused to commemorate Christmas, claiming it to be a pagan holiday. From 1659 to 1681 the celebration of Christmas was actually illegal in Boston. Christmas wasn’t declared a national holiday for another two centuries.
Moreover, most believers should recoil at the Supreme Court’s verdict that a public Nativity scene display can be reduced to “a passive symbol” that “engenders a friendly community spirit” and “serves the commercial interests” of the merchants. It’s rather chilling to think Jesus’ birth, which so terrorized Herod, could become such a timid courthouse crèche, called into promotional service for Santa’s retail assistants.
The church can be a place to foster discussions of serious and long-term strategies for resisting the consumerist spirit of our age, particularly around Christmas. Our congregation, for instance, makes a point of observing St. Nicholas Day. St. Nicholas, whose story is part of the mix of traditions behind our modern Santa Claus, was a fourth-century bishop in Asia Minor known for anonymously giving gifts to the poor. For us the bishop becomes a lens through which we want our children to contrast the fate of the poor in Mary’s Annunciation with the fortunes of Standard and Poor’s. We want them to know that Bethlehem’s star is not indexed to Dow Jones’ fluctuation.
Frosty the Snowman is good entertainment. But he does not proclaim that God is more taken with Earth’s agony than Heaven’s ecstasy. He does not speak to the ancient ache for the day when mercy trumps vengeance.
The work of Christmas, as Howard Thurman wrote, is more than an event — it’s an orientation:
When the song of the angel is still,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their sheep,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.