Another Christmas Meditation: The Incarnation Calls Us to Be the Truth We Proclaim

Another journal entry to follow the one I posted yesterday as a Christmas meditation.  This, too, is Christmas-themed, and I wrote it on the same day (24 December 2010) that I wrote the one I posted yesterday.

It seems to me that many Christians today, who emphasize the church's role as a guardian of the truth and the obligation of church leaders to teach the truth, fail to recognize the significant connection between the incarnation and how people hear and receive--and above all, proclaim--the truth.  The incarnation introduces into the community of those who believe in Jesus an incarnational logic which requires us first and foremost to enflesh the truth we believe we're called to proclaim to the world.

We're called by the incarnation to live the truth we proclaim, before we formulate and proclaim that truth.  Incarnating the truth we want to proclaim to the world is a precondition to the verbal proclamation itself, so that the two must always occur in tandem, with the lived witness as a sacramental sign to the spoken truth.

And this incarnational logic therefore locks the leaders of Christian faith communities into what might be seen as a terrible logic of incarnational, sacramental witness to the truth they seek to proclaim to their own communities.  When the lived witness of the pastoral leaders of Christian communities is at stark variance from their proclamation of the truth that flows from the gospels--and this stark variance is increasingly apparent in the case of the Catholic church, as many of us look at how our pastoral leaders are dealing with the abuse situation--then profound cognitive dissonance occurs.

It is impossible for many believers to hear or appropriate the truth proclaimed by pastoral leaders whose lived witness belies what they proclaim.  The following journal entry reflects on one of the most basic proclamations of all: the proclamation that all who walk in the footsteps of the Word Made Flesh are called to welcome the stranger and open our arms to those in need, to those who are outcasts.  As this journal entry suggests, churches that profess to be concerned with welcoming those who are homeless undercut their profession of being all about welcome, when they simultaneously refuse to welcome their brothers and sisters who are gay and lesbian:

Our first stop when we exit the Piccadilly Circus tube station: St. James church, a Christopher Wren church.  We hope its little flea market is open, but it's not, on Christmas eve.

We go into the church.  I'm impressed by a welcome sign in the narthex: "A warm welcome from the church community of St. James, Piccadilly.  St. James is part of the Anglican Communion within the world-wide Christian Church.  We understand ourselves to be called: to gather as a body which welcomes and celebrates human diversity--including spirituality, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation . . . ."

And so I feel welcome as I walk into this church.  As I don't in almost any Catholic church today.  Because my church almost never posts such a welcome statement in its entrance ways.  And its notion of universality and inclusivity and diversity is now, effectively, to give solace and harbor to homophobes.  While telling me and mine, effectively, that we're unwelcome.

And then we go inside and walk down the north nave of the church, and I see a man bent over in a posture of profound prayer.  I hope I haven't disturbed him.

And then I see one man after another in the pews of that side of the church, lying down, huddled over, sitting.  And I realize they're homeless, and are gathered in that part of the church because its heaters are located there.

And what a novel thing, to find a welcoming Christian church celebrating Christmas by providing homeless people a place to warm themselves and rest on a very cold London Christmas eve.

A Christmas Meditation: God Takes Flesh, God Takes Gay Flesh

The last few days, at the tail end of Advent, I've published snippets from journals I kept in previous years.  As I've noted, I've been leafing back through my journals for one reason or another, and the pieces I published in the past several days leapt out at me.

I chose them because they're a reminder of something that, I suspect, we don't think about sufficiently, when we think about prejudice and discrimination, and what these do to the object they single out for abuse.  I suspect we don't think sufficiently about how the person whom we bar from employment and human community through discriminatory action in the workplace suffers in quite specific ways: economically, through the loss of a job and the loss of income to satisfy debts; physically, through the loss of health coverage and thus of ongoing health care; but spiritually, as well, through the sense of terrible exclusion from the human community, from a community in which one can offer one's talents, provide creative input, learn from others, and experience the gratification that comes from knowing one is making a contribution.  

And, as my recent journal entries also suggest, there's often an intense spiritual struggle when those who have done all this to you prosper and their actions go unchallenged--and that is very commonly the case when "official" church figures like bishops, priests, abbots, or nuns practice discrimination against others.  Because they own the title Catholic, their actions go unexamined, even when those actions are sometimes grossly prejudiced and cruel in their effects on others.  This results in an intense spiritual struggle to find God somewhere in the scorched earth of a life that has been interrupted due to discrimination by people claiming to act in the name of God.

But this is not the whole story.  Advent, with its search for light in darkness, leads to Christmas and its  proclamation that the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.  Though Steve and I have struggled long and hard, we also have much to celebrate, much for which to be grateful.  We not only search for, we also often find, the gracious presence of a loving God in our life journey.

I'm typing these words in London.  As a gift for my 60th birthday this year, Steve offered me a trip to London--a place neither of us has ever been.  I didn't feel up to traveling in March, when I turned 60, and we then decided to take the trip at Christmastime.  

And here's a more recent journal entry of mine, one written yesterday in London, which I offer today as a Christmas meditation: On the tube just now, headling along the Piccadilly line to Piccadilly Circus, we sit across from an older (truth: probably near our age) gay couple.  And as I listen to one of the two describe an exhibit about the history of Christmas celebrations to the other ("The trees began with Queen Victoria, you know"), I think:

God chooses to take flesh in the lives of gay men and lesbian women.  And as John McNeill says* in his book Taking a Chance on God, if the world suddenly lost the presence and gifts of loving gay men and loving lesbian women, the world would be infinitely impoverished.  Infinitely dehumanized.

God loves my gay flesh and becomes incarnate in my gay flesh.  Out of sheer delight in gayness, in the gifts those God makes gay bring to the world.

And thinking this, as I watch one "older" gay man describe a Victorian Christmas tree in loving detail, using his hands in the description, my heart lifts, and I feel great gratitude for the gift of God made flesh.

And a determination to remain grateful and to celebrate, no matter the calumnies, lies, absurdities uttered against me and my brothers and sisters today by many fellow Christians.  Grateful and celebratory, because God takes gay and lesbian flesh in the incarnation . . . . 

And later I think: it's morally crude to imagine, as many Christians do today, that the wish to procreate sets the procreative class of people apart in some superior ontological way.  Anyone (more or less) can beget a child.

The real challenge is to raise a child, to educate hearts, to help shape admirable human beings.  And, unfortunately, many of those ontologically superior heterosexuals who beget children have no clue about raising them, about educating their minds and hearts.

The human community needs many gifts and talents to become community.  It needs generativity that surpasses mere biological generativity, to sustain itself as humane community.

Churches that continue to base their sexual ethics on biological generativity alone as the prime ideal are doing a great disservice to the human community through their morally crude, reductionistic understanding of procreation, of pro-creation, of the shared creation of the world in which we human beings are involved with the God who takes our flesh.

*John J. McNeill, Taking a Chance on God (Boston: Beacon, 1988):

“Despite their personal suffering, the loving presence of lesbian women and gay men is the oil that keeps the whole human machine running.  If, somehow, gay people were to disappear from the scene, the whole community would be in danger of being seriously dehumanized” (p. 99).

Joy to the World: McDonald's and the Christmas Message

Saturday, on our way to an early-morning meeting, Steve and I decide to stop at McDonald’s for a quick bite to eat, as the first frost of the season lies sparkling on the low-lying fields beside the Arkansas River.  Between us and our destination, there is no other place serving a fast and easy breakfast—not one we can think of.

I know that Michael Pollan is right when he says that it’s not real food if it arrives through your car window.  I know he’s right because I’ve sampled said food (all too often) and have always found it wanting.  While it fills the gullet, it insults the innards, making me invariably regret my weakness in succumbing once more to its media-hyped wiles.  Still, what to do when you have limited time and few options, and need to eat a quick meal because your blood sugar levels won’t remain constant if you forego a bite to eat?

So stop we did.  And as we sipped our coffee and munched the egg sandwiches, I was surprised to see that McDonald’s has incorporated into its advertising themes for this season a Christmasy logo—a specifically theological one—focusing on the word “joy.”

Joy surrounded with little red snowflakes.  A Christmas message.  Or, rather, an advertising message wrapped up in a Christmas message, one with strong theological resonance for those of us raised on the Lucan nativity narrative with its stirring evangelical announcement, 

And the angel said unto them,
Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

McDonald’s as joy.  An egg McMuffin as joy oh joy.  American consumerism as an extension of Christmas joy, of the angelic announcement that all people will find in the birth of the Savior something to rejoice about, good tidings of great joy to all the people.

It’s easy to turn a meditation like this in the direction of consumerism and its illicit appropriation of religious messages for commercial gain.  But something else struck me this weekend as I looked at the announcement of joy on the side of the bag in which our fodder landed through the car window.

And that’s the incoherence of the Christian message itself, insofar as it has been appropriated by people of faith from the beginning of the Christian movement.  There is, woven into the very fabric of how we people of faith appropriate the central symbols of our faith, an incoherence that fails to probe the significance of those symbols at almost any level that goes beyond the superficial. 

We are seduced by the surface glitter, the smooth, dancing charm of the symbols.  And we fail to dive beyond the surface, to ask what the symbols mean for our everyday life—as signposts to a spiritual pathway that moves us outside the everyday, to deeper levels of experience and meaning than we encounter in the everyday, insofar as we remain always seduced by the surface.

The most obvious incoherence to which we don’t pay attention as we listen to the jingoistic renditions of the Christmas story rattling through the airwaves each year is this: as that story has come to be told in most communities of faith following Francis of Assisi and his development of the crèche, it’s a story about Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and the angels.  And animals.

It’s a story about tidings of great joy that includes the holy family and the animals surrounding and celebrating the birth of the Savior in a manger: cattle, sheep, donkeys, all watching with reverence, and in some midrashic renditions of the story, talking together about the significance of the Messiah, kneeling in knowing reverence before the holy baby.

Sensible beasts, as sensible (and as beastly) as all the people hearing the evangelical tidings—welcoming it with the same joy with which the sensible human beasts who hear the angels’ announcement welcome it.  Joy on the side of a McDonald’s bag used to hold hamburgers and sausage biscuits and egg McMuffins overladen with slices of ham, carved out of the bodies of the animals adorning and extending the message of joy to the earth in the Christmas narratives.

Joy that both uses the animal players in the Christmas story as sentimental, revered embroidery decorating the holy kitsch of it all, and simultaneously slaughters the non-human sensible beasts who discuss the significance of the birth of Christ and kneel before his crib in awe.  Joy that is, if one thinks about it, hardly joy at all—not to the sensible animals, at least, whose flesh graces our Christmas tables when we come home to feast after the holy liturgies at which we sing about the joy brought to the world by the birth of the Savior.

Symbols problematize everything in the world, if they’re worth anything at all.  If they’re religious symbols, signposts pointing to the spiritual path that goes well beyond the boundaries of the everyday, and makes the everyday less certain and less monochromatic, symbols trouble us—or should do so.  Profoundly.

Because living with them calls our certainties into question.  Living with sacred symbols constantly subverts our assurance that we have a handle on the world, that we own it and everything in it.  Living with sacred symbols pulls us into a realm of thinking and practice in which all we take for granted—even the savor and nourishment of a warm egg McMuffin on a frosty fall day—suddenly becomes not precisely what we have imagined it to be.  In a way that turns everything upside down.

Chesterton was onto something when he said that the problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it’s never really been tried at all.  There’s a deep inbuilt incoherence within the Christian tradition, which points back to the foundational symbols out of which the entire tradition grows, and how they have been too easily appropriated from the beginning of the Christian movement—as comfortable furniture adorning what we think we know and what we take for granted, rather than shocking proclamations of a disturbing good news that turns our world upside down.

I suspect that all those now attacking the new atheism and secularism rolling through many of the formerly Christian places of the earth have it absolutely wrong, when they see the primary problem as a loss of faith or a determination to resist the good news of the Christian gospels.  The primary problem is that what most Christian communities of faith and most of us as followers of Jesus have offered to the world as an evangelical possibility is nothing of the sort.

It’s, instead, a set of trite symbols whose meaning seems altogether too familiar to us, whose power to discomfit us in radical ways has been obliterated, in which sensible animals kneeling before the holy manger are soon to become consumable Christmas table centerpieces.  And in which we don’t hear or see the incoherence we’re proclaiming as good news to the world, and insisting that others believe in order to make us even more comfortable with things as they are.