Another Christmas time is upon us, so please let me open by saying to each of you: Merry Christmas. I’m going to dispense with the daily readout of Today in History. It merely distracts from my main message to you today.
I hope by the end of our visit today to have given you a different perspective on what we mean when we say that well-worn phrase.
Admittedly, my writings here are usually not overtly Christian, but I’m steering away from my usual because it’s Christmas, and off the beaten path in terms of the Liturgical calendar, given it’s me. (Shrug) Sue me, I’m weird that way.
Some authors, at this time of year, will quote the great gospels of Christ’s arrival and expound on that. And that’s worthy and right. Some others will take the secular angle of the holiday and go off on that. That too is fine, though frankly, it always misses the core of the topic a little.
Me? Well, I’m going to stick with the meaning of Christmas, but I’m going to turn to something a little later, about 30 years later, for my subject. I trust you’ll see why when I’m done.
Luke 18:15-17 reads:
15 Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them; and when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. 16 But Jesus called them to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God. 17 Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”
Most times that Christians hear this Gospel or read it, a child is being baptized. I was raised in the Lutheran church, specifically, the Missouri Synod. Every baptism, we hear this passage. I’m sure it’s the same in many other denominations. The apparently intended thrust of reading it in those situations is to make a loose connection with the Children being accepted by Christ. Certainly, that’s a valid angle for the story. But think about the broader storyline here, so you can get the flavor of what I’m going to describe to you. There’s a far bigger angle that many miss.
See, by this point on the timeline, Christ has been playing “superstar” for a while now. He’s been attracting flat-out huge crowds wherever he goes. The disciples are starting to become concerned for the (human) well-being of Christ. Children are, then as now, a source of some stress to adults already under stress. So, with, I’m quite sure, the best of intentions, the disciples decide wordlessly to give the Lord a break.
But Jesus, noticing this, says essentially, “Hey… No… Let ’em come… It’s okay. ” Apparently, seeing some remaining resistance in their eyes, he reinforces the command with a statement that must have shaken them badly. “It’s to the likes of these as belongs the Kingdom of God.”
I mean, whoa.
Now, it’s not hard for us to imagine what’s going on in the minds of the disciples. They must have felt a little put back. While not saying so, they must have figured they had an inside track to Heaven. (Shrug) It’s human nature. Remember, they’ve already been taunting each other with boastful predictions about who would be the greatest in the kingdom.
The passages don’t record if they actually said anything, but you just know what they’re thinking, here. “Come on, Jesus. We’re trying to give you a break here! And you elevate these lowest of the low, mere children, into the ownership of heaven? You raise a polite nothing to a path to heaven and eternity? What’s THAT about?”
And, you know, Jesus knows it too. He knows full well what they’re thinking, because watch what He comes back with: “I’ll tell you the truth,” He says, “Unless you change. Unless you transform and accept the kingdom of heaven like a child, you’ll never enter it.”
But what does He mean here? He’s talking, I’m afraid, about how you lose touch with happiness and the sense of wonder as you become an adult. That loss prevents us from seeing the Kingdom of Heaven, as it is.
I’m going out on a limb here to suggest that for most of us, the happiest times of our lives were when we were children. For most, when we’re younger, we have less in the way of cares and troubles. Let’s admit, too, that as we get older, we become aware of, and allow more and more sadness into our lives. It’s true; It’s a hard world out there, and as adults we’ve come to understand this, in a way of understanding that only long exposure and experience and lots of emotional scar tissue can bring.
It seems that every year we have more worries and concerns.
Oh, yeah, do we EVER worry. We worry about our health, and those concerns increase with advancing age. We worry about our jobs, about our investments, our savings, and about the future in general. Retirement is a concern. Will we have enough? We’re too fat, we’re too skinny. We’re too tall, we’re too short, our once-wavy hair is still waving. Only, it’s waving bye-bye.
We worry about the future our kids will have and the normal growing-up problems, but we also worry about the future that we’ve left our kids. We look at the news, and we wonder what kind of world we have left them? We even worry if we worry too much.
We’ve seen marriages and relationships we thought would pass the test of time pass away instead. Things we had hoped would come to pass didn’t, and those we’d not dreamed of in our wildest nightmares would happen, did. We see loved ones die. Jobs disappear. Hearts get broken.
And friends, those are just the humdrum, the everyday worries that every generation has had, since Cain bopped his brother’s bean with a boulder. Then, you get into the problems particular to us and our times; AIDS, oil shortages, cancer, the various strains of COVID, drugs, the way our own technology seems to be spiraling out of our control — and Islamofacists.
Ah, yes. Even though it happened years ago, there’s nothing at all, to my mind, like the specter of over 3,000 people dying on national television, in Washington, New York, and Pennsylvania, while we watch, to remind us that we’re not in control.
Look, I know very well that half the folks alive today, and so a good number of you reading this, were not even born yet, 24 years ago, when the 9/11 attacks happened, but most still know all about them. At the very least, you know there was a feeling of helplessness watching those events occur. That’s saying nothing about the frequent reminders of those days that we’ve recently had in Australia, the UK, and Brown University.
Then, too, is the idea that we have but a limited time on this earth, in this life. That shadow grows darker and heavier as the years progress, even if we say little about it. As Paul Simon once wrote:
Memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fears
It’s all about control, if you think about it for long. All these things I’ve listed are worries about things we cannot control, try as we might.
The list of these reverses gets longer as the years progress, and it eventually starts to break down the positive outlook in every one of us. Each according to their ability to resist. Each step, each worry, each bit of emotional scar tissue, if you will, moves us farther away from the relative joy of our comparatively carefree childhood.
By now, the sharper among you will notice where I’m going with this, because this is where Christmas comes in. This is why Christmas holds a special place in our hearts and our traditions.
You see, even for the not-so-religious, it is a time of renewal of our fragile human spirit. All of the hurts, small and large, become less pronounced and fade under the soft glow of the lights, the candles, the fireplace, and the smiles of the children.
Have you ever noticed that it’s the children, in fact, that do us the most healing? Christmas, it’s said, is for the children. Presidential speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote a little over 20 years ago about some of the qualities of children:
They are susceptible to wonder.
A child can look at a red toy car in the red-green glow of Christmas tree lights and imagine an entire lifetime. A child can play with a new doll and smell good things being cooked and hear sweet music and it can make that child imagine that life is good, which gives her a template for good, a category for good; it helps her know good exists. This knowledge comes in handy in life; those who do not receive it, one way or another, are ultimately sadder than those who do.
Of course, we tend to move away from that ability as we grow older. Our long experience has hardened us to the realities of the world around us, and perhaps it has jaded our point of view.
But here comes Christmas, which gives us, both individually and collectively, the chance of looking at the world through the wonder-filled eyes of a child once again. Becoming more childlike ourselves in the process, and so, becoming healed and renewed.
The experience is a far deeper one for those who have accepted the Christmas promise and its meaning. Reacting to that promise, after all, means allowing someone else to run the controls of our lives.
Remember that I said it was all about control? Well, I want you to think about the features of being a child. It was Randall Jarrell, I think, who once quipped: “One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.”
Mmm. Fair enough. Well, let’s remember, you and I.
You’re NOT in control of much of anything. Someone who knows better, and is by far more powerful than we, someone you TRUST, is running things. And looking back, I’m sure most of us would conclude that having that situation back would be of comfort to us. Haven’t we all wished to resign from the world of adulthood at times?
I guess this would be a good place to slip in a parallel story.
Consider Charles Dickens’s Ebeneezer Scrooge. You all know the story. Think about how it develops; He’s had some serious emotional setbacks in early life… and those have become a self-feeding, never-ending circle by the time we meet him, seven years after his best friend’s death.
All these setbacks have made him cold, hard, and, for all outward appearances, non-feeling. Fact is, he’s covered with emotional scar tissue. Being hard is his way of dealing with what he cannot control.
Only after his overnight experience, do all these cares get swept away, along with his anger of not being able to control his situation. The realization finally comes to him that he never really WAS in control in the first place, so stop fretting about it all.
Think about what are essentially the first words out of his mouth as he realizes that the weight of his worries, not unlike worries you and I often carry, is gone;
“I’m as light as a feather….” The weight of that scar tissue, and all the concerns it represents, has been lifted off his shoulders.
”I’m as giddy as a Schoolboy!”
Like.
A.
Child.
“I’ll tell you the truth”, Jesus said, “Unless you change. Unless you transform and accept the kingdom of heaven like a child, you’ll never enter it.”
Amazing parallels, aren’t they?
I’m reliably informed that Charles Dickens was not, as a rule, what one would call very religious. Yet in looking at the parallels in these two story lines, I must wonder in all honesty if he didn’t have some help with A Christmas Carol.
Now, you might notice that I took some liberty with the way the Biblical text was quoted. Some liberty, I say, but not very much, really, since it’s long been pointed out by Bible scholars that the word that earlier versions of the text that were translated as ‘change’ was really translated from the ancient Greek word for “transform.” This is a major point because it demonstrates what the first step is, and whose it is: yours.
Before you start, no. Change and transformation are not the same thing. The best description I’ve ever thought of to explain the difference between the two, runs along these lines: If I take a rock, and in the other hand I take a large hammer, and I hit the rock with the hammer, and break it, I’ve changed that rock, and given my rather famous lack of coordination, I’ve probably changed some of my hand, with it. (Ouch!) If I take that same rock, and take a small hammer and chisel, and very carefully, perhaps even over a period of decades, sculpt that rock into the shape of a beautiful flower, I’ve still merely changed that rock, in its shape, but not in its nature.
Transformation, on the other hand, is when the rock itself, as a matter of responding to its own will, becomes a flower, not just in its shape, but in its nature. Of course, that’s beyond the normal power of the rock, by any standard we understand.
So, what Christ is therefore saying to us is that we must become children, as a matter of our own will. We must transform our nature. Which is, as I say, impossible by any standard we know… Which in turn leads us to the source of all things, who teaches us how, and gives us the power to do it.
You see, the externalizations I mentioned, the lights, the fire, the children, and that which Dickens writes of: the giving, the being open to what joys are around us, and so on, all of that helps toward the goal of understanding the Christmas promise, but it’s by no means the whole deal.
At the core of it all (and this is a connection that, alas, many people never make) is that the one whose birth is being celebrated every December 25 is also the one who takes over that long list of worries I’ve mentioned. Understand me clearly: THAT’S WHY WE CELEBRATE!!
With those worries removed, lives get changed, hearts mended, child-like perspectives restored in a way that the lights, carols, and greenery can never do on their own. And the newly remade children find that the authority and responsibility and all the ponderous weight connected with them are taken away by the One who said just before He ascended, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”
(What did you think he was talking about?)
Is this the life that God would have us lead? For my part, I believe that it is. I have faith that it is.
Is this the peace that the Apostle Paul talked about that passes all human understanding? For my part, again, yes, I believe, I have faith that it is.
Let’s address the issues of trust and faith. We all remember the Charles M. Schulz creation of Peanuts. In it, we all remember Linus. This is the kid who is never separated from his security blanket. He performs amazing feats with it. But he doesn’t feel secure without it. But now watch this scene. In the process of retelling the Christmas story, he drops his blanket, something he never does on screen in any of the other Peanuts specials.
Schulz was a lot of things, but he was no fool. He knew the art of making subtle points in his storytelling. Linus drops his blanket while telling the story because the story he’s relating is something he has faith in.
That child’s perspective I’ve been speaking about doesn’t NEED to understand it for it to be the center of their lives, for it to be something that they depend on with every breath. Something they trust. Something they have faith in. Indeed, that’s about the best description I can think of for the very nature of faith.
Now, I must warn you in all fairness that some will resist being told all of this to the point of removing such joy as they find, wherever they may find it, often using the power of governments and force of arms to have it removed from town squares and schools, mocking, persecuting and yes, even killing those responsible for the spreading of the news of this miracle.
It’s a sad truth that a world used to darkness will continually and desperately fight to see that darkness continued.
That warning given, however, I will say to you also, to take heart. It’s no accident that Christmas is called the season of light and that Christ himself is called the light of the world.
I’ll close with this:
My friends, if I have one wish for this Christmas, it is that you will be open to the light… as God gives you to see that light… With the wondering eyes of a child.
Now that you’ve read this and understand how deep this goes, I say this with sincerity and with all its wonderful and different meanings attached: Merry Christmas!
We’re coming up on Christmas. Like the line poles along the highway, dates like that go by faster than you think. VIP memberships at PJ Media are a great Christmas gift, but don’t forget to get one for yourself. Use promo code MERRY74 for 74% off your membership in both cases.
