The Real War on Christmas

 

Each year Fox News broadcasts footage on the "war on Christmas," noting businesses that substitute the word "holiday" for "Christmas," or school districts that bow to non-Christian parents' demands to end singing of "Silent Night".   

The idea vehemently defended by Fox is the Christmas of modern culture.  But the first Christmas did not take place in a decorated home, around a tree bright with ornaments and flanked with piles of gifts, with the whole happy family gathered together singing carols.  It was not announced by department store fliers, displayed in colored lights, or celebrated with warm beverages and frosted cookies.  

Rather, the Creator of the Universe came to earth as a tiny infant in a dark and dangerous time of fear and repression.  The Lord of All was born to a teenage mother, far from home and family support, isolated and rejected, in an animal shelter.  His birth was not announced on the lawns of the government offices to the citizens of occupied Rome. It was announced to non-citizens on the outskirts of town, the working-class shepherds.  They would welcome the sign: a baby in a manger.  Christ the Savior is born, poor and homeless to non-citizens from Nazareth.

And the birth of the King of Kings was announced through the appearance of a star. This sign was heralded by foreign intellectuals. They traveled far to welcome the Christ. But it was not "good news" to the entrenched powers.  King Herod wielded his mighty arm to defend the empire by ordering the slaughter of every male child in Bethlehem under the age of two.

 

So Christmas really happened first in violence, fear, grief and despair.   "On those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned." --Isaiah 9:2b.  

On one hand, Fox News defends the celebration of the Christmas holiday.  And then, commentators herald the steady promotion of consumerism, the defense of wealth and power (and bonuses for bank execs), and regularly belittle or attack efforts to overcome poverty or protect the vulnerable.

On the other hand, the first Christmas offers the joyful promise of peace and the hope of reconciliation with God and among people.  No other religion has its God becoming flesh, totally human and poor, born in such a vulnerable and dangerous environment with government oppression, yet bringing hope of complete salvation. Christ the Savior is born.

Fox News proffers the constant drumbeat of war, the reliance on military solutions to social conflict, the demonizing of our enemies, and trust in American dominance. It never mentions credible reports of over 160 children killed by American predator drones in Pakistan since we came up with this new weapon (civilian reports top 300, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Aug 2011).

The real Christmas lifts up the Virgin Mary's song of praise for her baby boy: "He has brought the mighty down from their thrones, and lifted the lowly, he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich empty away."  How could Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, and Ann Rand avoid labeling this language from Mary's Magnificat as "class warfare?"

The real war on Christmas is lost to those who bury their noses in the sand of our commercial culture.  The effect is the same whether we never sing Silent Night in school, or we spin ourselves into a holiday frenzy that leaves no room for Christ. Christmas without God's true Salvation through Christ—the transformation of hearts, minds, people and powers­—is a hollow shell. Talking only about personal individual salvation, as powerful and important as it is, misses most of the Bible's reason for the season, and hides the real war on Christmas

Is there room this year, in our safe, warm inn, to welcome a homeless, vulnerable stranger, the Son of God?  Is there room in the most powerful nation on earth to trust in the Prince of Peace?

Here's Jim Wallis or Sojourners summary of this cultural war on Christmas, to whom I credit several of the ideas of my column:

http://www.sojo.net/blogs/2011/12/15/real-war-christmas-fox-news

 

The following is continued from Big Horn County News:

 

Quote from Jim Wallis:
"The real Christmas announces the birth of Jesus to a world of poverty, pain, and sin, and offers the hope of salvation and justice."

The first chapters of each of the four Gospels in the New Testament tell the story. Christmas is about the real presence of the Living God, Creator of the Universe, among us in real flesh—a tiny, vulnerable infant.  The theological term for this reality is incarnation.  No other religion has its God becoming flesh, prone to all the fallibility of humanity, born to a poor and homeless young mother in the midst of a military occupation by an empire.

 

"God's becoming flesh — human — and entering into history in the form of a vulnerable baby born to a poor, teenage mother in a dirty animal stall."—Jim Wallis of Sojourners

 

An interesting element is the origin of many of our commercial symbols of Christmas. Many of these originated with the Roman Empire, in its efforts to Christianize Europe, adopted the pagan symbols of the solstice celebrations. This includes the Christmas tree, the lights, and the date of December 25. The Empire just took away the pagan gods and left the symbols and the festivals and the date intact. But this history of tainted symbols has nothing to do either with the Bible's Christmas story, and while an interesting conflict, doesn't touch the Bible's allusion to a need for peace then and now.

 

While not overtly a Christmas story, Dr. Chi Huang's recounting of his medical service to street children of Bolivia comes as close as I have seen to a modern Christmas story. It really does reflect the values and struggles of the first Christmas story. This book is definitely adult material, When Invisible Children Sing, 1997. The author is a family friend.

 

--
David Graber

Hardin, MT  59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Fundamentally pro-life—The Advent of Christ

 

Infanticide was brutally common in the Roman empire of Mary and Joseph's time. Abortion was also practiced, but the trauma and poor chances of any survival made it a rare procedure. Yet the beginning of Christianity was fundamentally pro-life. What can we learn from those first Christians?

 

Near the time of Mary's surprise pregnancy, Sepphoris, the Greek/Jewish/Roman city of 30,000 barely 4 miles from Nazareth, was swept with turmoil. Infanticide and abortion, along with starvation and executions, were already present in Galilee with Pax Romana ruthlessly imposed by the Roman occupation and influx of Hellenic culture and idolatry. Civil war could only increase these practices. This new chapter began when Judas, son of the Jewish guerilla leader Ezekias executed by Herod, broke in and looted the Roman arsenal in Sepphoris. He distributed the weaponry and declared the city liberated. The Jewish population hoped the abominations practiced by the heathen occupation were ended.

 

But victory was brief. True to form, the Romans ruthlessly quelled the rebellion.  No Jew was left living in the city. Those who weren't able to escape to the countryside, or to risk surrender into slavery, were killed. Caesar, known to the Roman world as Filio Deus (Son of God) was to be worshiped by law as the god above all gods. He He permitted Herod Antipas to make Sepphoris his personal capital. He needed Jewish "tektones", carpenters and masons who previously farmed and were cheated out of their land by the economy of Rome. Being in virtual starvation and without hope to carve out an existence, they braved the journey into enemy territory. Daily they walked to Sepphoris from Nazareth and other nearby villages, and rebuilt the heathen temples, public baths and homes for the rich. Of course, most were not hired, and became the multitudes to which Jesus later ministered primarily.

 

Jesus almost certainly grew up to accompany his earthly carpenter father daily to work in Sepphoris, by then transformed into a center of Greek/Roman culture. Inevitably the Jewish families of Nazareth including Joseph, Mary and Jesus would have known about hunger, violence and sexual oppression rampant at the time near Roman frontier cities such as Sepphoris.

 

Such was the environment when Joseph discovered that his intended was pregnant.  The options were deadly, and certainly, as Scripture implies, Joseph knew precedents.  "Putting away" a young pregnant girl was an almost certain death sentence for mother and unborn.  In a law-abiding rich Jewish family, the Leviticus law provided the death penalty. Among poorer families, less able to keep the law, such unfortunate girls were more likely put away.  But this too was almost surely a death sentence. If they survived pregnancy, abortion, or suicidal depression, they could end up in a brothel working in the Roman baths or prostitution shrines for the occupation.

 

Because of these practices, combined with the economic and social pressure to birth male babies, by the end of the 2^nd century the Roman Empire suffered from gender imbalance. Especially in major cities, males outnumbered females 3:2. It was opposite in Christian communities where 60% or more were female.  This happened because Christians rescued girl babies found abandoned on city streets, really infanticide euphemistically called "expose the infant." Christians also rescued young women caught in the dilemma similar to Mary, but without an angel visitation to her and to her betrothed.

 

Christianity spread not simply because of miracles.  It also spread because Christian slaves such as those exiled from insurgency-prone provinces like Galilee and Judea advised their troubled masters "We Christians know how to live." Christians at that time fought against infanticide and abortion more as a symptom, showing unlimited compassion and care for the humanity of all, even enemies. Thus, by 250 AD, early Christians had built fundamentally pro-life communities throughout the Roman Empire. These communities featured disciplined training that amounted to pro-life transformation. It was essential to the astounding growth of Christianity exactly at the time of its greatest and most violent opposition. It was comprehensively and foundationally pro-life, unlike the narrow focus of today's pro-life activists.

 

This advent, along with Mary 2,000 years ago, let's connect the powerful few with the deprivation of many poor and lowly, down even to the preborn, and prioritize God's acts on all their behalf as she did in the pregnancy and birth of her Son:
"My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior . . .
He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly;
He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty."

            —Selections from Luke 1:45ff

Following is a brief list of books and a video supporting a scholarly understanding of early Christianity, most of which are on my shelf.

 

Myers, Chad, Binding the Strong Man (Orbis, 1997) 500 pages. Essentially this a commentary on Mark's Gospel.  But more than a commentary on individual words, it includes a plethora of ancient documents relevant to Mark's narrative and the background of its writing. Replete with scholarly sources cited, this reading of Mark's Gospel has a bias (p. xxii "forward" by Daniel Berrigan): "…an attentive analysis of the politics of Jesus; that Way of defiance, loving, albeit courageous, toward the worldly powers that in His time and ours ravage the world and legalize crime. Iniqitous authority, lawless and spurious, must be cast from its illegitimate throne; justice must be enthroned.  This is the work of Jesus. It proceeds in the community of Jesus. Love, defiance. Instinctive affection toward persons, even the worldly powers; defiance of their power, its malfunctioning and maleficence."

 

Claiborne, Shane and Christ Haw, Jesus for President (The Simple Way, 2008). Entertaining artistic layout of quotes of many historical documents reflected in my column of December 2011 in the Big Horn County News. An example from p. 183: "Tacitus said that people feared the peace of Rome…because streams of blood and tears of unimaginable proportions followed in the 'peace'."  And from a US soldier in Iraq, "We are dying and killing for abstract nouns like freedom and democracy…but this is not the gospel of Jesus Christ."

 

Heschel, Abraham, The Prophets (2007).  Heschel, a rabbinical Old Testament scholar, was a good friend and theological influence on Dr. Martin Luther King for many years.

 

Sobrino, No Salvation Outside the Poor (2008). Sobrino is a Catholic theologian from Spain with vast experience in Central and South America.

 

Romero, Oscar, The Violence of Love (2004). Excerpts from Archbiship Romero's sermons and papers prior to his silencing by an assassin's bullets at the moment of consecration during Holy Mass at his church in El Salvador highlight this book.  Some of this content is used in the documentary film, Romero, available at video outlets. It traces the fascinating transformation of this scholarly priest from avowed theological conservative to radical liberal because of his years of living with the Indians and poor of El Salvador.

 

Stark, Rodney, The Rise of Christianity (1997). Historical documents are organized into a fascinating detailed account of the first centuries of Christianity by this respected scholar. This book is a primary source for my column of December 2011, "Foundationally pro-life: The Advent of Christ"

 

McClaren, Brian, Everything Must Change: When the World's Biggest Problems and Jesus' Good News Collide (Sep 2009) McLaren was invited to address a coalition of Christian leaders for a week in Ruwanda and Botswana following the genocide, trying to process the grief of the nation with Biblical vision. Participants discovered the Bible's words from Jesus and the prophets made clear that God's priorities focus on the greatest causes of human suffering and premature death, rather than on the "spiritual" agenda adopted by most denominations in Christian mission to Africa. The title of the book comes from an exclamation, with tears, of one of the participants.

 

From Jesus to Christ        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NLQfZdkzzM

First produced by PBS, this documentary in three parts and is long and detailed, but not boring.  It was shot on site in locations in which the history occurred. Important and little known documentation of early Christianity is in this series, but the narrative is tainted by an agenda to discredit some dearly-held Christian beliefs. It's an excellent video documentary except for this bias.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT  59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org