I had a wonderful conversation with my local pastors group this morning over coffee. Four of us meet together weekly to share ideas and inspiration for the weekly rhythms of proclaiming "good news." I enjoy their company.
This week, we shared experiences of Advent and Christmas. One of my colleagues has a powerful interfaith relationship with Muslims and Jews and they take turns sharing worship together a few times during the year. My Presbyterian colleague always hosts on an Advent Sunday--it's a beautiful display of friendship and hospitality to welcome "strangers" during a holy season. He learned that after the service, a woman made a comment on a local Facebook group asking, "can someone point me to a church that doesn't let Muslims speak during Advent?" Oy.
It triggered a broader conversation about Christmas and Christmas traditions and how meaningful and unsettling they can be. I have become much more outspoken over the last few years about how much I dislike Christmas. Yes, it's the materialism and over-consumption that comes from living in a market society that has to manipulate our desires in order to remain viable. But I even resent church celebrations. They're too precious. One of my colleagues told a story about a long-held tradition at their church at Christmas where a local opera singer would show up on Christmas Eve and sing "O Holy Night" in a floor-length sequined ball gown.
It's not that traditions like that are "bad." Beautiful music is surely part of Christmas. Why am I so grumpy about that kind of thing?
There's surely a tension in the Christmas story between humility and glory. The young girl laboring on the straw surrounded by animals in a backwater town in the Roman Empire is the humility. The glory is the angels appearing to the shepherds proclaiming peace on earth and good will to all. The story manages to hold the glory and the humility in tension.
Most of our worship services on Christmas don't even aspire to the tension. They are too docile. Too safe. Too clean. I want to worship on Christmas Eve at midnight in an abandoned car lot. That might get us closer to the spirit of the event. Snug in our sanctuaries with our little candles never gets me all the way to the insane core of incarnation.
My hunger for provocative worship experiences makes me perpetually dissatisfied with Christmas Eve. I'm all for beauty. But Christmas Eve, of all nights, is not the time for being safe or docile. I want to feel the chill of the night, feel the precarity and vulnerability of birthing a baby into a stark, violent world. I want to see the impossibility of it all, and to wonder that THIS is how God chooses to arrive.
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