How many people got up before their normal work day schedule to go shopping on Friday? How many were seduced by the promises of insanely cheap prices if you were at the store by 6 or 5 or 4 or 3 am, or even earlier? Was it worth the time and trouble?
Welcome to the war for the heart and mind of Christmas. On the one side is the truth, that God sent his only son into the world that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. On the other side is the entire economic capitalist free market system at its most powerful telling us to buy, buy, buy, to make this holiday something really special. That’s what John calls the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches. I challenge anyone to tell me when you could buy enough to make Christmas truly special.
In this letter from the apostle John, it is all about a new commandment. It is about living unto God and not unto the world. It is about when we screw up, we have forgiveness. Jesus is our Advocate, Jesus is our Atoning Sacrifice, it doesn’t get any better than Jesus. But John knows the struggle between what is to be-a life obedient to Christ and what is-a life of sin and struggle in the current world. And Christmas may be the most obvious battlefield for that struggle.
Where we’ve messed things up, I believe, is where we’ve made Santa Claus the bad guy. I am talking about the church when I talk about “we”. There are many Christians who look to Santa as a secular symbol of all that has gone wrong with Christianity, commercialism, materialism, greed, a culture of more, more, more, that Santa is somehow responsible for displacing Jesus to a smaller and smaller corner of the Christmas landscape to make room for more and more toys.
I don’t buy that. We have a decoration on our Christmas tree at home. There is Santa, on his knees at the manger, worshipping Jesus. That’s the truth about Santa, I think. There is an origins story that appeals to me. The man who gives gifts every year to all the children of the world, he was there to bring gifts to the greatest gift the world has ever received. How about that for a Christmas miracle? One of the magi lives on, bringing gifts to the world every year to celebrate the greatest gift we’ve ever received? That’s a Christmas movie I would watch.
It’s not about Jesus versus Santa. There is no knock down, drag out fight about who owns Christmas. No, there is another enemy out there, an enemy to both Jesus and Santa. We know it as one of the seven deadly sins. If we are going to call it a demi-god, lets name it for what it is, Greed.
Greed is what turns an enjoyable time of letting a child’s imagination wander through the toy catalogues that come to the house into a nightmare of I want, I want, I want, I want. Come back to that phrase “the desire of the eyes”. If they can see it, they seem to want it. The children who you love and want to provide for become these media savvy consumers who can quote extensively from the commercials they see on television and online.
Greed is why the news reports at Christmas time are going to be about the numbers. How did the box stores do? How did the malls do? How did the online stores do? How much money did we wring out of the American population for the purposes of buying stuff? How well do we know that the vast majority of the stuff we buy is stuff we will never use or we don’t need?
You know what statistics I would like to hear? How much of the world’s population could receive clean drinking water with the money America spends for one Christmas Season. How many people could be fed? How much pollution could be cleaned up? How much global warming reversed? How much sustainable growth in a country that has not? Don’t want to go overseas? How many jobs could be provided for in this country with that money? Could we make unemployment go extinct?
I love it when people say that is not how the system works. That is not how the free market system works. That is not how a global capitalist system works. John calls that the “pride in riches”. What I want for Christmas is a different system.
I think that is why the season is so busy. That’s why it feels like riding a surf board down Mt. Everest. The proponents of Greed, the powers behind that power, those seeking to undercut the real feeling and knowledge of Christmas, the last thing they want is for us who love Jesus, we who are saved by the birth of Jesus, those of us who love this Season for all that it could and should represent, the last thing they want is for us to take a moment at the manger and say “Hey, here I am. Here is Jesus. Here is the Reason for the Season. Here is the reason I have received life eternal. Here is the reason why the rest of it is nonsense.”
If they gave us enough time to figure that out, we could chuck the junk and enjoy the wonder. But who has the time?
But consider what we have to stand against the corporate industrial capitalist retail empire that calls us forth to celebrate the season with the expenditure of the almighty dollar.
We have the story of a couple of homeless people.
Against all the glitz and glitter and lights and sound and smells and tastes that will bombard and overwhelm our senses during this holiday season, what do we have?
We have a baby, born among animals, whose first bed was where the animals eat.
Hundreds and thousands of voices are going to whisper and talk and scream into our ears about what we should be buying to make ourselves happy, about what to make our children happy, to make our pets happy, to make someone, somewhere, happy. Every one of those voices is going to be tinged by the evil one, trying to pull us off the true focus of our lives, off our relationship with Jesus Christ.
To that, I respond with the words of John. “Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; for all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world. And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God live for ever.”
Merry Christmas. Let us pray . . .
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