Christmas Vacation.

My favorite Christmas movie is “Christmas Vacation,” in which Clark Griswold devotes himself to producing the “perfect family Christmas,” based on his rosy  childhood memories.  His aspirations collide with reality and the film gets hilariously crazy.  A lot of us can relate to Clark’s sentimental wishes for the holidays.  I remember and cherish the beautiful and happy family Christmases I knew when I was a kid.  

At the same time, I wonder if those memories aren’t more sweet and warm than the reality was.  At one point in the movie Clark’s dad confesses that he got through those fondly remembered family Christmases of yore with “a lot of help from Jack Daniels.”  I experienced Christmas rather differently when I was a student, parent, and pastor than when I was a child.  

In the church we seem particularly prone to nostalgia.  I suspect that this is because the church is often a place that people expect to be immune, or at least highly resistant, to change.  In church the tendency is to do things the way they have “always” been done (even if it has only been for the last few years).  The surest way for a pastor to get fired is not to do the candlelight “Silent Night” thing at the end of the Christmas Eve service.  If any institution is about preserving the past, it is supposed to be the church.  Right?  Can’t we at least depend on that?  

Well, no.  The church is always and only about Jesus Christ, whose ministry was hardly about conserving, maintaining, preserving, and sustaining the traditions, laws, and institutions of his time.  He got himself crucified for being an alternative to the religious and political establishment.  If you wanted comfortable and familiar religion, Jesus was not the guy to hang around with. 

The irony here is that the Advent and Nativity seasons, from the perspective of Scripture and the church, are about the future.  They are not nostalgic reveries concerning something that happened in the distant past; they are signs of the world to come, which Christ reveals and brings.  Many of the traditional Scripture readings for Advent are about the end of the world, for heaven’s sake!

The familiar creche scene, while it depicts a past event, points to a different, upside-down world in which the true King is born of a virgin in a stable, worshipped by poor shepherds and foreigners, and opposed by the supposedly legitimate rulers.  That is a vision of a different world that has yet to be fully realized among us.  But it is the truth to which we aspire and in which we trust.

Jesus calls us to a new life of love and justice.  Rather than Clark Griswold’s unrealizable fantasy of the “perfect family Christmas,” maybe we need to embody Jesus’ vision of a new world of compassion, healing, forgiveness, and peace.  It would be like taking a permanent Christmas vacation from the broken and violent world as we know it.  

So what would that look like? 

I wonder if it wouldn’t involve witnessing to Jesus’ economy of “give what you have, receive what you need.”  

What if it is about: 

• blessing without judging?
• healing without blaming? 
• generosity without indebtedness?
• welcoming without borders?
• giving without spending?
• sharing together in a new a future, rather than grieving over the past?
• celebrating diversity, rather than enforcing uniformity?
• cultivating hope and joy, rather than stoking fear and anger?
• Jesus Christ?    

Maybe the best greeting for the Advent and Nativity seasons is a line from an old song by REM: “It’s the end of the world as we know it… and I feel fine!”  

+++++++