An Apostle’s Advent Advice
John Shuck
First Presbyterian Church
Elizabethton, Tennessee
December 11th, 2005
Third Sunday of Advent
Rejoice always,
pray without ceasing,
give thanks in all circumstances;
for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
Do not quench the Spirit.
Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything;
hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil.
May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely;
and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless
at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.
I Thessalonians 5:16-24
This past week I read this statement on a church signboard:
“Let the cowards say: Happy Holidays.”
Presumably, non-cowards are not beset with any postmodern angst regarding cultural and religious pluralism and therefore boldly proclaim, “Merry Christmas!” every chance they get.
The American Family Association has targeted the Target retail chain for being anti-Christmas. Why? Because they claim that Target has substituted the more generic “Holiday” for “Christmas” in its store promotions.
They have taken Christ out of Christmas.
Therefore, all good Christians should boycott Target. Instead, they should take their billions to a store that is not afraid to say, “Merry Christmas.”
Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson of Fox news have declared that there is a War on Christmas. The liberal left has been plotting to ban the sacred holiday, they say.
According to O’Reilly, business should not cave to multicultural pressure.
Business should honor Jesus, the Prince of Profit. O’Reilly said this on a recent program:
Every company in America should be on their knees thanking Jesus for being born. Without Christmas, most American businesses would be far less profitable. More than enough reason for business to be screaming "Merry Christmas.”
http://mediamatters.org/items/200512010017
How far we have come! That icon of business, Ebeneezer Scrooge, didn’t find Christmas particularly profitable. In 19th century England, Christmas had something to do with charity. That is why Scrooge didn’t like Christmas. He found Christmas a poor excuse for “picking a man’s pocket every 25th of December.” And as far as uttering the traditional Christmas greeting, Scrooge had this to say:
“Anyone who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled in his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly in his heart.”
--Ebeneezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
How do we get from Ebeneezer Scrooge for whom Christmas was a threat to profits, to Bill O’Reilly for whom Christmas is the source of profits? What is Christmas about? What is Christ about? Which leads to the question, what are we about?
The right is concerned about taking Christ out of Christmas. To an extent, I agree. But I am not sure if I agree with them as to what Christ stands for. When I hear Fox News lifting up the name of Jesus I wonder about whom they speak. To my ears, I hear them speaking of a Jesus who is little more than a symbol for Imperial America. Their Jesus seems quite content with an expanded global military presence, increasing corporate profits, lower taxes, unlimited consumption of resources, and an ideology of America first. Ebeneezer Scrooge (that is the old Scrooge before his conversion) would probably like this Christ and this Christmas. He would probably be a regular on the O’Reilly Factor. In my view, this Jesus is in stark contrast to the Jesus of the Gospels and to the Christ of Paul’s letters.
I want to talk about Paul today. A recent book has helped me see Paul in a new light. The book is entitled In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom. A New Vision of Paul’s Words and World. It is co-authored by John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan Reed. (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004).
This 400 page book is an excellent guide to the background, particularly the Roman Imperial presence, of Paul’s time. Crossan and Reed visit all of the cities to which Paul wrote letters and provide a background to these places from archaeology and history.
A few insights I gathered from their book include:
1) The Roman Empire with its symbolic presence in all of 1st century Mediterranean life provides the interpretive key to Paul and his vision.
2) Words such as church, gospel, Lord, Savior, peace, kingdom, were politically charged words. They are not simply religious, spiritual, or ecclesiastical words as we have tended to interpret them.
3) When Paul says “Lord Jesus Christ”, he is making a politically dangerous assertion. In the Roman Empire, there is only one Lord and Christ and that is Caesar.
4) Paul and the communities he founded and nurtured were participating in an alternative reality to Empire. This reality was based on justice for the many as opposed to empire for the few.
Here is the thesis for their book. Rome was not an evil empire. It was not the axis of evil. Rome was the cutting edge of civilization. According to Crossan and Reed:
“Who they were there and then, we are here and now. We are, at the start of the twenty-first century, what the Roman Empire was at the start of the first century. Put succinctly: Rome and the East there, America and the West here.” P. 412
There was a clash between Rome’s vision of the kingdom and Paul and Jesus’s vision of the kingdom. For Rome, peace comes through victory. First victory, then peace. For Jesus and Paul, peace comes through justice. First justice, then peace.
For Paul and Jesus, there will come a time when God’s kingdom will be realized, the kingdom of peace through justice. We are participating in its advent. Becoming a Christian, for Paul, meant signing on to this program. If we believe that peace through justice is coming—that is justice and peace for all not just the few, then the evidence for that is the way we live in the present. To what extent are we willing to participate in this process of peace through justice? If that is the focus of what it means to be a Christian, then Paul’s comments to the community at Thessalonika begin to make sense.
Rejoice always,
pray without ceasing,
give thanks in all circumstances;
for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.
Do not quench the Spirit.
Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything;
hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil.
May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely;
and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless
at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.
I Thessalonians 5:16-24
This is an ethic for participating in a reality that is in the process of being realized.
We have the choice to participate in it and to be nourished by it or not.
We participate by sharing.
We participate by working for justice for the many as opposed to empire for the few. We participate by treating all on Earth as family members of the household of God.
Putting Christ into Christmas is not about forcing our religious slogans, symbols, and cultural artifacts on others.
It isn’t about singing “Silent Night” at the top of our lungs on the public square.
Putting Christ into Christmas is not about elevating ourselves and our traditions.
To me, putting Christ into Christmas is about extending hospitality to those who do not share our traditions.
Putting Christ into Christmas is not the time to think of ourselves as Americans but to think of ourselves as citizens of Earth.
Putting Christ into Christmas is not about excluding but including.
Putting Christ into Christmas is not about profit, but justice.
It is not about consumption, but caring.
Idealistic? Absolutely. Unabashedly idealistic.
Paul and Jesus were two thousand years ahead of their time.
Perhaps the time has come.
Maybe there are enough folks who are ready to hear their words and believe in their vision.
We can only hope.
But hope is what Advent is all about.