The Digital Story of the Nativity

If you haven't seen this, you should. It is very cute... Merry Christmas!

Bottom Line Non-Negotiables

They come out of the woodwork this time of year even more than they do at Easter-time. They come challenging me to change their minds about the “magical” (their word, not mine) things, or the “superstitious” (again, their word, not mine) things about Christianity. As modern or post-modern people, they simply cannot reconcile their knowledge of how the universe works with what they think are the “bottom-line, non negotiable” about all sorts of things – the inerrancy of the bible, the virgin birth, how the bible says one thing one place and a completely contrary and other thing in another, and all the rest. It’s as if they are yearning to be convinced that they have it all wrong, that the bible really should be read literally, that the virgin birth can be reconciled with everything else we know about higher mammals reproducing, and how the bible is, as a piece of literature, a difficult but interesting cohesive and consistent whole. And they are disappointed when I am not smart enough to do that.

Mostly, I cannot do that because these things that they think are non-negotiables are very negotiable to me. Now, if they would only ask me what my bottom line about all this religious stuff is, what my non-negotiables were, they would likely be surprised by my answers, because they have little or nothing to do with miracles or biblical inerrancy or any of the other stuff that we get into arguments about.

I can think of 4 “non-negotiables,” and none of them have anything to do with:

-this or that style of worship,

-this or that style of study programs,

-this or that style of architecture, organizational schemes, dress codes, political affinity tradition, custom, culture, denomination,

-old hymns, new hymns, hi-tech, low-tech, intellectual distance, touchy-feely intimacy

Rather, at least today, for me those 4 “bottom line” things are:

1) Jesus is an embodiment of God. Somehow, through Jesus, God comes from beyond time and space to show us how it’s done. I have no idea how that happens, and it doesn’t really matter to me.

2) To be Christian is to be open and willing to be an embodiment of God like Jesus. To be like Jesus doesn’t mean dressing like him, eating like him, wandering from town to town like him; it doesn’t mean not listening to hard rock music and not dancing and not standing up for what you think. To be like Jesus means to try to be an embodiment of God, and that means to care for others with integrity, honesty, and true compassion.

3) To be a Christian, I have to know intimately the story of Jesus, because the beginning place for every interaction is the goal to be like Jesus. And that means that I need to know more about the story than Christmas, Easter, and the occasional platitude that excuses my non-Christian behavior while condemning yours.

4) To be a Christian is to embrace the notion that God loves me unconditionally, just as I am. God loves you unconditionally, just as you are. I am, and you are, therefore, freed from having to prove myself to me to you, or to anyone, and am liberated to love even those who seem most unlovable to me and you.

Much of the time, the stuff we pick fights about (miracles, the suspensions of the laws of physics, the often prejudicial ways very pious people often behave, literal or figurative reading of the bible and tradition, etc.) help us avoid the things that matter most. And today, 4 days before Christmas, these 4 things are at the heart of what matters for me.

A

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11: 6-9)

"A." A little child shall lead them. A little child. Not Jesus, supposed son of Joseph, son of Mary, son of God. Not the Messiah. A little child shall lead them. The realm of God's shalom, God's wholeness, justice and peace is to be ushered in by a little child. At least here, the poetry points not to a specific little one in the Davidic line; it simply hints at a little child. And one more thing: the Hebrew word Isaiah uses for child, năh'-ar, just like the English word "child", is genderless. The poetry doesn't say, "the little male child;" it says, "a little child."

Now you might think that I'm making a very big deal about a very little word. But I think the simple truth is that you and I have been conditioned by a lifetime of Advents and Christmases to read the prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures as God-sanctioned, Nostradamus-like prognostications of Jesus. The problem is that while understanding Jesus in the light of these prophecies helps us get a full picture of how Jesus' contemporaries understood him, to understand the poetry as beginning and ending in Jesus misses the point.

The point is that the poetry says "a little child," and that while Jesus is everything that we say he is, and more, Jesus is not God's only chosen one. God has not finished acting in history, and God is not finished with chosen ones and promised ones, little boy and little girl chosen ones, little boy and little girl promised ones. A little child.

The prophet's poetry is not about predestination, where in some corner of God's heaven there's a book with a script for every child's life in it. The prophet's poetry does suggest something about our self-disciplined predisposition toward the little ones who at every level people our lives. What if our predisposition toward every child – regardless of wealth or lack of it or beauty or lack of it or parentage or circumstance or Wexler scale scores – included the notion that each child begins life as a little child imagined by the prophet. What if we decided that we would see and embrace each little child –

Ä the babies we baptize with some regularity,

Ä the well-scrubbed little faces lit up with their holiday programs,

Ä the hollow little hungry faces that stare at us from the site of the famine du jour,

Ä the babies whose births we await with both joyful anticipation and great fear and trembling –

as if that child were a promised one and chosen one of God?

What if you and I took seriously the notion that we were to be stewards of God's gifts to us, and that God's highest priority were the compassionate, impassioned care of God's promised and chosen little ones? What if you and I behaved as if each child we encountered – again, regardless of wealth, or lack of it, or beauty, or lack of it, or parentage, or circumstance, or Wexler scale scores – was one of God's highest priorities? Even when they won't stop crying. Even when they are stubborn. Even when they remind us of us at our very worst. What if we determined that we would be in relationship with each child we encounter as if she or he were a chosen, promised one from God?

If we did, the day would certainly come when no longer would one American child die every 53 minutes from the effects of poverty. If we did, the day would certainly come when no longer would 14 million American children live below the poverty line. ( see the latest report from the Children's Defense Fund on "The State of America's Children" at http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/data/state-of-americas-children-2010-report.html) If we did, the day would certainly come when we realize that taking only adequate care of the children among us is less expensive than taking care of their broken adult lives to be.

God's little boy and little girl chosen and promised ones don't decide when or where to be born. They don't decide where to call home. They don't choose their family's religion. They do not chose their parents' irresponsibility. The greatest temptation is to assume that all I'm called to do is take care of my own. The greatest truth is that all of God's little boy and little girl chosen and promised ones are my own. And your own.