Have a materialistic Christmas

On the biggest shopping day of the year and the start of the Christmas rush, it seemed worth revisiting a Christmas Eve sermon, Have yourself a materialistic Christmas which said in part

The stuff of this world matters to God who lovingly created all there is. But we have so spiritualized the baby in the manger, so remade him into an image of perfection that we can’t imagine Mary ever having to change a diaper. When we overly spiritualize Jesus’ birth, we really are taming the shock of the incarnation. We end up with a greeting-card faith that can’t stand up to the challenges of real life.

We need a more materialistic view of Christmas. Grab hold of the reality of what it meant for God to be made man. God became a real human baby, fully human with all that means, even as he remained fully divine. Mary and Joseph got no divine assurance that night. Only a grubby group of shepherds with oddly glowing faces as they told of a multitude of angels seen somewhere in the night. The three wise men were still off in the distance somewhere. There were no gifts great or small in sight. There was only the common stuff of this world. Plain old ordinary stuff. That’s the materialism of Christmas. Plain old ordinary stuff made holy by God’s presence.

A more materialistic Christmas does not look like a mad, frantic dash to get just the right stuff to give someone. It’s a fallen, flawed view of matter to amass more stuff as if it is the stuff you own that matters. Having a more materialistic Christmas means coming to terms with the fact that Jesus was human and his swaddling cloth did need cleaning. Having a more materialistic Christmas means that we stop looking at the halos long enough to realize that Mary and Joseph were common folk. Having a more materialistic Christmas means recognizing shepherds, not as noble people performing a job everyone admired, but as men who others looked down on as little better than thieves.

God decided that becoming human meant siding with the oppressed and the outcasts and showed it by coming first to poor, lowly, and even despised people. That’s not how people always thought a god should act. God broke all the rules to fulfill a love story centuries in the making.

Have jumped ahead to think about Christmas, we will now jump back in time. Advent is coming. Prepare the way with an emphasis on the common things God made and loved rather than a mad dash for more.

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