Advent, Christmas, and Weakness

Many Christians these days get angry when people say “happy holidays” this time of year instead of “merry Christmas.” I’ve seen a few blogs, facebooks, and other forms of social media dedicated to being “politically incorrect” in their conviction to keep Christ in Christmas by saying “merry Christmas.” It’s hard to know how to react things like this. On the one hand, we Christians should be eager to confess Christ. But on the other hand, we are called to respect and love all people; even those who disagree with our religious views. But both of these arguments miss the point.

For we Christians, in the midst of our fighting about semantics, we have missed the true meaning of Advent and indeed, of Christmas. Advent is about weakness. Christmas is about the all powerful creator incarnated in the form of a weak, entirely dependent baby. As I discussed a few days ago, Christmas is about God’s self-emptying on our behalf.

It is rather disturbing to think of God as weak. We pray to him for power, miracles, healing, salvation, and many other things that require infinite strength. And it is good that we do this. But the Christmas season celebrates God’s subjecting himself to weakness on behalf of humanity.

Why are we uncomfortable with weakness? Why does uncertainty bother us the way that it does? And to ask the biggest question of them all, why does it bother Christianity to practice weakness during the Christmas season? Our cultural climate is one of extreme social Darwinism - the survival of the fittest. We build massive buildings, form powerful armies, and accumulate excessive amounts of wealth all to show that we are the dominant society. Historically, when our position on the world scale is in danger of losing power, we have been told that “our very way of life is at stake.”

This attitude has worked its way into the church. Churches hold growth seminars, spend untold amounts of money on stages and sound systems that would rival full-time rock bands, and practice Christianity is a way that shows power, strength, and confidence. The church is equally as Darwinist as the world as it relates to social structures. In recent years, Christianity and politics has been inseparable in American society. Christianity has adopted a place of power. Christianity has been climbing the social ladder, trying to show that it is fit enough to survive. Out of this comes the fight for Christmas. We insist on saying “merry Christmas” because it shows our unique slant on this time of year. We fight to “keep Christ in Christmas” because by doing so we ourselves climb another rung on the social ladder while those who are not Christians stay behind.

The ironic thing about all of this is that the harder we fight to “keep Christ in Christmas,” the more we remove him. If our main concern about keeping Christ in the celebration of Christmas has become to use one set of terminology over another, we have completely missed the point. Christmas is about the weakness of God. Christmas is about the creator lying in a cattle feeding trough, embodying perfect love in weakness for a people who only understood power.

Unless we speak of weakness in love, we take Christ out of Christmas regardless of what terminology we use. Jesus’ birth and his life bore witness to a “weak” love of identifying with outcasts, the homeless, the unloved, and the despised. Unless we do the same, we have taken Christ out of Christmas regardless of whether we say “merry Christmas” or “happy holidays.”

Advent and Waiting

Internally bound within the concept of Advent is the painful process of waiting. Those who waited for the first advent waited and hoped through exile, return, oppression, revolution, and extreme nationalism. In our 21st century global village, we wait for the second advent in a myriad of circumstances. But the common thing binding all those who have waited for an advent, whether it be the first or the second, is that we have all experienced the pain of waiting.

My wife and I were engaged for two years before we got married. Those two years were happy and joy filled times that both of us loved. But after two years, the wedding day could not come fast enough. It’s not that neither of us were not satisfied with the way our relationship was with one another, but we knew that something greater than engagement was on the verge of happening. Waiting is a paradox. It can be both painful and joyful.

But within Advent, we celebrate both the pain and the joy of waiting because they both point to God with us.

Waiting is joy filled because in the tension of waiting, we find hope in that which we are waiting for. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “whoever does not know the austere blessedness of waiting - that is, of hopefully doing without - will never experience the full blessing of fulfillment.” (1)

Focusing on Bonhoeffer’s words, if we do not experience the absence of that which we wait for, we can never fully appreciate it when it fully arrives. Those who awaited the first advent found hope through the despair of exile. This hope fully manifested itself in the stories of Simeon and Anna who experienced the fullness of joy in receiving the full blessing of that for which they had waited so long (Luke 2:22-38).

But for all of the hope we experience in waiting, we still experience the sharp pain of waiting. Anna who experienced a full manifestation of the blessings of waiting still had to endure the 70 years of being a widow in a society that was dominated by men (Luke 2:36-37). Bonhoeffer who wrote of the great blessings of waiting still endured the harsh realities of a Nazi prison while waiting for a reward that he never received before falling asleep. Those of us who look forward to the second advent still experience the groanings of creation that is infected with sin as it waits to be redeemed (Rom. 8:19-25).

Waiting is a paradox. It is joyful and painful. But in this season of Advent, we celebrate the tension of waiting in the tension of our celebration of he who has come and will come again.

(1) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 4.