A God who gets messy
By Bill Uetricht “ I
t’s the most wonderful time of the year!” Many of us (not all) look for- ward to the Christmas season. Yet we admit that the season can
be amazingly stressful, sometimes bringing us into confl ict with our values. As marketers bombard us with messages and images, we fi nd ourselves turning Christmas into a consumer extravaganza. And we know deep inside that this isn’t faithful to the one born among poor parents in a cattle stall in a little- known village. Every year we realize our celebra-
tion of Christmas has gotten out of control again. And we wonder how we can return our celebration to something more in keeping with who we are as people of faith. Our discomfort is right. Some-
thing has gone astray. Our cel- ebration of the holiday certainly
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misses the mark. T e cries for a less materialistic Christmas seem to be the right pleas. Yet I wonder if this diagnosis also misses the mark. Perhaps what we need is not a less materialistic but a more materialis- tic Christmas. Some defi ne materialism as an
excessive preoccupation with stuff , but materialism at its core is about the material, the real. T e struggle many of us face
when celebrating Christmas is not getting lost in the material world, but rather our expectation of what that material world should be. We get lost in what ancient Greek
philosophers might call the “ideal of the real”—the ideal Christmas, the ideal family, the ideal parties and presents. Busy grasping for the ideal, we spurn the ordinary and the real. T e Christian message at Christ-
mas is that God isn’t detached from real life. In Christ, God enters messy, ordinary life. T e cross is the sign of how deeply God enters the suff ering and pain of our real world. When we sing “What Child Is
T is?” (Evangelical Lutheran Wor- ship, 296), we hear how deeply Jesus’ birth and death are connected. We sing: “Why lies he in such mean estate where ox and ass are feeding?” Why is he in such an ordinary place? We then sing: “Nails, spear shall
pierce him through, the cross be borne for me, for you.” And we consider that the one born in such a simple place is the one who endures most fully the worst this ordinary world has to give. What would our Christmas cele-
brations look like if they were about this God who gets messy, who meets us in the most ordinary of places? Our festivities certainly wouldn’t be about perfect parties, perfect families, perfect meals or perfect presents. T ey wouldn’t be about creating an ideal Christmas. Trying to be, create or pick the perfect only serves to send us on a search for a holy grail we never fi nd. What if our Christmas celebra-
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