Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle

The “news” this week is, of course, dominated by the impeachment of the President, and his response to the Speaker of the House, the latter reminiscent of something that might have been in Beetlejuice Goes to Washington, if Pee Wee Herman played the title role. But the impeachment itself was certainly not “breaking news”, whatever the networks claim, because it has been predicted for months. And neither the impeachment nor the President’s reaction were news at all in Thoreau’s sense. He, we recall, said that a wagon running into a cow is news — that is, “new” —  only the first time it happens, the second time being merely a different wagon and a different cow.

If anything, the news this week was the editorial in Christianity Today magazine bearing the headline “Trump Should Be Removed from Office,” and, even more interestingly, the reaction to the piece. The editorial speaks for itself and is well worth a read. As for the reaction: one would have thought that the response to an editorial run by an evangelical magazine (founded by Billy Graham) finding a lying, philandering, bigoted narcissist unfit for office would have been “duh!” Instead, the cry has, for the most part, been “Bravo!” And — here’s the really interesting thing — those kudos have come from people that, one suspects, do not have a Christianity Today subscription on auto-renew (Mia Farrow, Sandra Bernhard, Robert Reich) while condemnations have come from people like Franklin Graham (Billy’s son) and the unfortunately never-at-a-loss for words Laura Ingraham, who typically line up solidly with the evangelicals. But perhaps not even this is surprising. After all it was the gentiles who “got” Jesus first. Just as the Republican Party, once the party of Lincoln, is now the party of Trump, there are pharisees in every generation; the only question is where to find them.

But enough of that. This is the week to think about real News, the Good News. Christianity is a religion of paradoxes. Christians worship a God that is totally transcendent, not a creature in any sense of the word, and yet walked among us fully enfleshed. (When leading adolescent youth groups my go-to way (which never failed) of reviving interest in a distracted group was to remind them that Jesus being fully human meant that he farted.) Christians (and Jews) believe that God is both perfectly just and perfectly merciful. Christians also believe that Jesus is with us everywhere, all the time, although we never manage to actually see him. These paradoxes inhere in the faith and will be sorted out only in the fullness of time.

But there is a paradox about the Christmas season that is wholly man-made. We believe that, as Linus puts it, the “true meaning of Christmas” lies in the fact that the Messiah has been born, and his coming makes us free. Paul writes in Galatians an ideal that is shot right through the New Testament: “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free.” Why is it, then that the season that celebrates his birth is the one time of the year when we are least free, when obligations most weigh upon us, when our daytimer is fullest, when our trashcans are full and our bank accounts are empty? Starting, it seems, right after the Fourth of July, we get commercials telling us that the real spirit of Christmas lies in buying our spouse / partner a luxury sport utility vehicle (with, in many cases, one thrown in for ourselves). The implicit message behind these commercials, of course, is that this is how you show someone you love them, but the message behind the message is that you bloody well get to work, loser, taking a second job if necessary, so that you can afford the thing.

Well, respectfully Mr. Lexus, Señor Cadillac, and Herr Benz, as that late-developing Noelophile E. Scrooge said, you keep Christmas in your way, and I’ll keep it in mine. If you actually believed in the truth of the Christmas story, you would feel free to take the box of chocolates or bottle of wine that you have for your uncle Waldo, who you never liked anyway, and give it to the homeless guy on the corner; or better yet to invite the homeless guy to Christmas dinner and have him sit at the table right next to Uncle Waldo; to skip the neighbor’s Christmas party, or go and stay too late, as suits your fancy; to throw out the fruit cake Aunt Gladys sent you because you hate fruit cake and not even your Labrador Retriever will eat it, or to eat the whole thing at one sitting because you love it, in either case without a smidgeon of guilt; to make a big stack of books about the Keto diet, positive thinking, meditation for pagans, anything with the words “wealth,”[1] “simplify,” “keto,” or “secret”[2] in the title, and anything by Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Covey, Eckhert Tolle, or Tim Ferris, put them all in the fireplace, set fire to it, and (preferably in your underwear) watch The Princess Bride, or any version of A Christmas Carol (other than the current one, which involves Scrooge dropping f-bombs and making indecent proposals to Mrs. Cratchit); to lift a glass to Saint Thomas, who had precisely the reaction (“yeah, sure you saw Him”) that we all would have had; to go to church on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, even if your family thinks you’re becoming a bit of a fanatic; or buy yourself a Prius rather than a Lexus, and then leave it in the garage and fly across the country trailing clouds of carbon exhaust in your wake, for no good reason at all except to tell your loved ones you love them face to face, rather than via FaceTime. Responsibility, like heaven, can wait a few days, as can the Prius. The child in the manger will be patiently waiting also.

That is the true meaning of Christmas, and that will truly set you free. Merry Christmas.

[[1] Including The Wealth of Nations; you’ve had it for thirty years and not read it, and you can get it on Kindle for free. Plus, the real reason you’ve kept it on the shelf is to impress visitors to your house. It doesn’t.

[2] Non-fiction only, lest we lose The Secret Agent, The Secret Garden, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.