Christmas is not for children

Christmas is not for children. This observation seems at odds with the sights and sounds that have blitzed our senses in the shopping malls over the past few weeks, with children lining up for photos with Santa Claus and suggestions of both the cute and the glitzy manger scenes. 


The source of our confusion and our inability to grasp this reality lies in the fact that the Christian Church's celebration of the feast of the Incarnation has become completely overlaid by a celebration of family driven by the unrelenting consumer logic of late capitalism. Christmas for us is about family, therefore becomes centred on children, creating an immense source of pain for those whose families are dysfunctional, those who are single and separated.


A look at the readings for the Christmas service that I attended in Canberra yesterday will start to make the point about how little the whole festival is about family, middle class selection and generally having a good time. The reading in the lectionary for the Old Testament for Christmas morning strikes quite a different note:



The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
on them has light shone.
You have multiplied the nation;
you have increased its joy;
they rejoice before you
as with joy at the harvest,
as they are glad when they divide the spoil.
For the yoke of his burden,
and the staff for his shoulder,
the rod of his oppressor,
you have broken as on the day of Midian.
For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult
and every garment rolled in blood
will be burned as fuel for the fire.
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and of peace
there will be no end,
on the throne of David and over his kingdom,
to establish it and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time forth and forevermore.
The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this. (Isaiah 9:2-7 ESV)



This is an account about politics and government. The debris of warfare and battle will be burned up and destroyed and what we are to look for beyond that is one who will bring a reign of peace, characterised by justice and righteousness. This is  a perspective that is supposed to frame the discussion of the Gospel reading in Luke 2 on Christmas morning, but I suspect usually doesn't. It certainly didn't at the church service I attended. The passage takes away any excuse for a sentimental account of the significance of the birth of Jesus and places it in a context of empire and exile.


As it is if you manage to ignore the political frame of God's project for the achievement of peace and justice in Isaiah, the account of the birth of Jesus in Luke Chapter 2 opens with a clear account of the political context. Debra Dean Murphy from the Ekklesia Project makes this very clear in her lectionary reflections on this passage:

In Luke, we glimpse what the tyranny of the imperium romanum meant for its subjects, especially those on the margins of empire geographically, ethnically, and religiously. In verses 1 through 5 it is clear that the events leading up to Jesus’ birth were no picnic – nothing like the familiar, beatific stuff of greeting-card sentimentality. Rather, despots and oligarchs populate the scene and the treacherous journey to the stable – labor pains upon labor pains – includes refugees on the run, authorities asking for papers, and risky border crossings.   

We can miss this, of course, and often do – especially when we rush to the later, more palatable and more accessible passages of Luke’s narrative. The Christmas pageant version of verses 8 through 14, for instance, has long colonized our imagination, with toddlers in bathrobes and bed sheets, coat-hanger halos on their wee heads.

But as Dorothee Soelle once observed, “the boot of the empire crushes everything in its way in the narrative from Bethlehem to Golgotha.” The terror of the shepherds was real and, as those among the poorest of the poor, the glad tidings they received from the angels (in whatever form these heavenly messengers appeared to them) signalled something of the radical politics of the infant king and his own future dealings, as one among the poorest of the poor, with the imperial powers.(The Logic of the Incarnation)

Tom Wright spells out the contrast between two kingdoms that Luke sketches in his account of the birth of Jesus:

Luke's scene ceases to be a romantic pastoral idyll, with the rustic shepherds paying homage to the infant King. It becomes a clear statement of two kingdoms destined to compete, kingdoms that offer radically different definitions of what peace and power and glory are all about. 

Here is the old king in Rome, turning 60 in the year Jesus was born: he represents perhaps the best that pagan kingdoms can do. At least he knows that peace and stability are good things; unfortunately, he has had to kill a lot of people to bring them about, and to kill a lot more, on a regular basis, to preserve them. 

Unfortunately, too, his real interest is in his own glory. Already, before his death, many of his subjects have begun to regard him as divine.

Here, by contrast, is the young King in Bethlehem, born with a price on his head. He represents the dangerous alternative, the possibility of a different empire, a different power, a different glory, a different peace. The two stand over against one another.
Augustus's empire is like a well-lit room at night: the lamps are arranged beautifully, they shed pretty patterns, but they have not conquered the darkness outside. Jesus' kingdom is like the morning star rising, signalling that it is time to blow out the candles, to throw open the curtains, and to welcome the new day that is dawning. Glory to God in the highest-and peace among those with whom he is pleased!

You see the two empires squared off against each other toward the end of John's gospel, when Pilate confronts Jesus with two questions: Don't you know that I have the power to have you killed? And, what is truth? That is the language of kingdom, power and glory that the world knows.The Most Dangerous Baby

Why Samuel Wells ponders do we turn Christmas,  into an event that is really just for children? After all ... 

 this is a story about political oppression, harsh taxes, displaced people, homelessness, unemployment, vulnerable refugees and asylum-seekers. That's the danger of performing it in a place like Delhi and having it acted out by adults who themselves know the very real possibility of any or all of these realities. We might have to recognize what it's really about.

And the truth is, we don't want to think about such realities. We don't want to think that our own political system and the demands of our own economy could have comparable effects on far-flung places to those brought about by the Roman Empire and its client regimes all those years ago.

We don't want the cozy Christmas story besmirched by such tawdry human and political realities. We don't want to spoil things by thinking of the oppressed - and more than that we absolutely can't face the possibility that we might be counted among the oppressors.

So we get youngsters to perform our nativity plays. We talk about how magical this season is. We say "Christmas is really for the children." How ... convenient. Christmas is really for Grown-Ups

If it is for children we can then evade all the hard and the difficult questions that follow if we read it for the hard disturbing tale that it is. We are then faced with the call to discipleship, the call to follow, to become people who are on the Way, no longer at ease with the world in which we are so deeply invested. And we in our churches provide a chaplaincy service to a society, giving a religious veneer with our affirmation of the importance of family and personal generosity to those who live and work on the margins every day of the year.

I got given this year the DVD of the movie Of Gods and Men, the disturbing story of the monks in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria who made the choice to stay and accompany the people in the local village in the midst of a dirty war between the Army and Islamist guerrillas. This story I think provides a parable of the Incarnation, of the costly choice of identification with the pain and brokenness of the world. As a parable of the Incarnation it makes it clear why Christmas is for grown-ups and not for children.

What should we return (render) to Caesar?

The gospel reading this week was Matthew 22: 15-22 on the much quoted, but much misrepresented passage on "rendering to Caesar".  The comment by Jesus on paying imperial taxation "give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar - and to God what belongs to God" has been frequently used to underwrite a political quietist stance in which a line is drawn between political activity and "religion".

Well, this approach just won't wash for a number of reasons starting from the fact that the distinction between a private sphere of "religion" and a public sphere of politics would have been incomprehensible at the time. To read such a distinction back into the text is anachronistic. We need to read the incident within its historical context. As a Jew, speaking to Jews, Jesus would have been understood to have been reminding his interlocutors of the prior and total claim of God over their lives. The books of Moses and the Prophets, whose authority he held in common with his interlocutors, were devoted to spelling this profound claim out in redundant detail covering the whole of life, from agriculture to food to economics in an arc whose trajectory pushed increasingly to emphasise the central character of the claims of justice and and mercy in walking humbly before God.

So what is going on here?

James Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts I think helps us get a handle on at least part of what is happening with his study of conflicts between the powerful and the oppressed, and his account of the difference between the onstage, public, and the off-stage roles and the differing accounts offered by both groups. What makes this passage so rare and so interesting is that Matthew offers us in the story an account of what the powerful, though still subordinate groups (remembering that the Romans are in overall charge),  the Herodians and the Pharisees are saying off-stage as opposed to their on-stage performance.

In this on-stage moment, they offer Jesus an opportunity to say in public what they suspect he might be saying as a member of the discontented oppressed class off-stage. What his reply offers is an account of a politics that is theologically unassailable, from their point of view, but is nevertheless quietly subversive of his interlocutors and the stance they have taken in their practice of engagement with the Roman empire.

Jesus' answer while apparently deferring to Caesar, is subversive in that it places people in a position in which they are invited, by implication to consider what it means to "give back to Caesar what is his" as against "giving back to God what is his". It does so by inviting, implicitly, a consideration of the question "what is Caesar's?", a question that, in Caesar's terms, should not even be asked. Such a question brings the possibility of a political and socially critical  discipleship into view. What we owe to Caesar, or the liberal democratic nation-state of Australia, itself aligned to an imperial power, is always, and must always, be open to question against the prior claim to return to God what is God's.

What should we return to Caesar? Not an easy question, but one that should be struggled with continually and communally. We can start our reflection on this question from Jesus' the point that the prior claim is to return to God what belongs to God, a practice which acknowledges that the baseline of the human is filled out for us paradigmatically in the life and teaching, the death and resurrection of Jesus. We learn from him what it looks like to return to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to return to God what is God's.

The politics of Gentleness

The association of politics with weakness seems strange, n a world where politics is associated with the power of the state, and the activities of political parties. This brief, thought provoking book challenges that association.

Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness By Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier IVP 2008

The exchange between theologian Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier founder of the worldwide L'Arche communitiesexplores how Christians are to live in a violent and wounded world by witnessing prophetically from a position of weakness. The church they argue has much to learn from an often overlooked community--those with disabilities.

Hauerwas has reflected frequently on the lives of people with disability, the political significance of community, and how the experience of disability addresses the weaknesses and failures of liberal society. L'Arche provides a unique model of inclusive community that is underpinned by a deep spirituality and theology and provides an example of an alternative politics. Hauerwas and Romand Coles have already engaged with Vanier as a political thinker in their book Christianity, Democracy and the Radical Ordinary.

Together, in one of the first books in the series Resources for Reonciliation, Vanier and Hauerwas carefully explore the contours of a countercultural community that embodies a different way of being and witnesses to a new order--one marked by radical forms of gentleness, peacemaking and faithfulness.

This is a profoundly challenging book that is addressed first to the church in recalling it to its roots through helping it re-imagine the understanding and practice of power within the church as a political community.

A prophetic spirituality

The complete series of William Stringfellow's books, long out of print, is being published by Wipf & Stock. Something timely here. A quarter of a century ago he made the following assessment of the United States in The Politics of Spirituality:

... over dependent upon the consumption ethic, with its doctrines of indiscriminant growth, gross development, greedy exploitation of basic resources, uncritical and often stupid reliance upon technological capabilities, and incredible naivete technological competence and crude relentless manipulation of human beings as consumers. Increasingly now people can glimpse that this is no progress, no enhancement of human life, but wanton ;ounder of creation itself. People begin to apprehend that the penultimate implementation of the American consumption ethic is, bluntly, self consumption. In the process it hs become evident as well that the commerce engendered by the American consumption ethic, together with the commerce of weapons proliferation relates cnsequentially to virtually every injustice of which human beings are victims in this nation and in much of the rest of the world. (pp.64-65)

Reading this a few days ago I thought it was a prophetic reading of the culture that had not dated. The spirituality that drove Stringfellow's assessment of his culture was he thought simply the ordinary experience of the Christian in partaking in politics. Religiosity he argued has little to do with the action of the Word of God in its judgement of human history.

Stringfellow was not overawed by either academics or clerics. He simply sought to exercise his gifts in speaking truth to power wherever it was not being appropriately exercised.

Getting sport out of politics or politics out of sport?

Calls by distinguished ex-Oympians in Australia over the past twenty four hours, including an angry tirade by Kevin Gosper to keep politics out of sport profoundly misses the point. The more difficult question is how can we keep politics out of sport.

In the Olympic movement the two are profoundly intertwined - the Olympic movement could not survive without the willingness of states to through large amounts of money in the vicinity of the IOC when bidding comes around for the right to "host" the next Games.

Given that reality how can anyone claim that sport is separate from politics?

Let alone the transparent attempt by the Chinese Government to use the Olympics as huge public relations exercise ... and on a minor scale the evident disappointment of the ACT Chief Minister, a beacon of progressive politics, at the prospect that a $900,000 investment in the presence of the flame in Canberra as a photo opportunity was going to be spoiled by people protesting about human rights in Tibet...

Street Theatre on the way to Jerusalem, or Palm Sunday revisited

The hymns on Palm Sunday are a bit of a mixed bag.

The closing hymn this morning - "Hold high the Cross" while paying lip service to "servants of the crucified" has a strongly imperial tone with images of the cross being waved as part of the crusades came irresistibly to mind. I had to remain silent and that is hard because I enjoy communal singing.

Palm Sunday does bring the political dimension of Jesus and his movement firmly into view. the difficulty is not that the hymn has a political ring to it, it's the character of the politics that it suggests that silenced me.

So what are the politics of Palm Sunday?

Let me give you my take on what is at stake by taking a look at Mark's account of Jesus’ approach to Jerusalem. The nuances of using either Matthew's and Luke's accounts instead of Mark's would not change my argument very much. In the account of all three Gospels we are up to our neck in a very surprising account of a politics that is at the heart of Christian theology and practice.

Mark's gospel was probably written just before or perhaps even during the uprising of Jewish nationalists against the imperial power of Rome in 66 AD. In a conflict that lasted till AD 70, Jewish forces sought to regain political and religious control of their nation in a bitter guerilla war that raged across Galilee and Judea ending in defeat following the Roman siege of Jerusalem. It was a time of struggle for survival by peasant farmers with guerillas raiding the countryside making up for their lack of numbers and limited military resources by their tactics and their willingness to give their lives in God’s cause.

Mark recorded the story of Jesus for a church that was asking questions about what faithfulness to Jesus as the crucified and risen Messiah meant during a time of war and conflict. Should they support their fellow countrymen? Should they join the military struggle against Rome?

The way Mark tells it, Jesus approaches Jerusalem not on a war-horse as a conquering military figure, but on a colt, not a form of transport normally associated with royalty. No Jewish king or roman emperor would choose to ride such an animal when entering in triumph into a conquered city.

Yet that is what Mark is hinting at. Here is the conqueror, the Messiah. But after all the build up of having got to Jerusalem Jesus does not make a triumphal entry. He simply looks around and then wanders off to supper with friends. It is a total anti climax – the scene is set by Mark you would think if not for a coup, at least for a confrontation with the authorities – but nothing happens, at least not yet.

Mark drops clues all the way through that point toward a warrior Messiah but he doesn’t follow through to provide a stunning political conclusion in the way that his hearers would have expected. Sure we have the reference to David - the warrior king par excellence in Jewish history. Mark does not deny the political dimensions of Jesus as messiah but instead challenges the accepted conventions as to what the politics of the Messiah will be. He presents a Jesus as a messiah who does not take up the role of warrior.

Jesus procession to Jerusalem is a form of street theatre which signals his claims as messiah, while at the same time pointing to a very different understanding of the character of the messiah from that which was commonly held. This odd messiah embodies a politics that challenges three groups:

➢ Those committed to getting rid of the Romans by military means.
➢ Those who withdrew into a response of ritual purity that avoided issues of economic injustice and Roman imperialism.
➢ Those who simply wanted to get along with business as usual, whoever was in charge.

Jesus in Mark's account rejects the politics of violence, the politics of withdrawal and the politics of accommodation lives out a politics of affirmation of life, of prophetic engagement and rejection of business as usual along with a practice of making time for meals with friends.

The Politics of Forgiveness

Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy
Donald B. Kraybill, Steven M. Nolt, David L. Weaver-Zercher, 2007

This is moving account of the violence at Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, that goes on to explore the practices that underlay the extension of forgiveness by the amish community.

This exploration by sympathetic academics from their ecclesial cousins, the Mennonites raises deep questions about the politics assumptions that underlies the liberal consumerist society.

The Amish, while on some accounts have practised a sectarian withdrawal from contemporary society, have lived out another political option that makes reasoned choices about what technologies they will use and practices of life that make forgiveness possible.

In a culture that places such a premium on buying and selling, as opposed to giving and receiving, forgiveness runs against the grain.

Running against that grain, finding alternative ways to imagine our world, ways that in turn will facilitate forgiveness, takes more than individual will power. ... We need to consturct cultures that values and nurture forgiveness. In their own way the Amish have constructed such an environment. p.182

Why religion, and law and order are a problem - introducing the politics of Easter

Great quote in the readings for Lent:

... Jesus was not brought down by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion which is always a deadly mix. Beware those who claim to know the mind of God and who are prepared to use force if necessary to make others conform. Beware those who cannot tell God's will from their own. Temple police are always a bad sign. When chaplains start wearing guns and hanging out at the sheriff's office, watch out. Someone is about to have no king but Caesar. (Barbara Brown Taylor "Truth to Tell" Reading 16 in Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter, pp.89-90)

The politics of Easter are just as confronting, and nearly as frequently bypassed by "religious" people as are those of Christmas. More to come.

Christmas - a very political festival

Simon Barrow has drawn attention to the highly political character of Christmas and its subversion due to the alliance of Christianity with the powers that be. Following is an extract from his excellent blog FaithinSociety,- see the link attached to this site. the various commentaries he is pointing to start to spell out the implications of a recovery of the subversive character of Christmas.

Enjoy!

I expect to return to this theme in the context of Easter where the mystification of the politics of Jesus has gone much deeper into the liturgy and theology of the Christian community.

But the truth is that the alliance of Christianity with governing authority and dominant culture has inflicted the most damage on the subversiveness of Christ's birth. This is something Jonathan Bartley and I have been arguing in different ways over the past couple of weeks. See Jon's Church Times piece here, which roots the problem in our ongoing diagnosis of the ails of the Christendom mentality. Mine focuses on the biblical dynamic itself. We have also published provocations from Giles Fraser, from Methodist president Martyn Atkins (who I am delighted to see will be their general secretary shortly, and has a blog here) and from Rabbi Michael Lerner (mentioned below). Rowan Williams' BBC Radio 4 Thought for the Day is worth reading, too.

The Politics of Christmas according to Luke

For all the attention paid to the birth of Jesus in the focus on Christmas in both the church and the prevailing culture, the stories that we have are limited to only two of the four gospel accounts of Jesus. This is is in stark contrast to the focus in all four gospels on the last week of Jesus life and his execution.

In Luke's account as in Matthew's account, discussed earlier this week, we land up in the midst of the politics of first century Palestine, not some nice spiritually warm "religious" event.

Luke focuses our attention on the political aspirations of the people of Palestine located against the history of their striving for identity and independence - hoping for liberation - read the poetry of the Magnificat and the prophetic Benedictus, all this is soaked in the language of politics, of justice, pulling down princes, lifting up the poor, freedom from fear and guiding our feet into the path of peace.

All the signs and language of this account are a counter imperial challenge to the claim of the ruling Roman powers and the claims to divinity of Caesar.

With Caesar there was not distinction between the 'political' and the 'religious' - Luke was writing to those in the wider Roman empire. To make the claims Luke does was to call into question the political claims of the empire.

Jesus is bringing into the world, Luke advises us, a new form of politics that calls the claims of Caesar into severe question.

Luke's Christmas account read carefully calls into question any easy alignment of those who claim to be followers of Jesus with the pretensions of Empire - then and now.

Should Christians care about religion?

The confusion, among christians, as well as in the society at large about what the separation of religion from politics and the increasing accummulation of power by the state needs to be untangled. The theologian William Cavanaugh has done some great work in challenging the received wisdom on this issue.


The story of separation of "religion" and “politics” in Europe and the development of the “secular” state, as normally narrated, begins with the wars of religion triggered by the Reformation. A state free from "religious" control was necessary to ensure tolerance and suppress the violence of competing religious forces. This narration gains plausibility against the background of the co-option of the Christian church by the Roman Empire, the emergence of Christendom and the use of imperial violence to enforce conversion to the Christian faith. According to William Cavanaugh (“A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House – The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State” Modern Theology, 1995)

"The "Wars of Religion" were not the events which necessitated the birth of the modern State; they were in fact themselves the birthpangs of the State. These wars were not simply a matter of conflict between "Protestantism" and "Catholicism," but were fought largely for the aggrandizement of the emerging State over the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesial order. … behind these wars is the creation of "religion" as a set of beliefs which is defined as personal conviction and which can exist separately from one's public loyalty to the State. The creation of religion, and thus the privatization of the Church, is correlative to the rise of the State. "

As a result we have the invention of “religion” as a sphere of life, a realm of individual choice and private concern disconnected from public, community and social life is intertwined with the emergence of the state as "sovereign", with a total monopoly of power within a limited geographic area. In another article Canavanugh argues that

"… the term "religion" has accompanied the domestication of Christianity. It has facilitated the marginalisation of the radical claims of the gospel and the transfer of the Christian's ultimate loyalty to the supposedly rational spheres of nation and the market. The church is now a leisure activity: the state and the market are the only things worth dying for. The modern concept of religion facilitates idolatry, the replacement of the living God with Caesar and Mammon. " ("God is not Religious")