“Do not quench the Spirit.” [1
Thessalonians 5:19]
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| The family Christmas: never quite perfect, but still important |
Far more than any other time of year, the windup to
Christmas brings front and center the topic of spirit. Cards, advertisements, TV programming, the
constant stream of carols and songs are all calculated to get us into the
spirit of the season.
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| What exactly is the "Spirit of Christmas"? |
Exactly what that spirit is, is less than clear. There are at least four Christmases that are actively in play: the commercial Christmas, the cultural Christmas, the family Christmas, and the religious Christmas. In broad strokes, each of them has its own idea of what the spirit of Christmas is. The commercial Christmas is, of course, the spirit of retail. It gets dressed up as the spirit of generosity and giving. The cultural Christmas, represented by such staples as “The Nutcracker,” “The Messiah,” and various concerts, programs, and parties, is what I’d call the spirit of cheer. The family Christmas? That one is so complicated that I don’t know of a word to characterize what its dominant spirit is, but I’ll take a stab at and call it the spirit of perfection. Somehow in the context of family more than any other, there is the pressure to have an occasion for solidifying relationships and kinship bonds through such things as returning to one’s roots, sharing meals, decorating houses and exchanging gifts. The fact that frequently no family Christmas turns out to be absolutely perfect leaves more frustration in its wake than any of the other Christmases. Finally there is the religious Christmas, the spirit of which is generally one of high emotional intensity with a discernible meditative, reflective component.
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| Christmas Eve at Washington National Cathedral |
You can readily see how all four of these Christmases overlap, borrowing imagery and elements from one another. Rather than rant about how Christmas has been spoiled by secularism and so on, I prefer to look at this planet-wide celebration as a needed annual event on many different levels. I can think of no better reason to have a worldwide bash than the Coming of the Messiah, however we might understand that advent.
But there is a downside in all this. It is possible to quench the spirit. It is possible to choke it to death. And if we aren’t sure what the spirit even is, the danger is greater that even
though we might not intend to do it, we might in fact stifle it.
Both the Prophet Isaiah and the Apostle Paul speak directly
about the spirit. And here’s the
thing: the Spirit of Christmas is not a
seasonal thing at all. Nor is it a mood.
Nor is it unique to a day or an event or
some conglomeration of activities. It is
in fact the Spirit of God, one name for which is Holy Spirit. There is no way that we can read, hear,
understand, and appropriate the stories of Advent and Christmas without
encountering the centrality of the Holy Spirit.
In both the birth narratives, that in Matthew and the other in Luke, it
is clear that the action behind the birth of the Messiah is the movement of the
Spirit of God. To Mary, the angel
Gabriel announces, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the
Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he
will be called Son of God.” [Luke 2:35] Likewise in Matthew’s account, an
angel appears to Joseph in a dream saying, “Do not be afraid to take Mary as
your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.” [Matthew 1:20] The net effect of both these
stories is the claim that the entire life of Jesus is a documentary of the
nature of the Holy Spirit. All the
healing, preaching, teaching; all the feeding of multitudes, casting out of
evil, crossing of boundaries separating Jew from Gentile, man from woman,
outcast from community, poor from rich, child from adult; all the prayer,
sacrifice, forgiving of sins: these are
live actions out of the life of Jesus that manifest the Spirit by which he was
conceived and through which he was born.
The story in John’s gospel drives home the point even
further. John the Baptist identifies
himself as a “voice crying in the wilderness,” harking back to a centuries-old
prophecy of Isaiah. In this story of the
Baptizer answering his questioning visitors about his identity, he says, “I
baptize with water. Among you stands one
whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie
the thong of his sandal.” And later he
testifies, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it
remained on him. I myself did not know
him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you
see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy
Spirit.’” [John 1:26-27; 33]
That is the link between Jesus, the Spirit of Christmas, and
you and me. In a word, Jesus baptizes us
with the same Spirit that descends on and is embodied in him. He is not a categorically different human
being who has little relevance to us beyond teaching us what we are not or
implicitly lecturing us on what we can never become. Even less is Jesus’ main purpose is to get us
past a formidable entrance exam into a life after death. As one of the Church Fathers put it, “What he
is by nature, we become by grace.”[1] Put
simply, Jesus shows us not only what God is like but what the human being fully
alive is—and how that human being thinks and behaves. St. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote in the second
century that the glory of God was the human being fully alive, and the model
and means of that glory is Jesus. It is
precisely the work of the Spirit to be the power unleashed in us enabling us to
become the persons we are created to be—fully alive, fully feeling, fully
embodied, fully free, fully human, and full of God.
Do not quench the Spirit.
The most available way to quench the Spirit is to make a habit of
telling yourself, “I am not.” Or, “I
can’t.” Or, “I can’t be.” Or, “I will never be.” We become the stories that we tell ourselves
about ourselves. If we tell ourselves
that we are flawed, wicked, evil, and so on, that is exactly what we will become. By the same token, if we make up stuff about
ourselves that, however positive, is not true, then we become those lies as
well. “I am perfect. I am the best. I am better than you or you or you. I am not accountable to anyone. I can do what I please. I have no responsibility for anyone other
than myself.” Those are just a few of
the most obvious lies that are just as untrue as a litany of mess about how
low-down we are.
Do not quench the Spirit. The Spirit of God is always the
Spirit of charity. God makes it rain on
the just and the unjust.
There’s
a wideness in God’s mercy
Like
the wideness of the sea.
There’s
a kindness in God’s justice
Which
is more than liberty.[2]
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| Scrooge, icon of the cultural Christmas. "We can't victimize the poor and claim to be in the side of God." |
So much in our world, embodied in our systems and enshrined
in our heroes and values, proclaims a very different standard for human
beings. (One might add that there are
many voices claiming that God is neither kind nor merciful but fundamentally
angry, punitive, and harsh.) We give
ourselves broad permission to be stingy, judgmental, bigoted, racist, sexist, and
a host of other human-deprecating things. Not so with Jesus, not so with God, and not so with Holy Spirit. We can’t have an unjust society without
quenching the Spirit of righteousness. We can’t be intolerant and claim to be followers of Jesus. We can’t victimize the poor, whether on an individual,
corporate, or national level, and claim to be on the side of God, who always is
on the side of the poor and the oppressed, righting the injustices of the
world.
Do not quench the Spirit. One of the things that people often say of Christmas is that it is “for
the children.” I used to get nauseated
when I heard that, thinking that it amounted to trivializing Christmas, to
ignoring the gigantic implications of the Incarnation of the Word made Flesh in
Jesus. But I no longer think that. While I don’t agree that Christmas is
essentially about toys and candy, I think it is exactly about becoming as
children, without which we will never be a part of the Kingdom of Heaven. The Spirit’s work is emptying, letting go,
becoming vulnerable, embracing mortality, and living a life of giving oneself
away. Choke off the Spirit fast by
hoarding, possessing, controlling, denying your humanness, colluding with dehumanization,
or giving into the fears that breed all of those things and more.
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| Santa visits a children's hospital |
A number of years ago I met a man who told me that he really
didn’t enjoy Christmas and hadn’t for some time. I asked him why. He told me that he really had had a terribly
difficult experience one year when he was asked to play Santa Claus in a
children’s hospital. He gladly donned
the obligatory red suit and fake beard and went through the wards cheering up the kids. When he asked one little boy on a cancer ward
what he wanted for Christmas, the child said, “I know I’m going to die, Santa,
and I’d like nothing more than for you to stay with me. Will you?” Well, what do you do with such a request? Of course he would, said Santa. And he did. For more than 24 hours he sat with the child, holding his hand,
comforting the parents, on into the night and into the next day until finally
the little boy slipped away.
“I was totally wrung out by that experience,” said the
man. “I can’t even begin to celebrate
Christmas without having the whole thing come back to me.” Well, it was not up to me to talk the guy
into re-thinking what he had done, and it might be that he never ever has
gotten over his troubling experience. But to my mind, if there ever was a story that more aptly captured what
the Incarnation of the Word is about, I don’t know that story. It might have spoiled Christmas forever for
me, too, and it might for you. But
somehow joining humanity in its weakness and giving it company and strength
seems to be what God does best. It is
not by might, nor by the power of will, but simply by the grace of the Spirit that
we can ever do such things. And yet it
is in those very moments that the Spirit baptizes us with amazing strength and
courage.
You don’t have to go looking for opportunities to do
something heroic. Just be yourself,
without pretense or shame, and the Spirit will find a way to come alive in you
as surely as a little seedling will find its way out from under a log until it
finds the light. Treat it tenderly. Do not quench the Spirit.
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| Treat it tenderly. |
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2017
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