Waiting for Christmas

It’s December 23 and I should be writing one of the sermons I need to preach over the next two days. But instead I am watching Christmas cheer.

I am watching the lunch crowd fill up the Laughing Sun (my favorite local brewery). I see the holiday celebrations. A group of people throwing axes with their work friends for a last work event before they go home for the holidays. There are a couple families here with their Christmas sweaters on, obviously taking a lunch break from Christmas shopping. You can almost see the sugar plums in the dreams of some of the smallest ones.

You can tell who has to go back to work, and who is done for the week, mostly, but not always, by what they are wearing and what they are drinking. But there is a sense of expectation on every face, and among every crowd.

But there are others. There are some who are alone. There is the couple that is not speaking to each other, but looking at their phones instead. There is the old guy who so obviously longs for the connection that can be made over a beer.

And then there is the guy who is trying to figure out how to make a difficult Christmas a good one.

Spoiler alert, I’m that guy. I don’t really like to spoil other people’s stories, but this is a little bit my story too. This Christmas, my son is really dealing with mental illness. Actually, that’s not exactly right, my son is very happy. The rest of us are dealing with his mental illness.

That’s all you get to know about him, but let me tell you that the rest of us have worked really hard to differentiate from his fluctuations in personality, his anger, his need, and his delusions.

We’ve done well in not getting on his rollercoaster of drama, but when his illness peaks it’s always unpleasant for the people who love him. It just so happens that it’s peaking this Christmas.

Everyone wants to have that Cratchit Christmas. The Figgy Pudding, and the Goose, and the “God bless us, everyone.” We all dream of the perfect family Christmas. But the sad reality is it’s not always so perfect.

Someone is probably spending Christmas this year with their creepy uncle who seems a little like a pedophile. Someone else is no doubt sharing the Christmas ham with their childhood rapist. And many of us are spending Christmas with a powerful absence. I know that absence acutely. It’s been more than 20 years and sometimes I still feel like something’s missing because my mom isn’t there.

Christmas is a time when the marketing in our world demands that we experience happiness and cheer, but the brokenness in our hearts and in our lives often demands the opposite. When these two voices – reality and marketing – collide, they can leave us confused, hurt, and wondering why we feel like we aren’t supposed to feel.

But that’s not what Christmas is. That was never what Christmas was supposed to be. The first Christmas story involves the slaughter of babies for the sake of one man maintaining power. It’s true, in case you aren’t aware, the first Christmas – the birth of Jesus – was met with mass infanticide because a power hungry dictator was afraid that the baby who was born was going to take his throne.

Imagine those Mamas. Those Dads. The parents who lost their sons because the world was messed up and because power always wants more power.

It’s devastating.

Christmas is a march against all things evil and painful. It’s not supposed to ignore to mess and the pain, its supposed to confront it.

When we sing “Rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee oh Israel” it is not a naive happy, merry moment because the decorations are so pretty and the Christmas spirit is in high gear. It is a rebellion against the status quo of pain and trauma in our world.

Things are not as they are supposed to be. There is a wretchedness at work in many of our lives. There are losses and pain that need to be named. Then again, there is a hope because a child has been born that promises to destroy the destruction and wreak havoc on the status quo.

This Christmas, we are all in different places. Some of us are at a place when things are great and we are simply enjoying an amazing holiday with people we love. Others of us are ignoring reality and trying to put on a pretty show. Still, there are others who feel out of place and disconnected and we are wondering why we weren’t invited to the party.

Wherever we are and whatever we are experiencing this year, I am praying each of us can experience, even if just for a moment, the power of what it means that Christmas is an announcement of war against pain, fakery, misery, and death. There really is a reason to rejoice, there is a reason to hope. And that reason confronts the deepest pains each of us are feeling right now.

Merry Christmas, Rejoice! God with us is coming to you. Every pain can and will be made right.