Christmas Day: Into the Treasury of Life
By: The Rev. Jerrod McCormack
What does it mean to truly live? This time of year is full of all kinds of wonderful things: friends having get togethers, office parties (though one could question the goodness of those), and family time. These are the times of year that we see people that maybe we’ve lost contact with over the course of the year and maybe we finally manage to reconnect. We get to make amazing memories of the holidays.
I remember my Christmases growing up in North Alabama. There weren’t many white Christmases to speak of, but there were lots of memories. My dad has always loved to decorate the house for Christmas. We always had these amazingly beautiful Christmas light displays: vis a vis Clark Griswold from “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” There were two amazingly tall Southern Magnolia trees (magnolia grandiflora) in our front yard. They had to be at least 40-50 feet tall. Though I have to confess, they seemed bigger than that as a child. One year when I was a kid my dad decided that he wanted to hang lights on those trees in the front yard. I thought he was absolutely out of his mind. But he was determined, so he came up with a rig. He basically used a smaller tree with all the branches cut off, leaving only a Y at the top of the pole to run lights up into the huge magnolia trees. I can’t believe it even now! Looking back at it, I am amazed at his determination and his commitment to making something special and amazing of that Christmas.
I think about all of the special memories and amazing moments of my life and I am filled with awe and inspired to try to make wonder filled moments with the kids I work with. When I was in seminary, I remember one of my professors saying, “Christians and Jews march on their memory.” It is a comment that has stuck with me after many other things have passed from my memory. I think it has stuck because it is deeply ingrained in my own spirituality. It’s one of the ways that I seek balance and hope in times of trouble. To remember the depth of God’s love and the continual promise of God’s seeking human redemption. Lamentations tells us: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” (Lamentations 3:22-23)
In certain moments it is very difficult to hold this idea and our experience of our daily lives hand in hand. I’m writing less than a week after the tragic shooting in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My heart is broken by this tragedy and the hatred that has been leveled against my Jewish brothers and sisters. Hate is not found in the heart of God. Crimes of hatred and violence betray the very image of God that lays inside each and every human being. Just a few days after the shooting, I had the privilege of standing alongside Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Catholics, Anglicans, Unitarians, Mormons, Lutherans at a synagogue here in Calgary and declare that we will reject hatred, bigotry, xenophobia, and stand together as people of different faiths to support our Jewish brothers and sisters following the massacre in Pittsburgh. It is one of the positive moments to come from such a terrible tragedy, but it isn’t the only one. Our Muslim brothers and sisters formed rings of protection around synagogues in Toronto on the most recent Shabbat.[1] We have to look at the good things that can come from these horrible tragedies. It is hard for us to hold these terrible moments in human history alongside the Glory of God revealed in the incarnation.
It is easy to reflect on the power and prestige of the birth of Jesus, but when we celebrate the glory of the incarnation that comes into such a messed-up world where there’s violence and hatred and evil it is much harder to imagine the God of heaven and earth deciding to enter into this world for its redemption. I would love to believe that Jesus entered into a world that was filled with less hate or less pain, but that simply isn’t realistic. It isn’t true to the human experience, and it isn’t faithful to the message of God’s redemptive acts throughout human history for our salvation. God comes in times that are most confused when people have most lost their hope and direction in life and aren’t sure how to live as God’s people in a new age.
When God brought the Israelites out of Egypt, it was to break the yoke of Pharaoh’s slavery and give us freedom to worship and love God. When God brought God’s people into the promised land, it was that they might not wander lost in the desert eternally but to give them a home. When God came to dwell among us, it was not into a sanitized world apart from the reality of human suffering, but it was to a people who were oppressed by the Roman authorities and crushed under the burden of the legalistic religious authorities that we might know the freedom of true life. St. John Chrysostom in his famous homily says, “For this He assumed my body, that I may become capable of His Word; taking my flesh, He gives me His spirit; and so He bestowing and I receiving, He prepares for me the treasure of Life. He takes my flesh, to sanctify me; He gives me His Spirit, that He may save me.”[2]
Jesus comes to dwell in and among our ordinary human life filled with both suffering and beautiful things to show us the true treasure of life and invite us to participate in God’s saving work. That we might know the abundant life to which God has called us a life of freedom and belonging and to open to the whole world the way of salvation. There surely is no greater proclamation of God’s love than God’s enduring embrace of the whole of creation through the incarnation. God reaches out through the incarnation to make God’s love known to us and to the whole of creation.
[1] “‘We Share That Pain’: Muslims Form Rings of Peace at GTA Synagogues in Wake of U.S. Shooting.” CBC. November 03, 2018. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/gta-muslim-pittsburgh-synagogue-peace-ring-1.4890743.
[2] St. John Chrysostom. “St. John Chrysostom: Homily on Christmas Morning.” Prydain. December 25, 2008. https://prydain.wordpress.com/2008/12/25/st-john-chrysostom-homily-on-christmas-morning-3/.
The Rev. Jerrod W. McCormack was recently ordained a transitional deacon in Diocese of Calgary in the Anglican Church of Canada. He serves as the Spiritual Health Practitioner for the Alberta Children’s Hospital in Calgary, Alberta and as a deacon for St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Calgary. He’s a native of Alabama but has been sojourning in the Great White North for several years now and is pleased to call the Canadian Rockies home.
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