We hear the Christmas story as a lovely fairy tale.
But that isn’t how the Bible tells it.
For starters, when the people of Nazareth looked at Mary,
through the
cynical, judging eyes of the world,
they didn’t
see the Blessed Virgin Mother of God
They saw an unwed mother.
They did not say Hail
Mary full of grace.
They said less pleasant things.
In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said,
He who knows the mother and the father
will be called the son of a harlot.
It sounds like that’s what he was called.
But St. Luke looked at Mary through the eyes of faith.
and saw the Theotokos, the Mother of God.
The world we live in is the world we see,
and the eyes
of faith see a better world.
People didn’t see Joseph as a leading citizen either.
A carpenter back then was not a skilled craftsman like today.
It was manual labor.
When Jesus began teaching,
people threw
his father in his face.
Is not this
the son of the carpenter? they sneered.
But Matthew, using the eyes of faith, saw Joseph as the
saint,
who listened
to his dream angel
and accepted
the disgraced girl
who was in
God’s eyes full of grace.
Galilee was not an honored place in the world’s eyes.
The fact that Jesus was from Galilee was reason enough
for many to reject him.
Can
anything good come out of Nazareth? Nathaniel asked.
Prophets do
not come from Galilee, the Pharisees said.
But faithful Matthew quoted an obscure passage from Isaiah,
Galilee of the Gentiles
The people living in darkness
have seen a great light.
God choose Galilee as home of our Savior
precisely
because the world looked down on it.
That stable in Bethlehem was not only the least hygienic
place
you could
find for a birth,
it was ritually unclean,
dishonorable.
But St. Francis, seeing it through the eyes of faith,
regarded the
stable as a shrine,
made holy by
its very earthiness, its humility.
Francis was the first to build a crèche as a holy object
for us to
venerate on this Feast of the Nativity.
The Shepherds were a questionable lot too.
Their job made ritual purity impossible.
Priests would not allow them in the Temple.
But the Holy Family allowed them in the stable.
The angels chose the shepherds to hear the first Gloria.
The angels’ faith saw the shepherds quite differently
from the
eyes of the world.
The wise men who came at Epiphany
were not
even Jewish.
They were Zoroastrians astrologers.
But for Matthew, they were the first to worship our Lord.
The Nativity happens when the rejected is embraced,
when the one the village called
vile names
is seen
through faith as a holy virgin,
and the
smelly stable is reverenced as a shrine.
The world divides us into in-groups and out-groups,
acceptable
and unacceptable.
In that system, we can never be safe.
Even if we are in favor today,
we may be
cast aside tomorrow.
But God doesn’t work that way.
Christ’s incarnation as the illegitimate child
of a poor
couple from the backwater of Galilee
was God’s
way of breaking open
the
oppressive system of in and out,
admired
and despised
--
the system that keeps the oppressed down
and
the privileged perpetually nervous.
As a young person, Latino theologian Virgilio Elizondo.
attended pastorelas or miracle plays about saints.
He recalls,
“. . . (T)he
costumes (always) appeared very shabby.
I was . . .
tempted to give the people some money
so they
could buy finer materials for the costumes.
Eventually I
learned that . . . (miracle play costumes)
may be made only from discarded
materials
(because)
in the Incarnation the rejected of the world
are
chosen and beautified.”
Jesus said, the stone
that the builders rejected
has become the
cornerstone.
St. Paul wrote,
God has called not . . . . the powerful,
not the important of society, but
the insignificant,
the weak, and the
despised.
Elizondo brings it to a simple point. He says:
“What the
world rejects, God chooses as his own.”
God chose Mary.
God chose Galilee.
God’s odd taste, God’s preference
for the so-called losers of life,
matters for us in two ways.
First, the fact that God cherishes what the world scorns
should change how we treat each
other.
If we want to be on God’s side, we befriend the outcast
whether they
are cast out on grounds of race, class,
moral
judgments, or legal status.
But we can’t do that for others until we find God’s grace
acting in
ourselves and our own lives.
We start by letting God erase the judgments of us.
So, how’s your life?
What kind of judgments are you laboring under?
Are you having an Andy Williams Christmas?
Do you have “parties for hosting, marsh mellows for roasting,
and caroling
out in the snow?”
If not, well neither did Jesus.
It’s the parts of our lives that don’t measure up to
expectations
that warm
God’s heart.
How does your life look to you?
It’s all in how you look at it.
Are you looking at yourself and your life
through the
cynical, judging eyes of the world?
Or are you looking at yourself and your life
through the
eyes of faith,
eyes that
see yourself as the child of God,
eyes that
see angels who sing for you,
eyes that
see your own life as full of grace.
What is it about ourselves we have been taught to hate?
Are we the wrong height, the wrong weight, the wrong gender?
Is it our voice, our mannerisms, our ineptitude at this or
that?
Maybe these things are faults in the word’s eyes,
but not in
God’s.
In the eyes of God, we are already a delight.
God has ruled. That is the good news we call gospel.
God has ruled that we are his beloved
just because
we are who we are -- just as we are.
Joy to the World isn’t just about what happened long, long
ago.
It’s about what started long, long ago
but is still
happening in your life today.
This Christmas, take a leap of faith
that any shame you carry
is the
world’s judgment – not God’s.
As Paul said, If God is
for us, who can be against us?
. . . If God declares us justified,
who can condemn us?
Soak in God’s absolute and unconditional love for you,
Dare to believe that God enjoys you just as you are.
Open the eyes of your faith to see that
you are
living in the midst of a miracle,
right here,
right now.
And resting in that security, offer a little of that kind of
love
to somebody
else – show some kindness to a stranger –
find a
virtue in someone you don’t like,
and
wish them well for the sake of that virtue.
Practice the paradox of accepting the unacceptable,
and the dark
sky around you will lighten faintly
in
the East and the morning star will rise
in
your soul.
