My earliest Christmas memory is this: picture, like a photograph, four-year-old me, standing hiding a little bit behind my mom, peering out at a tall, thin, balding man sitting on a couch next to a Christmas tree all lit up with lights and tinsel. It doesn’t sound like much of a photograph, but you have to know the story behind it.
This little moment of memory was from the year I was four years old. My father, an army officer, was away in Vietnam. My mother, my baby sister and I lived in an apartment complex full of families like ours – wives and children whose husbands/fathers were at war. My mother made sure I remembered my father – there was a big glossy picture of him on the wall above my bed, taped onto a posterboard that said “Daddy” in big red letters. My mother and I wrote letters to him every day, with my 4-year-old scrawl in red crayon on the outside of the envelope, saying “To Daddy.” And we’re told that the Army mail clerk in Vietnam found that extremely amusing. He would come to my father’s tent with the mail and say, “Let’s see if we have any mail for ‘Daddy’ today – why yes, we do!”
For Christmas in my little world, a world with no dads, the moms did the best they could – putting up lights and trees, getting our families of women and children together to celebrate, putting mysterious presents under the tree. That was the year Santa brought me a tricycle, shiny and green with tassels hanging from the handlebars. I loved that tricycle. But of course what we really wanted was to have our fathers home for Christmas.
That year, my best friend's father actually got leave and came home, all the way from Vietnam, for a week at Christmas. And my Christmas memory, that picture, is this: going over to our friends’ apartment, standing shyly hidden behind my mother, looking at the Christmas tree, all shiny with tinsel and lights, and next to it, on the couch, a tall man. And I remember looking at him and thinking, so that’s what a father looks like.
If this were a Disney movie, the door would have opened on Christmas Eve, and my father would have walked in – but that’s not what happened. My own father didn’t get to come home that Christmas, but he came home one month later. And when we met him at the airport, I was the first one to catch sight of him as he stepped off the plane, and I shouted “Daddy!” and ran and jumped into his arms – a story often told, another memory photo my family treasures.
And I learned, at age 4, that the greatest Christmas present doesn’t have anything to do with tinsel and lights, it doesn’t have anything to do with anything you might find under the tree – not even the fanciest green tricycle. The greatest Christmas present is to be with the people you love.
Maybe you have albums full of Christmas photos like that one too – in your house or maybe just treasured in your memory. Maybe your photo is of running and jumping on your parents’ bed at 5 a.m. on Christmas morning, seeing them grumbling but smiling to see you awake. Maybe you see yourself as a child, scrambling down the stairs to see whether Santa came, turning the corner in your bare feet and pajamas, stopping to see a shiny new bicycle, with a bow on the handlebars and your name on a tag. Maybe your picture is of your extended family, all gathered and ready for Christmas dinner, the house smelling of turkey and your grandmother’s apple pie, and everyone smiling for the camera just before you sit down to eat.
And when you look at those photos, in your photo albums or in your mind, perhaps a little worn and faded with age, perhaps in soft focus so you don’t quite see or remember the hard edges around those old Christmas memories, what warms your heart is not the photos themselves, what you remember is the stories you know behind the photos –and most of all, memory of love.
Probably when we think of Christmas, we all have another photo in mind too. Somewhere in our memory, we have a picture of the first Christmas. We see a cold, clear night with starlight brightening the night sky. We see a field outside of town with shepherds gazing in fear and amazement at a sky full of angels, singing the most beautiful music any ear has ever heard. We see one star that is brighter than the rest, shining on small, humble stable. We look inside that stable, and see hay on the floor, and a donkey and an ox warming the cold air with their warm breath.
We see a steady, responsible, worried husband gazing down at his wife and wondering how on earth he is going to do the task God has given him to do. We see a young wife who has just given birth to a baby, looking at the child in wonder and pondering deep thoughts and questions in her heart. And we see a tiny, warm, newborn baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, no crib for his bed. The baby has a short, dangerous life ahead of him – before he knows it, his family will be fleeing to Egypt to escape the first of many world rulers who will seek to kill him, one of whom will eventually succeed. But for this one night, he is safe, and warm, and loved, and his young mother and her worried husband, and a band of ragged shepherds, and a sky full of angels, stand watch over him this cold, clear night.
And why is this a precious memory for us, this picture of that night in Bethlehem? It’s not that the picture in our mind is so beautiful. That first Christmas had none of what we’re used to – no beautiful trees and twinkling lights, no Santa Claus, no bicycles waiting in the morning. It had no extended family gatherings, no grandmas, no turkey; the young mother gave birth alone, without her own mother to help her. The young family in our mind’s picture is far away from home for Christmas, and won’t be going home to Nazareth anytime soon. The shepherds are dirty and poor, the stable smells of the animals who live there. And yet this picture in our mind is infinitely precious to us, a picture of love.
That memory of a night in Bethlehem is precious to us is not because that picture itself is unusual: children are born to worried, poor, lonely parents every day. It’s precious because we can look at it and remember the rest of the story. It’s a story about the God of the universe who took on human flesh and lived an ordinary human life, as vulnerable to hunger, sorrow, cold, pain as you and I. A story about God, not a god who sits on a throne and watches us from a distance, but a God who decides to be born as a vulnerable and poverty-stricken child, who cries and eats and sleeps and grows just like any child; who will be so vulnerable that he will die under the power of those same Roman soldiers counting heads in Bethlehem at his birth; but who will triumph over the powers that put him to death by rising to life again.
This is the God whom we will remember in everyday substances like bread and wine, the God whose real presence lies not just in angels and stars. This is the God who is truly present in every fleshly moment of our lives, the God who loves us in the very earthiness of our existence, the God who will never abandon us, no matter how ordinary or troubled our lives might be. This is the God who comes into our everyday human lives, and makes them holy.
We love this picture because we can see ourselves in it. A God who was born in a stable in the year 1 is a God who is also born in our lives in the year 2011, whose love reaches out to warm anyone who has ever been cold, lonely and far away from home. A God whose parents were traveling at the whim of a faraway emperor, with no place to stay at the time of his birth, is a God who understands about the distant forces that affect our lives, families and governments and economics, and who comes to us to offer a solid foundation when everything else seems to shake.
A God who was visited by dirty shepherds from a dark field outside of town is a God who welcomes every person who lies awake in the dark and prays for light to shine from somewhere, somehow. A God who was born to a young girl who ponders these things in her heart is a God who offers love to every person who yearns for meaning and purpose. And a God whose angels proclaim peace and goodwill in a backwater country that has known only war and heartache for hundreds of years, is a God whose peace is deeper and more complete than any peace the world can offer, and yet who offers that peace to the world, on a silent, holy night, in a dark street shining with everlasting light, in a newborn child who is infinitely dear to us, because his new and precious life is the picture of perfect and eternal love.
Merry Christmas, everyone. May the Christmas memories you make this year fill your hearts with the light of Christ’s love.
No comments:
Post a Comment