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Rabbis On Meaning of Christmas: The Downward Mobility of Good at Christmas
23 December 2010 By Rabbi Lerner
The Downward Mobility of God to a Stable at
Christmas, Rev.Lynice Pinkard provides an anti-empire
perspective on Christmas
Before Talking About Christmas and the deep spiritual
meanings that it evokes, it's important to set out
some context. I believe we are in a nose-dive toward
death as a culture, because of the forces of the
imperial system, the world domination system,
militarism, and our compulsion to consume and acquire.
The consumptive anti-human forces that are being
unleashed on this planet provides for me the backdrop
for the Christmas holiday.
In the Christian scriptures, the prophesying and
heralding of the birth of Jesus reflected a general
sense that salvation--deep rescue--was coming through
this baby. The Jewish people, then, were thinking of
Israel and that deep healing and renewal were coming
for their nation. As Christians, there's a way that we
could extend the notion of deep rescue, healing, and
renewal to our world. Jesus comes with the Holy Spirit
that baptizes us with the spirit of life, the life
giving power of God that heals and repairs what's
broken and damaged by the deathly behavior of created
beings. At Christmas, in my congregation, I want to
raise up this possibility for healing and restoration,
for a salvific power of renewal in the midst of death.
One of the primary characteristics we see in empire,
and in colonization processes, is that they work from
the top down and the outside in. But the Holy Spirit
works from the bottom up and the inside out. One of
the scriptural principles that we talk about in our
congregation is the principle of light; that it's a
little light here, a little light there amidst the
darkness, and the principle is that God's light has
the possibility of penetrating the darkness and
transforming it to light. This light is the witness of
God's life in the world, and it is how the world will
be transformed--through a collaborative process with
God, of God's friends embodying light in the world and
bringing it to the world.
Amidst the commercialization and the utter opulence of
how some people celebrate Christmas, it's easy to
forget that Jesus was born in a crowded stable, full
of poor people who had been forced to come to
Bethlehem for the census. They were poor people,
compelled by the empire to register for taxes. This
wasn't the traditional German hymn of "Silent Night",
with its evocation of cozy comfort and warmth around
the fire; instead God's spirit and life were busting
through, in Jesus, into the midst of
disenfranchisement and poverty and deep oppression,
and that speaks to what one might call the downward
mobility of God.
Remembering this scene might provide a way to overcome
the emotional and spiritual distance that our
commercialized symbolism has created. Our congregation
doesn't put up a tree, or a creche--we leave that to
the supermarket across the street--but it would be
interesting to try and replicate the festival of
booths, of people putting up tents. On one side of the
street you'd have a storefront with the green and red
lights and your traditional Christmas tree, and on the
opposite side you'd have tents made out of straw or
bales of hay, showing solidarity with homeless and
poor people, and creating the kind of busy crowded
scene that occurred with all of the people flooding
into Bethlehem.
This solidarity is something that we must all embrace,
including our children. Most kids' involvement with
Christmas emphasizes receiving presents; if they give
presents, it is still just a part of receiving, part
of the more general process of acquiring and getting,
of more and more and more. We should emphasize what it
means to really give, and help our children make
connections between acquiring and consumption and the
suffering of the other people in the world. At the
root of this solidarity is the fact that Jesus
himself, historically, was not Christian but Jewish.
If we, as Christians, seriously commit to follow
Jesus--in all of his life-giving, love-connecting
generosity--we must bring to our children's
consciousness the fact that we are bound to Jews,
Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, pagans, to everyone,
everywhere and to all creation. This, rather than
consumption, is what we must reinforce.
As we ask ourselves, with a view toward ethics, what
ought we to do in order to eradicate (or at least stem
the tide of) the imperialist system of domination, we
must remember that we can't just attack deathliness on
its own terms; we must meet death with life. If we
want to proclaim the salvific power of Christ's love,
and to manifest that glory of God in the world, we
have to show what God looks like on this planet. We
have to collaborate with God by working for the
flourishing of life everywhere, for all people and for
creation. If Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus,
it also celebrates the birth of the Spirit of life,
coming up though all of creation to arrest the death
process. For Christians, the birth of the Spirit of
life in our hearts means we must bring more love, more
amnesty and grace, more mercy and compassion, more
radical hospitality and welcome, more peace and
healing and a greater determination to produce a just
and free society. In essence, Christmas allows us to
witness the power of God's life coming out under its
own force in and through us.
Rev. Lynice Pinkard is a pastor at the First
Congregational Church in Oakland, California, and a
therapist whose work is dedicated to decolonizing the
human spirit and resisting the forces and structures
of domination that destroy us and our planet. This
article appeared originally in Tikkun magazine, and
Pinkard's latest article will appear in Tikkun's
Jan/Feb issue 2011.
Save the Date: March 14, 2011
YOU ARE INVITED TO CELEBRATE THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF
TIKKUN MAGAZINE on Monday evening, March 14, 2011. At
the Pauley Ballroom of the University of California,
Berkeley. You can come for the previous weekend,
experience a Jewish Renewal celebration of the Sabbath
(Shabbat) with Rabbi Lerner on Friday eve, March 11th,
and Torah study March 12th, and spend March 13th with
others in the Network of Spiritual Progressives as we
discuss strategy and future projects. Then join the
festivities on the evening of March 14th.
At the 25th Anniversary Celebration, we will present
the Tikkun Award to the following recipients who will
be present to receive the award:
*Justice Richard Goldstone, author of the UN report on
human rights violations on Rwanda, Bosnia, and most
recently and controversially, on Gaza during the
Israeli attack 2008-2009 *Congressman Raul Grijalva,
Democrat of Arizona, leader of the pro-human rights
for immigrants who supported a call for a national
boycott of Arizona and nevertheless was reelected to
his Congressional seat from Arizona! *Naomi Newman,
co-founder of A Traveling Jewish Theatre *C.K.
Williams, Pulitzer-prize winning poet whose poetry
appears in Tikkun *Sheikh Hamza Yussuf, founder of the
first American-rooted Islamic study center in the US:
Zaytuna College
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