Just before Christmas, as executor of my late father's will, I started the process of making application for compensation benefits for armed services veterans who were used as human guinea pigs in a top-secret chemical warfare testing program. The program went on in this country from 1941until the 1970s at two locations. As a soldier, Dad was used as a human guinea pig several times at Suffield, Alta., during the Second World War. Acknowledgement of the top-secret program was forced on our government after a class action lawsuit by victims seeking redress for illness related to the testing. Dad died in 2000 after a tragic battle with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. It was the last of many diseases that plagued him, particularly in the last 15 years of his life. (Were they a result of the chemical testing? We will never know. In the legal world you have to surrender a lot in order to win.)
To make application for the compensation benefits for his estate, I had to find the appropriate documentation, which meant rummaging through all of Dad's personal papers, pictures and stuff again. Almost immediately, the rummaging cannonballed me into a sea of grief, which I thought I had puddled in quite long enough in the months following his death. I had to make a decision, and quick. I had to go through with the application process but I did not have to go through with the deep grief again. And so, I just decided not to go there. I decided to cut myself off emotionally.
A few days after my estate decision, I started to work on a Christmas sermon from Luke 2:1-20. After a full day's study and work I had absolutely nothing to show for it. Wednesday I spent the whole day again, and again nothing to show for it. Thursday was even worse and I was whining. Finally Linda grabbed me by the ear late in the afternoon and said, “Enough already! Do something else.” I finished off the evening writing letters.
Friday morning early, Linda kicked me out of the house. I spent most of the morning parked on the frozen shores of Maze Lake reading and rereading the Luke passage in my pocket “field” Bible and asking God, “How come no sermon?” God wasn't talking. Christmas Eve came and I thought the Christmas Eve service would kick off a Christmas sermon for sure. Christmas Eve came and went, and Christmas Day dawned. I still didn't have even the beginning of a sermon. We opened gifts.
And then it happened. Jody from Sheridan Lake had given us each a little something for Christmas and as I opened mine, I discovered a rather innocent looking T-shirt with some writing on it. I love T-shirts, especially those with place names stencilled on them, so I picked it up to have a closer look at the place name. What I found was a picture of a cross, fashioned out of old weathered fencing boards. There was a note tacked to the old fence board cross that read: “Gone to see Dad. We're fixing a place for you. Be back soon to pick you up! Jesus.”
I lost it. Pent-up emotion flooded in on me and I have to confess the rest of the morning was a blur. My mind and my heart were blown away by the simple message on the T-shirt. Later in the day as I reflected on the T-shirt sermon, the experience leading up to it and the Scriptures, I realized that the emotional detachment that I opted for as my “grief strategy” had had an effect on me that I was not counting on. Somehow I had castrated my emotional being, not just from re-grieving, but also from Christmas and the Scriptures. As a result, the power of the Scripture, perhaps the most powerful part of Scripture, the part dealing with the birth of God in human flesh, had become inert for me and me for it. I have always known that for me, if Scripture doesn't first touch me deeply and emotionally, I don't have much to say about it. But never have I experienced this like I did this Christmas.
And so after lunch on Christmas day, I sat down once again with the Christmas Scripture from Luke. Now the pages seemed alive.
What especially stood out for me was Mary. What can you say about her? Twentieth-century German-Swiss reformed theologian Karl Barth liked to refer to her with the phrase first coined at the Council of Ephesus in AD 431: “Mother of God according to the manhood” of Jesus. Barth's point was that with the Holy Spirit coming upon the Virgin Mary, Mary is the real mother of God and Jesus is the real Emmanuel. That, Mary as mother of God, “God with us,” is no longer some abstract theological notion nor a case of distant speculation. With the birth of Jesus, born of God, born of Mary, God pushes right into our face and speaks: “See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands” (Isaiah 49:16).
Powerful stuff. And it points to Mary's response to the shepherds. After they tell her all about the divine angelic pronouncement about the birth of her son, after they tell her all the theological content of what the angel told them, after they tell her all about the loud praise of the heavenly hosts which they witnessed … to all this information Mary says absolutely nothing. Instead she quietly takes it to her heart. Eugene Peterson translates: “Mary kept all these things to herself, holding them dear, deep within herself.” And what blows me away is how much this quiet, contemplative and very emotional response of a mother to the birth of the Son of God from her own human flesh is just the right personal response. Rather than saying anything, certainly rather than theologizing and preaching, Mary takes the powerful experience of the very real personal love of God and the truth of the birth of God in human flesh and plants it deep within her emotional centre to be treasured, pondered, held dear.
It seems to me that whatever else the birth of Jesus the Christ is, it is an invitation from God to enter into a deep and dear and love-filled heart-to-heart. It seems to me that when you boil off all the theology and preaching, when you go beyond all the religious stuff about it, what you get to through the birth of Christ is the inner life with God, a very emotional connection with the divine. The birth of God among us becomes the birth of God within us. As Jesus himself put it: “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:20).
Is Christmas an emotional time of year? You bet! And for the Christian it has to be. I think the most powerful human testimony of this in Scripture is in Mary's quiet response to the birth of Jesus, treasuring and pondering it inwardly. Diaries or journals are often where the emotional inner life with God gets written about. Mary never wrote a diary that we know about. Others have. The diary of Thomas a Kempis, a member of the Brethren of the Common Life in the Netherlands in the late 1300s, has become treasured as The Imitation of Christ. It has remained one of the most widely read books in the world. Out of his own deep inner life with Christ and that of his brothers, he writes this prayer to God: “Raise my heart to You in heaven and suffer me not to wander on earth. From this moment to all eternity do You alone grow sweet to me, for You alone are my food and drink, my love and my joy, my sweetness and my total good. Let Your presence wholly inflame me, consume and transform me into Yourself, that I may become one spirit with You by the grace of inward union and by the melting power of Your ardent love.”
