So there we were at the Day Care’s Christmas Program. It’s a church-based Day Care so it came as no surprise at the end of the program that the pastor of the church stood up, opened his mouth, and ruined the Christmas spirit. I mean, here were all these little kiddies singing away about Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus – and about snowmen, jingling bells and all sorts of other happy Christmasy things. It was all joy, joy, joy to the world.

Until he got up.

Taking the microphone, he reminded everybody that it’s a good thing Jesus was born so we can all go to heaven when we die.

Joy to the world!

Die? Did he say, “Die?”

The 4-year olds looked a little confused.

I’m pretty sure they thought Christmas joy is really about reindeer and angels and elfs-on-the-shelf and the Star in the east and the baby in the manger and Santa coming down the chimney while everybody is fast asleep and getting presents and having fun and…love. Yes, Christmas joy is especially about LOVE!

Die? Did he say, “Die?”

The true “reason for the season”, he said, was to celebrate that we can go to heaven when we die which we could not do if Jesus had not come to die.

Die? Did he say “Die” again?

What the hell is all this talk about dying?

This Day Care Christmas Show Death Narrative reminded me of the Christmas pageant I once saw where the lights went down after the baby Jesus was born in the manger and when they came back on a guy pretending to be Jesus was hanging on a cross with ketchup blood all over his bathrobe. It was a flash forward scene, from the manger to Golgotha.

Kinda ruined the joy of the moment.

The Day Care’s 4-year olds by now were looking past the preacher to the Christmas tree with all its bright lights and ornaments.

How do they get that Star way up there on top?

The preacher went on – for far too long as we preachers are wont to do – telling the crowd about how wonderful it is that God loves sucky people like us so much that he sent Jesus to die so he won’t have to kill us if we will simply admit that we are sucky people and believe in Jesus to make us not sucky anymore. Those weren’t his exact words, but that was the message.

In fact, it is THE message of many preachers, many churches, and many people.

But it is not the Christmas message.

Do you remember what it is, this message of Christmas?

“Glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace, goodwill toward mankind!” 

That’s how the angels sang it.

Peace to you!

Good will toward people!

The joy of Christmas is that God truly does love us.

Christmas is God’s declaration of LOVE for the world!

Maybe God even LIKES us!

Maybe we’re not as sucky as we think!

Matthew Fox wrote a controversial book called “Original Blessing.”  Before it was published in 1983, Fox was a Dominican priest. After it was published, he wasn’t a Dominican priest anymore! Why? Because Fox challenged the Church’s teaching on original sin, demonstrating among other things, that such a doctrine did not exist in the Church until 400 years after the life of Jesus.

Did you know that?

More importantly, Fox asserted that the idea of original sin does not exist in either Judaism, or the early Christian Church. It doesn’t exist today in Eastern Christianity. And yet the idea of the pervasive sinfulness of human beings passed down from one generation to the next has become the filter through which many Christians and much of the Church today look out at people and at the world around us.

Fox writes that a true study of Scripture reveals that the operative principle of God’s relationship with humanity is not our original sin, but our original blessing!

Yay God!

According to Genesis 1, God created a GOOD world with GOOD people, and even though we human beings rebel against God and fall into sin, there is a spark of GOODNESS that remains alive within us.

Meister Eckhart, the 13th century Christian mystic – who was also a Dominican by the way – described it as the spark of the soul. He wrote that, hidden in all of us, is “something like the original outbreak of all goodness… something like a brilliant fire that burns incessantly. This fire is nothing other than the Holy Spirit.”

Original blessing.

How hard it is for those of us who grew up in some parts of the Church to know that we are good and valuable and richly loved by God. And how hard for those of us who were taught to see ourselves first and foremost as fallen sinners to treat others as good and worthy of love and respect.

Fox writes, “What a difference it makes to teach our children that they are blessings first and “sinners” only second. So much low self-esteem, internalized oppression, and violence to self and others rule our society forcing bouts and binges of addictions ranging from bulimia to consumerism. One therapist I know told me she hands out copies of this book to all her clients because she has come to realize how many problems arise in the psyche from toxic religious messages.”

How I wish that Day Care Christmas Program could embrace this theme:

Christmas proves that you are beautiful and good and God cherishes each and every one of you! That’s what it means to believe in Jesus and that’s why we celebrate Christmas!

Just a short sermon like that would be great.

Then we could get on with singing “Joy to the World!”