12/26/2022
“Christianity is indeed an optimism about human beings such as only God could conceive.”[1]
Christmas Day should bring optimism into our hearts because God imagined that, within the body of a living breathing human being, God could exist as well. The true God/True Man we meet in Jesus Christ starts out life just as we all do... as a baby. Can there be a more optimistic time than when a baby is born?
And yet, the Christ child is not born into all of the optimism that we find in the sterile hospital cornered bassinets found in any local hospital’s maternity ward. He’s placed in a feeding trough in borrowed quarters for the night. His Father, unable to sleep soundly, is told in a dream of threats to his life and they are off to Egypt quickly and suddenly. They are refugees on the lam.
How quickly we lose our optimism, and yet God never does. God remains optimistic about humanity because the wood of that manger would all knowingly become the wood of the cross one day. The carpenter’s foster-son would be strapped to the element of His foster-father’s livelihood to be killed as a common criminal. It was there that the disciples lost their optimism until the bright dawn of the Easter morning.
This Nativity renews optimism, but life itself threatens it. God calls us away from the darkness of desolation to remain in optimistic wonder, most especially as we view the Christ child in the manger, but also each day, knowing that God stretches beyond the powers of time and space into our humanity in unexpected, and often wondrous, ways. Our expectation is often the danger. Certainly we want a savior, but we are surprised when we find Him in dirty diapers, laying in a barn, or ultimately hanging from a cross.
One Christmas morning, I awoke in college to find my roommate had given me an unexpected and very extravagant watch. I was touched, surprised and worried as my gift did not reflect as much extravagance. My roommate was a great lover of Snoopy and I got him a brand new Snoopy stuffed animal. You would have thought I had given him the watch! He danced around the room hugging the dog.
“I forgot how cute this was!” he yelled. In a Christmas embrace, our friendship took an optimistic turn by our deep care and regard for one another. We began to more eagerly share in each other’s humanity, lasting well beyond our college years into the deaths of parents and grandparents, weddings and break ups. Like God, we even dared to enter into the worst parts of each other’s humanity and dared to stay optimistic through the darkest hours.
Can you dare to do the same? In a world divided by wars, hatred, bigotry, how can one rise above pessimism? When Democrats and Republicans can’t even drink together anymore, how might we be called to, not just dialogue, but to a spirit of synodality where people engage in deep listening, not for any practical outcome, but rather that they might renew their optimism?
God can and does conceive of such optimism and does so in the person of Jesus Christ. This Christmas, may the encounter that awaits each of us as we look to the manger to see the messiness of a life be a birth of optimism. Can we move beyond the manger to the altars of our parishes wand there see that same little baby, unbelievably stretching forth to each of our unworthy pessimistic souls, that we might finally understand that Emmanuel, God-with-us, will never abandon us? Why do we need sparkly tinsel and flashing lights and giant trees in the living room to finally understand the absurdity of God’s self-gift to us?
This Christmas, may you revision the optimism that God already has for you and, thus, bring new life to all those you encounter.
What events from this past year have led you to optimism or pessimism?
How might God’s optimistic look at our humanity influence how we see ourselves and others?
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[1] Rahner, Karl, The Great Church Year (Crossroad, NY, 2001) 62
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