The Need to Celebrate

December 8, 2024

All three readings of today, like all of Advent, are pointing us towards a future of joy, a future when all things will be made right, as the second reading says, “by the day of Jesus Christ.”  And in our real world today, there is something about the feast of Christmas, almost all over the world (whether Christian or not) that seems to usher in this sense of joy and hope. And this general feeling of ‘goodwill to all’ has been present long before today’s marketing industry enhanced it. In fact, during many wars in the past, the soldiers of opposing armies, often declared a day of truce on Christmas day, during which time they would even share drinks and sweets with each other.
 
And so it is with all religions and cultures.  There are days on which people get together to celebrate. Oftentimes, it is a time of uninhibited abandonment to normal social norms, as people break barriers in their minds and societies, and enjoy themselves, - as we see in the many Mardi Gras celebrations around the world (e.g. in Brazil on the day before Ash Wednesday) and in the celebration of the Hindu feast of Holi in India, where people throw colour on each other, or in the La Tomatina festival in Spain where people drench each other with tomatoes.
 
In his book, The Feast of Fools, theologian Harvey Cox spoke of the human need, even necessity, for festivity and fantasy in our lives at all times. The title of his book is taken from a celebration that was common in the Middle Ages when such a celebratory feast provided an opportunity for ordinary ‘powerless’ people to freely poke fun at those in power, whether in the Church or in the State.   Festivity then, for Cox, is when we get swept up by expressions of joyous celebration, even if it is for a short time. The celebration and the festivity somehow rejuvenate us and make us feel better. As for Fantasy, for Cox  it meant the ability to imagine radical alternatives to our present way of living.  And fantasy is the seed of hope. And so fantasy helps us celebrate and be festive when sometimes things seem so dark. In fact, the darker our world, the more we need to have such festivity and fantasy, if we must not die internally.
 
Perhaps the Christmas story offers us both. It offers us an opportunity to experience festivity because, according to the Christian story, it celebrates the birth of a baby when the skies themselves lit up in celebration, a celebration shared by rich and influential people from all parts of the world (the Magi), as well as poor and simple people living close by (the shepherds).
 
It also offers us a fantasy that life and our world could be different. In fact, one of the passages found in the Book of Isaiah that is interpreted as a prophecy about the coming of this baby says: A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;   from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.” and  ”the wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together;  and a little child will lead them….. They will neither harm nor destroy on my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord”  (Isaiah  11:1, 6-9).  
 
Such a world of peace may seem like a fantasy for our world today, where big and small wars are continuously encouraged to feed the arms industry, so that according to the Global Peace Index, in 2024 alone there are 92 countries that are currently engaged in conflicts beyond their borders. And looking at the world around us, we may often feel helpless.  In the midst of that helplessness,  Christmas offers us a fantasy, a hope,  we can still hold on to, for when we look back at the story of Jesus’s birth, we find the story of a helpless baby and his parents, so helpless that they were even refused a place in the inn and had to make do with a stable for animals; the story of a baby who was hounded by the mighty King of the place where he was born, the story of a baby who grew up into a man who  spoke truth to power both within religion and state; a baby who grew up to be crucified and killed - and yet, despite all of that, changed the world in powerful ways. Of course his story must remind us that this fantasy is not a story of power breaking into our world and making everything right.  Rather, the Christ-mas fantasy is that genuine inner change can trigger sustainable external change.
 
And though most of us, his so-called followers, have been consciously or unconsciously sucked into fostering the opposite of this fantasy, and are still enamoured by external ‘power’ in order to bring about whatever we desire, the seed he planted never dies, and somehow springs forth and blossoms in unexpected places and unexpected ways all over the world. And then for a little time, around that sudden blossoming, the fantasy comes true. So, inspired by that kernel of the Jesus story, we have Gladys Staines (an Australian serving in India with her husband for many years) forgiving the murderers of her husband and boys and continuing to serve in that very place where they were killed; we have Gandhi, Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. using non-violence to change their respective worlds, and we have Christian missionaries serving the disadvantaged in remote corners of the world right from the first century after Jesus’ birth, till now. And so on and so forth.  It is this reality of these ever new shoots of love and hope and joy that keep sprouting in ever new and unexpected places, - and that, as a friend of mine said recently, both moves the world and scares those who see religions as a competition between different gods.
 
Of course, there are enemies within Christendom itself, and so these shoots of the Christ-ian fantasy soon enough face vested interests and the inevitable institutionalisation processes that tend to kill the fantasy - until it suddenly, in unexpected and surprising ways, springs up again. 

And so if we must be Christian, we must bring festivity into our world, where our differences and hate are set aside as we dance together. And to be able to do that, we must continue to fantasise a different world as John Lennon’s famous song, IMAGINE, urges us:

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace;

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world;

You may say I'm a dreamer

But I'm not the only one;

I hope someday you'll join us

And the world will be as one

 

First Reading: Baruch 5: 1-9

Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God. Put on the robe of the righteousness that comes from God; put on your head the diadem of the glory of the Everlasting; for God will show your splendor everywhere under heaven. For God will give you evermore the name, “Righteous Peace, Godly Glory.” Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height; look toward the east, and see your children gathered from west and east at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that God has remembered them. For they went out from you on foot, led away by their enemies; but God will bring them back to you, carried in glory, as on a royal throne. The woods and every fragrant tree have shaded Israel at God’s command. For God will lead Israel with joy, in the light of his glory, with the mercy and righteousness that come from him.

Second Reading: Philippians 1: 4-6, 8-11

I constantly pray with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because you hold me in your heart, for all of you share in God’s grace with me, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the compassion of Christ Jesus. And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.

 

Gospel: Luke 3: 1-6

 

 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord,  make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled,  and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”