I work in a large home improvement store that is very orange. I have to say that the holiday season was a nice adjustment on the eyes- not so much orange. It was funny because immediately following Halloween the mother ship of this company decided it was time to play Christmas music. Why not, it got people to think holidays = gifts = spend money at the orange store. However, everyone else thought differently. Just about every other customer, store associate, and vendors like myself complained about the fact that Thanksgiving had not come yet and Christmas music was playing. They were so adamant about it – Thanksgiving gets ripped off! To make a long story even longer, the orange store decided by the next day not to play Christmas music until after Thanksgiving. The outcry must have been so great they might have loss money.
Thanksgiving came and went. Christmas music started playing again.
So why aren’t people concerned about the overly Christian emphasis of 80% of all Christmas music. Saying “Merry Christmas” was an intolerant statement that limited the Holiday season to Christians, it made people think that Christmas originated b/c of Christians… imagine that. But in the orange store the little people in the small boxes in the ceiling keep sining and singing about a teenage virgin giving birth to the Savior of the world. No one has a problem with that? Is it because it is the holidays and we don’t want to be like Scrooge?
Then I wondered, is it significantly easier for the world to accept Jesus as a baby and not a man? Is it easier to see him cuddled up in a manger that marks a happy ending of a fairy tale like story? Do people realize that this same baby is the person who is completely intolerant because he said, “I am the way, the truth, the life, no one comes to the father but through me.” Do people know that this same person who got angry in the temple and drove people out by overturning tables and making whips. Do people know that this same baby was also the one who died and came back to life, and for some reason that story is a little more difficult to swallow than a teenage virgin? Instead of “Mary did you know…” I am working on a song “People do you know…”
I noticed not only for the majority of the world, but also for myself, that it is a whole lot easier to believe in Jesus when we can contain him in a manger, wrapped in swaddling clothes. Yes this was the incarnation, God becoming flesh, but the incarnation does not stop there. God continued to barge on to the scene to change people. His entrance was not obtrusive, but his life, teaching, death and resurrection sure were and are.
The Savior of the world as a baby is easy to believe in because at that point because he has not shattered our personal agendas of how we think we need to be rescued. Him being the Savior of the world probably lost its fairytaleness when he talked about a kingdom that you could not see or touch. Or, when he talked about being last, a child, or servant.
I don’t know why but, but believing in someone who only gives what I put on a Santa list – a better job, peace, comfort, world peace, a good government – does not interest me. In fact, it does not save me. It ruins me. Beleiving in someone who can offer me life that is beyond comfort, money, status, and world peace is the path I want to take.
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