Winning and Losing the War on Christmas

I run the 5th and 6th grade after school program and am our church's youth pastor (on top of being the "everyone else" pastor as well).  Needless to say, I am always on the hunt for games.  Games are a great way to learn, especially learning hard lessons.  I have bait and switch games, I have team games, I have a large quiver of games for every occasion.  Most recently, I have utilized more and more "win together, lose together" games.  For example, instead of playing ping-pong normally, I challenge the students to play in such a way that they count how many consecutive volleys they can get.  That way, they win together or lose together.  Great fun.

Advent, or Christmastime, is full of games.  One of those games, though, is a combat simulation called "The War on Christmas."  Each year, websites aggregate the affronts to Christmas and report them to the masses.  When Christmas trees are renamed to Holiday trees, or "O Holy Night" is removed from the traditional school Christmas/Holiday concert, that counts as a loss.  When the public school teacher plays that iconic nativity scene from the Charlie Brown Christmas, that counts as a win.  Each year, the game is played and nobody wins.  

Nobody likes to lose.  It is in our nature to want to win.  However, like the movie "Wargames," warriors for Christmas are playing a game in which they are destined to lose.  After all, it is hard to love someone with whom you are in battle.  It is hard to correct someone on saying "Happy Holidays" and leave them full of the shalom on earth promised in the angel song.

I wrote on this passage from Jerome recently, but thought it bears repeating:

“We have taken away the manger of clay and replaced it with a crib of silver… He who was born in that manger cared nothing for gold and silver… I marvel at the Lord, the Creator of the universe, who is born, not surrounded by gold and silver, but by mud and clay.” - Jerome, 4th century

As Christians, we want to see tangible signs of God's Kingdom.  As human beings, broken and power-hungry, it would be nice to see those signs in terms of cultural victory.  However, that is not the game Jesus played.  The crib of silvery victory looks nice, but it isn't the one Jesus chose.  Jesus chose the mud and clay. 

Historian Eamon Duffy humorously quips that Jesus is, “A resounding worldly failure: the gruesome death, outside the city, of a man who ruled no kingdom, made no fortune, won no wars, and failed to persuade the majority of his contemporaries that he had anything of value to say.”   

This Advent, let us consider the God who came to us in clay, and served in humility.  Having beheld that servant King, let us in turn give up the game of winning and losing and instead roll the dice on the game of love.