In coming days it is obligatory for
all preachers to dust off their “Keep Christ in Christmas” sermon. The villain
is commercialism. The remedy is to shop less, donate time or money to the less
fortunate and to increase one’s prayer. I’m tired of this message. My concern,
particularly during Advent, is my inadequate appreciation for Christ’s
Incarnation and consequently my distraction from the true locus of Christ’s
church.
In a recent column Fr. Ron Rolheiser,
OMI paraphrases a social worker’s theology along these lines:
I
am involved with the poor because I am a Christian. But I can work for years
and never mention Christ’s name because I believe that God is mature enough
that God doesn’t demand to be the center of our conscious attention all the
time.
The social worker who does the job
with competence and empathy has the privilege of encountering God Incarnate
almost unaware, at least not until that social worker reflects on his or her
workday.
Where is Jesus during Advent?
Through an uncommon and meaningful
program, seminarians in the State of Washington get close to the real Jesus who
is a baby in a trough, a common criminal on a cross, a fisherman, a neighbor, a
teacher, a healing friend and a sometime agitator. These seminarians are
required to spend some weeks laboring alongside migrant farm workers. By
engaging in such work and through conversations with migrants, these young men
get “good formation,” their bishop explains. They are made to think about an alternative
to the attitude that the church is centered within the Chancery or the rectory.
However, the seminarians and their
bishop and myself are still a crucial half step away from a better appreciation
of the Incarnation and thus from the true locus of Christ’s church. A
seminarian in the program says, the church “goes to meet [the people] where
they are.” His bishop says, “We need the church to be close to those doing this
labor.” No doubt these are positive statements. But the seminarian and the bishop
could be missing the true meaning of Christmas if they presume that the church
suddenly appears when a Church employee shows up on the scene. Although God
exists apart from human experience, the Incarnation means that God is
simultaneously also intimately in a machine shop, in a retail store, in an
accounting room, on a hospital unit, in the jail, the court and the restaurant
long before and after a visit from a Church employee. Christ and his church are
in all workaday places whether people are continually conscious of Christ or
not.
My Advent journey for 2021 is to get
beyond a notion of church that uses phrases like “Bring Christ to the
marketplace” or “Keep Christ in the world” or “Don’t lose Christ at the mall.”
Christians certainly can gin up their virtues during Advent; more empathy and
joy, for example. Advent especially calls out for an increase of the worldly
virtues like social justice, solidarity and peace. But bringing Christ to
the world is a tad arrogant.
Doesn’t it make for an intriguing
Advent to realize that Christ is all along Chicago’s Magnificent Mile of
Michigan Ave shopping? Isn’t it worth a pause these days to glimpse Christ in
the neighborhood? To suspect that Jesus Incarnate lurks in the office, walks
the legislative hall and inhabits the school? Do not these places, like all
sacraments, both hide and reveal God? Isn’t Advent about looking at an animal
trough in Bethlehem with eyes of faith and thereby seeing the Creator and
Savior of the whole universe? The challenge is to encounter Christ who lives
among us, not so much to bring God or the church anywhere.
Droel edits INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102,
Chicago, IL 60629), a printed newsletter on faith and work.
