Rex A E Hunt

Christmas DayA, 2010
Luke 2:8-20

A Liturgy is also available

HAVE YOURSELF A VERY, MERRY, POLITICAL CHRISTMAS…

This year has been the Year of Politics in Australia.
And what a year it has been!

(My list...)
• Around the time of the federal election the eZine magazine Matilda.com wrote:
“…a leadership spill that toppled a sitting prime minister, installed Australia’s first female PM and saw a Labor Left candidate - endorsed and installed by the Right - signal a major policy shift to appease big business” (MCordell, 25/6/2010).
• Cardinal George Pell and the Australian Christian Lobby led by Jim Wallace once again joined forces in the public square - this time to advocate Christians not vote for the so-called 'anti-Christian' Greens, who the Cardinal described as 'sweet camouflaged poison'…
• The lobby group GetUp successfully challenged, on Constitutional grounds, the former Howard Government’s changes to the electoral act, which limited the time people had to enroll to vote after an election was called.  As a result a further 98,100 names were added to the roll of voters…
• Reflecting on the lead-up to the election, Andrew Hamilton consulting editor of another eZine magazine, Eureka Street, wrote:
“In the Federal election asylum seekers and wives or children of refugees have been made fair game. So have the young unemployed. And although Indigenous Australians have not been directly targeted, they have seen guns occasionally turned in their direction…  The targeting of the deprived is not new in Australian politics. Unpopular minority groups like communists and foreigners have often been the focus of political campaigns” (AHamilton, 19/8/2010).
• Overall, the five-week campaign was dominated by the calculations of political professionals and by attention to the whims and prejudices of small groups of Australians in marginal electorates…
• Immediate results on the night were a hung parliament with neither Labor nor the Coalition gaining a majority of seats in the House of Representatives…
• Seventeen days later a group of three country independents declared their hands and allocated a 2 to 1 win to the Gillard Labor government…
• Their collaborative efforts caused some to ask if this was an end to ‘adversarial politics on steroids’…

And now something different for the trivia buffs among you:
it has been revealed that since production began, 487 celebrities have voiced characters on The Simpsons.

Mmm.
I mention all this to suggest that it is also within a political context
we should hear the Christmas stories.
A context not often mentioned in church.

Or put another way… the infancy narratives of old need to be set within
the modern framework of re-election hype, waterboarding (or repeated drownings),
global climate change, and school-yard bullies.

They all grow from the same root: the will to control.

oo0oo

So what of Christmas?  Let me share an observation or two.
Today’s Christmas celebration is a date on a calendar.
A public holiday.
A red letter day if you will.
A start to holidays – sun (with the prospects of a bit of rain this year), sand and surf.

In the biblical scheme of things, these stories come late in the tradition.
Eighty to hundred years late.

It then took nearly 400 years before the early churches decided,
mainly for reasons of control and political expediency,
to celebrate the birth of the sage Jesus of Nazareth as one of its festivals.

And then another 250 years or so, again
amid great debate and various other religious practices,
for about half the churches to celebrate it on 25 December.
A situation which is still the case today.

And even then for the next 1200 years or so, it remained a bit of a mixed bag
of both celebration and being banned, until the mid 1800s.
Then it’s celebration became popular and sentimentalised,
especially through the writings of Charles Dickens,
a poem, and then later, through
a 30-year long advertising campaign.

These days, if you believe noisy evangelical preachers,
the really big controversy over Christmas is whether or not commerce and extravagant spending
has overturned and destroyed the so-called ‘spirit’
of a Dickens-type Christmas.

Hence the pious but often equally commercial protest: 'put Christ back into Christmas'.
But are these and other claims ‘fair dinkum’?  And is this
what the religious infancy or nativity stories are all about?

Doug Adams was the former professor of Christianity and the Arts
at the Pacific School of Religion in California.
Unfortunately he died in 2007 and is still greatly missed.

As some of you have heard me say on other occasions,
Adams was a great advocate of joining the arts and theology.
For instance, he often pointed out that in nativity scenes, many great artists
portray the child Jesus as drawing together
the full diversity of humanity.

• Shepherds appear ragged and poor.
• Magi or astrologers appear elegant and wealthy.
One of the Magi men is old.
Another middle aged.
And another young.
All are foreigners.  And one may be black.
• Closest to the child Jesus is a woman,
Mary his mother, who is visible to all.

Adams says: the so-called unrighteous as well as the so-called righteous, are in Jesus' company  (PSR web site, 2004).

Now I don’t have a colourful painting of a nativity scene to show you.
Least of all one done by one of the world’s great artists.
But I do have some art to show you  (from Shuck & Jive blog, 2007).

And I have printed it on the Liturgy sheet (see below) you received this morning.
It’s reproduction may not be as clear as I would have liked
so let me paint some descriptive words to go with it.

It’s a nativity scene.
It’s a nativity scene in Bethlehem.
It’s a gated or walled nativity scene in Bethlehem.
It’s a political gated or walled nativity scene in Bethlehem... today.

He then went on to say:
“For instance, did you know that 15 year-olds are locked up in prison for six months for throwing stones at military watch-towers?  Did you know that Israel is building a segregated road  system in the West Bank, so that Israelis and Palestinians won’t have to travel on the same roads?  Did you know there are 90 military checkpoints and 562 other obstacles (trenches, roadblocks, etc.) placed on the roads in the West Bank? It’s hard to see how Palestine can develop a sustainable economy, let alone form a viable state” (Henderson, UCA web site, 2007).