What I’m about to share with you will make a finicky housekeeper cringe. Our living room and foyer still harbor pockets of Christmas mess:
Small piles of gifts and stocking-stuffers sorted neatly by recipient; cardboard and packaging destined for recycling; a cast-aside instruction manual sternly forbidding “use of this appliance in a bathtub or other similarly wet environment.”
In my stack I found an empty bottle of chardonnay, and I haven’t the foggiest idea how it got there!
Whenever someone says, “The holidays are always hard,” what I hear them saying is, “The holidays are always messy.” Complicated. Generally, problematic. Oftentimes thorny. And thus painful. But none of those descriptors is how you’re supposed to respond to the fellow shopper in the bread aisle when she asks with lingering holiday cheer, “How was your Christmas?”
“Oh, good, fine” – or not. “It is what it is” – until it isn’t. The holidays are always messy.
We find ourselves in places that none of us wants to be in. At times, with people whose company we treasure not; other times, yearning for just a few more sweet morsels of yarn-spinning and memory-making before it’s time to go. Another minute or two of cherishing the crackling fire before its embers finally die out.
Such was my Christmas of 2022: Two weeks of limiting the spread of my COVID virus by self-quarantining in my second-floor bedroom, while downstairs my wife and three children carried on the trappings and trimmings of Christmas without me. I was a sobbing hot mess of profound sadness, listening to the muffled chords of holly-jolly merriment rising from the living below me.
Indeed, the holidays are messy. Yet in the midst of such holiday messiness is precisely where God always shows up!
I’m sure Mary had no plan or intention of delivering her first child amid the messiness of a stable. I’m sure Joseph had every hope of laying his swaddled newborn son in a crib far-less messy than a feed trough. But surrounded by such squalor and messiness is where the Lord God shows up.
The first Noel began with messiness and so also does its end. Fresh on the heels of Matthew’s heart-warming account of obedient wise men following a star and offering the newborn King gifts of gold, frankincense, myrrh, the holy-day party comes to screeching stop, and in that abrupt halt, life gets even messier for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
Listen to the Word that God has spoken, listen even if you don’t understand.
Now after they had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said,
“Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”
When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”
When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child’s life are dead.” Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel.
But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod, Joseph was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. There he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, “He will be called a Nazorean.” (Matthew 2:13-23)
Oddly enough, the horror of these passages is what sustained me through the messiness of my COVID Christmas of 2022.
As the glad tidings of great joy continued without me all around me, I couldn’t help but feel sweaty, anxious moments overcoming this weak, vulnerable, still-wet-behind-the-ears family – when bumps in the night and gravelly crunches of sinister footsteps make Joseph jump and conjure dreaded encounters with boogey men lurking under children’s beds.
I couldn’t help but imagine long, fitful nights of tossing and turning, the sleep of heavenly peace proving elusive for Mary and Joseph.
I couldn’t help but picture flashes of Mary arm-cradling her newborn son, quietly weeping bitter tears of shock and dismay, fed with the kindling of fears known and unknown, real and perceived.
Like last Christmas, this Christmastime again finds me empathizing with the Holy Family.
The triggers are different this time around, but the ties that bind remain the same. Suffice it for now to say that being a father of young adults is proving to be more emotionally challenging than I ever expected. And I know for a fact that I’m not the only one.
Similarly upsetting emotional challenges also are part and parcel of being a young adult these days. Trying to chart a course for your “what’s next” feels like an act of futility in such broken and fearful times. Every “win” you tally seems followed by defeat; every corner you turn, and SPLAT goes an icy snowball of harsh reality that hits where it hurts.
That such terrible, awful things happen to the innocent – and have always happened to the innocent – is the very reason why the Son of God becomes Emmanuel, God with Us. He comes – smackdab into the heart of our messiness, so that the day will come, when there’ll be no more messiness: No more deer-in-the-headlight stares from the refugee, the terrorized, and the trafficked; the displaced, the battered, and the bullied; the jobless, the unwanted, the unloved; the outcast living on the edge, the lost and alone going nowhere; the sick, and the dying, and all those other poor souls who hunger for an end to it all.
Jesus comes, so that the day will come, when there’ll be no more hopeless, blank, glassy-eyed stares from scared, utterly terrified children.
Jesus comes, so that the day will come, when there’ll be no more kids having to put their active-shooter training to grisly, ghastly use.
Jesus comes, so that the day will come, when there’ll be no more kids – toddlers, grade-schoolers, teen-agers, or young adults – who, when they look to mom or dad for comfort in the face of war and threats of war both foreign and domestic – see only their very own terror reflected back from their parents’s eyes.
Maybe, then, Christmas is messy, because life is messy.
And garland can only do so much to cover up life’s messes. Think in terms of putting lipstick on the proverbial pig.
That’s why the ending of Matthew’s Christmas story makes us fidget and squirm with the itchiness of a heavy, wool, turtleneck sweater. Matthew’s pen confronts us with our own messiness, which by the Holy Spirit intimately and inextricably binds us to the messiness of God’s arrival in Christ Jesus.
Which really is good news, because the muscular left hook of evil that punches hard the Holy Family is the same evil that pummels you, me, and every other part of the Body of Christ like a ton of falling bricks, disrupting our lives and making messes in the spaces we occupy. God the Father knows of such messiness, because God the Son has firsthand experience with messiness. He was born squarely into it.
The late satirist Andy Rooney frames it thus: “One of the most glorious messes in the world is the mess created in the living room on Christmas day. Don’t clean it up too quickly.”
Turns out, it’s good to live with life’s messiness, because those places of chaos and disorder, disease and dis-ease, are where the Lord God always appears full-on, bearing the sacred gift of a heavenly new broom that always sweeps clean.
Ancient words, ever true: Listen even if you don’t understand!
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message during worship on Epiphany Sunday, January 7, 2024, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Scott Hoezee and Andy Rooney inform the message.