And you asked me what I want this year And I try to make this kind and clear Just a chance that maybe we'll find better days
'Cause I don't need boxes wrapped in strings And designer love and empty things Just a chance that maybe we'll find better days
So take these words and sing out loud 'Cause everyone is forgiven now 'Cause tonight's the night the world begins again
I need some place simple where we could live And something only you can give And that's faith and trust and peace while we're alive
And the one poor child who saved this world And there's ten million more who probably could If we all just stopped and said a prayer for them
So take these words and sing out loud 'Cause everyone is forgiven now 'Cause tonight's the night the world begins again
I wish everyone was loved tonight And somehow stop this endless fight Just a chance that maybe we'll find better days
So take these words and sing out loud 'Cause everyone is forgiven now 'Cause tonight's the night the world begins again
'Cause tonight's the night the world begins again
-Better Days
The Goo Goo Dolls
It's not often that a pop song streaming through my earbuds via Sirius XM radio hits exactly the right theological notes. Generally there's not much theology at all in those words. But yesterday morning as I was grunting through my weight circuit the song "Better Days" caused me to stop, sit up, and pay attention.
The meaning of Christmas, right there.
Christmas and I have had an up-and-down ride over the years. I loved it as a child for all the reasons kids love Christmas. Toys, treats, family we haven't seen in forever. Parents who've stopped fighting for a couple days. The sound of Santa downstairs on Christmas Eve, sounding a lot like Dad after one too many scotches, swearing a blue streak as he fumbled through assembling my Major Matt Mason Space Station under the tree.
Then I was the swearing Santa under the tree, trying to recreate that feeling for my three when they were in the footie pajama season of life. I felt what my dad probably felt, busting a few buttons on Christmas morning watching them delight in my largesse.
Later I started the whole religious walk, and along the way found myself snickering at the rubes who believed this nonsense. The earliest Christians had no nativity story, nor does it appear in the first gospel, Mark. The details of the two gospels that tell the story, Matthew and Luke, contradict each other and are contradicted by the meticulous contemporaneous records kept by the Romans. There was no census. There was no massacre of the innocents.
And the whole thing sounded a little too much like all the other stories circulating in the diverse religious soup of the Roman Empire. Gods impregnating young women was an event that seemed to happen with such frequency that maybe Joseph's shrug at the whole thing seems understandable. "What's that you say, Mary? Pregnant? By a god? At the rate he's going, he and the rest of the heavenly host are going to populate the whole near east with demigods. Pass the matzo."
Yep, all sort of silly, and obviously created by the marketing arm of the early church as a way to explain this most unlikely event, a poor kid from a backwater of the empire transcending the space between earthly and divine on a mission to reconcile humanity to God.
But it's the sheer absurdity of the assertion that makes it real. As Malcom Muggeridge put it, “The coming of Jesus into the world is the most stupendous event in human history.” Made all the more so by the fact that God chose not to herald a new age through the conventional vehicles of an almighty king flanked by a priestly class jangling with expensive things and an army to enforce God's will. It was a bottom-up act of sedition that brought the kings and priests and armies crashing to the ground.
Of course, in due time the next few generations at the top of society legitimized their station by claiming Jesus as their own. People are people.
But the fact is that Jesus's arrival on this planet heralded the pivotal moment when "everyone's forgiven now," or as Mendelssohn wrote a couple centuries ago, "God and sinners reconciled." And I guess I find myself aligned with the theologians who've seen Christ's life as a two-way atonement, not only the man atoning for man's sins but the god atoning for God's failings in this relationship with us.
As the great religious thinker John Prine put it, "Father forgive us for what we must do/You forgive us, we'll forgive you/And we'll all forgive each other 'til we both turn blue/Then we'll whistle and go fishin' in heaven."
At the same time, I'm also sort of conventional in my religious thinking that repentance has to precede redemption. It's hard to forgive someone who doesn't realize he needs forgiving. Which is why these weeks of Advent as a precursor to Christmas, a mini-Lent, make sense to me.
So now that there aren't kids and toys all over the family room floor, now that the illusions of the Christmas fairy tales have faded away, I guess we're left with something even more wonderful, the grace embodied in a day when we celebrate the moment when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, when the veil between heaven and earth was pulled back, when we were reconciled with who we really were and are.
Tonight's the nigh the world begins again. Indeed.
Merry Christmas.
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