Strange Days
Do you ever have your doubts? If you don’t, maybe you should. If I am around a bunch of people that have no doubts and know a lot of things for sure I want to head for the door.
Personally, I am skeptical about a lot of things. I actually try to limit the things that I believe in so that people take me seriously about what I do believe. And I do believe some things. I believe that doubts are actually where real faith begins. It seems to me that it is the nature of anything we want to call “God” to be in the first place, unknown. A god that can be figured out and proven just wouldn’t be God. As far as we are concerned, if there is a God, it is one that is at first a stranger and totally beyond the reach or our faculties.
I am writing this a few weeks before Christmas. I remember the first time that I took my little son to see Santa Claus. My sweet little three year old stood in line with me not knowing any better and suspecting nothing. When it was his turn to talk to Santa, I took him by his little hand and started walking toward Santa. My son did not see “Jolly Old Saint Nicolas”. My son saw someone he did not know, a stranger reaching out to grab him. So he hid behind me and started to cry. Talk about having your doubts!
Years later, I took my three grandchildren to see Santa. That first child’s two little boys surprised me by climbing right up on Santa’s lap and getting comfortable. But their cousin, the little girl, started to scream, cling to her father and wouldn’t have anything to do with Santa. Santa Claus was a stranger. At the time I thought it was a good thing that she didn’t just cozy up to any old bearded bum at the mall.
Because, when you think about it, Santa Claus is a little strange. He is morbidly obese. He has long shaggy hair and a beard. He wears weird clothes. His nose is red either from being outside in the cold or having a few too many. He smokes. He breaks into people’s houses at night. He is a stranger. No wonder some kids are scared of him and have their doubts about him.
During what the rest of society calls “the holidays” many churches observe a strange season called Advent. This season is not presided over by Santa, or Rudolf, or Frosty, or even Charlie Brown. The central figure of Advent is a strange man called John the Baptist. This is a wild man in a hair shirt that eats bugs and spends most of his time screaming about what is wrong with the world. There are no plastic glowing “John the Baptist” decorations on any lawn anywhere. You don’t take your kids to go and visit John the Baptist at the mall. You don’t hear John the Baptist songs being sung on the radio. No, John is a stranger.
On the other hand, during the holidays, Jesus is so familiar. Right now, the name of Jesus is on everybody’s lips. And what could be more “familiar” than the Holy Family: Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus. What could be more common than childbirth? It is pretty easy to get comfortable with a baby lying in a manger. In one popular Christmas carol, we claim that the baby Jesus doesn’t even cry. No one seems to have any doubts or questions about Jesus. Instead, everyone is a Christmas expert. There isn’t a fast food chain, a toy store, a celebrity or a TV special that won’t tell you what “The True Meaning of Christmas” is.
I never will forget visiting the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. It is built over what is believed to be Jesus’ birth place. We entered through the Church and then went down several passageways until we were under ground. We were in this cavern that was hung with lamps that burned oil or something. The rocky ceiling was black with soot. I wondered: OK, what are we doing in this cave? Aren’t we going to a barn or something? The place was crowded with people and as I walked through them I saw a silver star on the floor. People were falling on their knees by it. It was the birth place.
Of course! In the rocky, dry, Middle-east there is not a lot of wood, so it is standard practice to use a cave as a stable. I had seen one in use with mangers hollowed out of rock. This was not the old familiar Christmas card version. Jesus was born in a strange way in a strange place. The almighty and the unknown sneaks into the world at night like Santa Claus sneaking into your house.
And it doesn’t end there. Those closest to Jesus don’t seem to know who he really is. When he asks them one day who they think he is, they scratch their heads, make some wild guesses, look down at their sandals and wonder. Another time, he comes to them, walking on the water and they think he is a ghostly stranger. When he is arrested, one of his closest followers is questioned about him. Even then he answers: “I don’t know him!” And he was right. A woman sees him after he is resurrected and thinks that he is some sort of gardener. Later, he walks down the road with two of his followers but they don’t recognize him as anything more than a friendly stranger. He comes to others as they are fishing and they don’t know him either. He is the proverbial stranger on the shore.
If his closest friends didn’t always recognize him it probably is not wrong to suggest that if you or I met up with Jesus of Nazareth we wouldn’t know him either. So if it is all true and he lives, it could be that we see him more often than we know. He once told this story in which people ask: “When did we see you?” Among other things he says: “I was a stranger and you didn’t welcome me.”
It seems to me that Jesus is always just a step ahead of the rest of us. He can’t be packaged and controlled even though, year after year, we try. Someone has said that you can’t nail him down even if you use real nails. So we never really know about him. Is he close or far away? If Jesus is hidden, there is nowhere we can hide from him. And if there is no place that we can go and say that he isn’t there with us, we end up having to doubt our doubts. These are strange days. We just never know much for sure when there is a stranger in the manger and a beautiful unknown star in the sky.
