This is Christmas Day 2023. It is not unlike the day of Christ’s nativity two thousand years ago. Jesus born into poverty, born to die for all humanity, born as God in the flesh. He was born into a world where the King called for the death of all infant boys. Even in this beautiful season, we find the reality that at the heart of humanity is a darkness that knows no boundaries. Genocide is not a bug but a feature in the human heart.
Today, the value of humanity has lost its appeal to the intelligentsia, the wealthy, and the powerful. We are obstacles to the success of their grand schemes. It is why prominent business people call for the reduction of the human race down to a billion or even 500,000 people. For some reason, no one questions this. The spectacle nature of our world is that we don’t see words as being truthful, but rather as symbolic of the boundaries of power.
In Jesus’ time. Rome dominated the world and could only do so by destroying its Republic in order to become an Empire. We find this as well in our time. We know what happened to Rome. Will that happen here? We’ll see.
As a result, the celebration of the birth of Jesus gets wrapped up (sorry for the pun) in the commercial extravaganza of the Christmas season. All the criticisms that you can muster about it being too commercial is probably true, but irrelevant. Mostly because what this season should reveal is why Jesus’ birth matters.
The effect is to drive distance between us. We lose touch with reality. Especially the reality tied to the lives of people and their communities.
Coming Home
If you have followed me for some time, you will know that my life for the past decade has been in a constant state of transition. I don’t need to present that history here. These transitions were all purposeful, intent on advancing my life situation toward greater opportunities for impact.
Presently, I am preparing to move back to my hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I have not spent much time there over the past half-century. When I graduated from high school, like George Bailey from Its a Wonderful Life, I wanted to leave because I felt there was nothing there for me. Unlike George, I had the opportunity to go work and live in a wide variety of places. When I did come home, it was to be with my family.
Home is where the love of my family has always been an anchor. I probably have not appreciated their love for me sufficiently. However, it is clear that coming home opens doors that do not exist elsewhere. I am reacquainting myself with friends from childhood. While we have not seen one another for 40 or 50 years, there is a level of respect that offers the promise of friendship and new community.
Returning home, I find examples of the principles that I have been advocating. Almost a year ago, I went to the memorial service of a high school classmate Buzz. It wasn’t a traditional funeral service. Rather, it was 90 minutes of people talking about how Buzz made a difference in their lives. It was a stunning testimony to one man’s impact because he chose to stay put.
As I sat there listening to their stories, I realized that it is difficult to have an impact on a community where you never live. As we can see through the experience of social media, you can become influential. The difference between influence and impact is the difference between the appearance of importance and the meaningful change that happens to people. Social media personalities influence the buying habits of people. Buzz, through his rootedness, was there when people needed him. He was a buffer against many of the hardships that come to people. He reminded me of the stories of Jesus interacting with people.
Hope and Reality
George Bailey’s story captures this tension as well. It exists in all of us. It is the conflict between hope and reality. The hope is that by our own initiative and ingenuity, we can overcome whatever challenges that we may face. It is the core belief of American rugged individualism. We are the masters of our fate. At least, this is the belief that we are fed by every place that influences us.
George Bailey cared for his community, often reluctantly. He had big dreams, and he did not see how those dreams could be fulfilled by staying in Bedford Falls. In the story, there is the commercial and moral conflict between George and his family’s Bailey Building and Loan with old man Potter. It provides a picture of our world today from the vantage point of 1945.
George did not understand that his community cared for him. Many of us find ourselves in this situation. Maybe it is pride or distracted awareness. More than likely, as in George’s case, the small stuff of home never quite matched the grandeur of the world beyond. I can appreciate this as my own natural curiosity never let me settle for what I knew.
In Its a Wonderful Life, the hardship of operating a mid-twentieth-century local financial institution ends up crushing George’s spirit to the point where suicide seems the logical way to resolve his family’s financial crisis. In his conversation with Clarence, the “angel second class” sent down to save him, George tells him that he wishes that he had never been born. Clarence, the angel, grants his wish. This segment from the film describes what Bedford Falls would have been like without George Bailey.
The implication of this story is that each one of us is George Bailey. Each of us lives a life of purpose and impact. The stories that could be told at our memorial service could be parallel to those told of Buzz.
The reality is that our lives matter. It is not because we hope they do. It is because we do things that matter to us. We see this in the last scene as the people who have been impacted by George and the generations of his family give back in gratitude. The people of Bedford Falls show up to care for him at his great hour of need.
George Bailey’s story is about the connectedness of our lives. This connectedness is social and relational. George has to reach the end of his rope to discover that real community is mutual in its caring for one another
Divine Flesh in Space and Time
The Christmas connection begins with the affirmation of humanity and human community in the birth of Jesus. It was a turning point in time.
The Gospel of John sets the context of Jesus’ coming.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. …
And the Word became flesh and lived among us …”
This intimate connection between God and humanity is the ground for the humanism that emerged during the Renaissance and remains with us today.
As human beings, we connect with one another. We impact each other through service and communion. I see this clearly in my conversations with my guests on The Eddy Network Podcast. We meet for conversation without an agenda. We just talk. This is how a first-time connection can be found to be meaningful.
The Christmas story of the coming of Jesus of Nazareth isn’t simply a story of a child born in impoverished circumstances. The story is much larger and more complicated. There are many connection points of time and eternity, space and physical presence, divine and human encounters, and of rationality, science, and, spirituality, consciousness, and faith. The dynamic connectional character of this story is what interests me.
Professor Thomas F. Torrance of the University of Edinburgh spent his career exploring the divine/human connection. It is this connection that defines Christmas. Torrance describes this event.
“By the Incarnation, Christian theology means that at a definite point in space and time the Son of God became man, born at Bethlehem of Mary, a virgin espoused to a man called Joseph, a Jew of the tribe and lineage of David, and towards the end of the reign of Herod the Great in Judaea. Given the name of Jesus, He fulfilled His mission from the Father, living out the span of earthly life allotted to Him until He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, but when after three days He rose again from the dead the eyes of Jesus’ disciples were opened to what it all meant: they knew Him to be God’s Son, declared with power and installed in Messianic Office, and so they went out to proclaim Him to all nations as the Lord and Savior of the world. Thus it is the faith and understanding of the Christian Church that in Jesus Christ God Himself in His own Being has come into our world and is actively present as personal Agent within our physical and historical existence. As both God of God and Man of man Jesus Christ is the actual Mediator between God and man and man and God in all things, even in regard to space-time relations. He constitutes in Himself the rational and personal Medium in whom God meets man in his creaturely reality and brings man without, having to leave his creaturely reality, into communion with Himself.”
The connected nature of reality is understood as a relationship between us and all things. Whether it is affirmed or not, but whenever someone speaks of the care of someone or of the vital importance of various causes, it is an affirmation of the connected nature of all that exists.
George Bailey could not see these things until his life reached a point of total desperation. The ending of the story shows the connectedness of the Bedford Falls community.
The connections that we have are many and dynamic. They draw us to one another and to places that matter to us. For some of us they draw us to home and to faith that is both rooted in space and time and transcends it in remarkable ways. They also draw us to people who care about us as we care for them.
My hope for 2024 is that we can renew our connections so that we may recover our appreciation for the people who are in our lives.
Thanks Ed for sharing your thoughts. We sometimes talk of our actions having 'ripple effects' but as you illustrate through George Bailey, and that film has been a companion to me since my teens, our thought and actions are more than ripples, they create permanent bonds of interbeing - everything we do matters.
All the best with you move home.
Thank you, Ed.
Watched It's a Wonderful Life yesterday (as I do every Christmas) and as always, appreciate its brilliance and ability to reorient perception in that connective direction.
Best to you on your move.