Maybe it’s an obvious thing to say, but traversing the Advent season to Christmas feels a bit different with a newborn in our arms. Leigh was commenting yesterday that she has so many more questions for Mary this year, like, “What’s it like to labor on a donkey?” and “Who cut the umbilical chord?” and “Did Jesus fight his swaddle?” Because it turns out keeping an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes is no easy task.
Holding Laila as we participated remotely in an online Christmas pageant, I was reminded of just how very small and fragile a thing hope is, at least at first glance — and how strong she can be when she gets a hold of your hair, or of the future, and starts pulling.
At Christmas, we are reminded that little things come before big things. That life comes before death. The strangeness of the Incarnation is the affirmation that life matters— this life, this particular life, in this particular place and time — in all its smallness and and contingency. We celebrate the birth of Jesus, and this year I have at a tiny bit of a better sense of how sacred and awesome and primal and powerful a thing birth is to celebrate.
“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much,” Jesus is reported to have said. The little things matter. So much of what we see going on around us this year seems to originate with people who can talk a big game about dying for their beliefs but can’t seem to value the little matters of life. Early on in the pandemic, the story of Naaman was floating around a lot, with a lot of folks, myself included, pointing out that what finally healed Naaman was him giving up on the need for the big show and settling for just washing himself in a little river. Just washing our hands, and having the courage to wear a cotton mask for a little while — these are such small things, really. But some folks would rather get sick, and risk others getting sick, and pretend like their actions stem from some high-minded take about liberty or family or something. And I get it. Frankly, it’s easier to pound our chests about making the ultimate sacrifice for our country than it is to get involved in the drudge work of democracy. It’s easier to talk a big game about making sacrifices for my family than it is to just do the damn dishes. But faithfulness in little things, first. Life before death.
Christians have often been no help in this matter. There was an early Church council that felt obligated to put out a statement saying Christians shouldn’t going around trying to get martyred just to get into heaven — that it’s the living out of one’s beliefs, rather than the heroic-seeming act of dying, that’s central. Faith might give you the courage to face the lions, but getting eaten by lions isn’t the point of faith. The way we have often talked about Jesus, as if this child whose birth we celebrate just showed up in order to die, as if the cross is the only part of the story that matters rather than the life that wound its way to it or the tomb-busting love that repudiates it, likely hasn’t helped, either.
But these are weighty matters, best left to another day. For now, as I write this, my 6-month old is resisting a nap in her bassinet by our bed, testing the bounds of her swaddling clothes (and we don’t even have to try to get her to sleep in a feeding trough!) Time to put down the theories about incarnation and atonement and rock her and sing to her, marveling all the time at how small and tough and beautiful life can be.
This year, may we be reminded to be faithful in little things before big things. In the daily matters of living before the epic matters of dying. For unto us a child is born. Let us stay here for awhile, by this improvised cradle, and with the shepherds marvel at this gift of life.
