Christmas presents paradox of baby God
Ricky Bobby recognizes the Christmas paradox of the all-powerful God coming as a vulnerable child and embraces the image — though with a bit too much enthusiasm.
“I like the Christmas Jesus best, and I’m saying grace,” the comical race car driver played by Will Ferrell answers those who would question his insistence on praying to the baby rather than the adult Jesus.
“Dear 8-pound, 6-ounce new born infant Jesus, don’t even know a word yet, just a little infant so cuddly, but still omnipotent, we just thank you for all the races I’ve won,” he prays in the 2006 movie “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.”
While Bobby’s preference for the baby Jesus is played for laughs, others could have some serious reasons for wanting to focus on God as the infant in a manger.
“Babies are sweet,” said the Rev. Gerrit Dawson, lead pastor of Baton Rouge’s First Presbyterian Church. “They don’t demand you change your behavior. … Baby Jesus is safe to pray to, because he’s not the grown-up Jesus who tells us to turn the other cheek and to feed the poor and thereby feed him.”
Whatever their reasons, when it comes to Christian holy days, Americans tend to prefer the one associated with the Nativity over the one connected to the cross and resurrection, according to a survey released recently by the United Methodist Church.
The 2011 American Holiday Study, conducted for United Methodist Communications, found Americans see Christmas as the most important holiday, followed by Independence Day, Thanksgiving and Easter.
The survey of 870 adults ages 18 and older was conducted online in June by Corporate Research, of Greensboro, N.C., and used a demographically balanced sample of the U.S. population. It reports a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percent.
More than half of those surveyed (54 percent), identified sharing a meal as the most meaningful activity of the season, while 14 percent found attending worship services to be the most significant activity.
“What everyone seems to agree on is that the holidays should not be about consumerism, but about connection with others,” the Rev. Larry Hollon, chief executive of United Methodist Communications, said this month in an email announcing the survey. “People want to be in touch with family and friends — to be part of a community, and that’s what the church is all about.”
In his book “Christmas Is Not Your Birthday,” published this year by Abingdon Press, the Rev. Mike Slaughter, a Methodist pastor in Tipp City, Ohio, urges Christians to rethink their pursuit of a “perfect” holiday. The first Christmas, as recorded in Scripture, wasn’t perfect, Slaughter writes.
“Jesus was born in a stable, a cave where animals were kept,” Slaughter writes. “Wherever there are animals there is dung. And where there is dung, there are flies.
“So clearly, the setting of Jesus’ birth was not sanitary. And it didn’t get much better from there. Jesus spent his earliest years as a refugee in Africa, escaping the genocide that Herod was committing in Judea against children aged two and under.”
Yet even in the mess, or perhaps especially in the mess, Christian ministers find lessons about God in the Nativity.
The Rev. Mary Moss, pastor of St. Alma Baptist Church in Lakeland, trains other ministers through her roles as a teacher and director of the Southwest Regional Biblical Institute, which offers theological education in Baton Rouge in partnership with Samform University in Birmingham, Ala.
She sees in the Nativity lessons about God’s ability to keep promises and the broadness of God’s love.
“Jesus could have been born in the best of places,” Moss said, but instead the promised messiah is found in a “feeding trough for animals.
“Yet in the manger with all the obstacles associated with it, the promise-keeping God breaks through,” she said. “To me he is a God who can be trusted even when conditions, circumstances, may not be favorable.”
And to her, the God of the manger is not just a god for the rich and famous.
“God is a god of the poor, the lowly, the economically strapped in life, the marginalized, the disenfranchised,” Moss said.
Slaughter writes that how people see God has ramifications beyond Christmas.
“The picture that you have of God has everything to do with the shaping of your faith and values,” he writes. “If your picture of God is distorted, your life perspective will be skewed.”
Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, of Erie, Pa., during her visit to Baton Rouge in November also talked about the importance of how people see God.
The Roman Catholic sister said that to have a whole view of God, people must embrace the feminine in the divine as well as the masculine and see that God is not just authoritarian, but also compassionate.
Chittister cited such Scriptures as Isaiah 42 where God is like a woman in labor and Psalm 131 where God is like a nursing mother.
The Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion in Waco, Texas, has examined the ways people view God — whether as angry or not and whether engaged in the world or not — and found those views to serve as powerful predictors of people’s attitudes about a variety of social, political and religious issues.
Authors Paul Froese and Christopher Bader, detail the research, first released in 2006 and since updated, in “America’s Four Gods,” their 2010 book from Oxford University Press.
A related online test — available at http://www.thearda.com/WhoIsYourGod/theBook/index.asp – lets participants answer questions to determine which of these descriptions might best fit their own views: “the Authoritative God, who is both engaged with the world and judgmental; the Benevolent God, who loves and aids us in spite of our failings; the Critical God, who catalogs our sins but does not punish them (at least not in this life); and the Distant God, who stands apart from the world He created.”
Someone who sees God as distant is unlikely to view sharing God with others as important, the research shows, while someone who sees God as highly engaged and judgmental is more likely to pray, go to church and see such acts as performing an abortion, having premarital sex and viewing pornography as wrong.
Women are more likely to see God as benevolent, while men are more likely to see God as authoritarian, the research found.
For First Presbyterian’s Dawson, the Christmas story speaks to the issue of how involved God is in the world.
“I think the Nativity tells us that God is all in,” he said. “He’s holding nothing back by coming to us as one of us.
“If God comes into the world this way, this is the way God wants us to see him,” Dawson said.
And is that as loving or judgemental?
Dawson makes room for both.
First Presbyterian this month advertised its live Nativity event where church volunteers filled the roles of those in the manger story with a poster showing a crown of thorns in the manger, instead of the baby.
“It’s the connection that the baby in the manger grew up to be the savior of the world who died on a cross for us,” Dawson said.
Sending the savior is an act of love that suggests a judgment, he said. “Sending a savior implies we need to be rescued and that can bump up against my own pride.
“The whole story is one of paradoxes, that the uncontainable God lies in the manger and that the rejection of God by humanity becomes the means for him to save us.”