A Final Christmas Present

Leviticus 12; Exodus 20:8-11

The Sunday after Christmas is kind of a “so what” day—the big celebration is over and New Year’s Eve—well, let’s be honest, it has its own power and funk that really has not much to do with this day of holy worship. This Sunday carries with it the air of quiet, rest, perhaps dullness—a Sunday that becomes the embodiment of what the Church calls “ordinary time.” For a lot of folks, it is a good Sunday to stay home, bundled beneath the covers, and enjoying family togetherness. My niece’s church in North Carolina goes ahead and punts, taking a Sunday off—no worship and a message to simply stay in and enjoy one another. 

There is something to that, even in a life of spiritual praxis.

Even the Holy Family did nothing much on this fourth day after Christmas. By now, we all pray, they had gotten out of the stable—surely even the most hard-headed, hard-hearted innkeeper would have found someplace for Mary and the baby, begrudgingly making a space for Joseph. Having a baby is a tumultuous, cataclysmic life change—the whole world goes upside down. In that moment, you need a place to simply be, to sit still, and adjust. I imagine the Holy Family doing exactly that for a time. 

But here, again, we discover the wisdom in God’s rules for living, i.e., the Torah—the mandated eight day respite from doing anything after the birth of a child—refraining even from officially naming the child. God orders life not in an expression of abject or brutal power for power’s sake, but to allow us to find shalom within our ordinary time. God orders life so we can find ourselves and each other. New parents need nothing more than to find themselves, They need space and time just to be, to allow themselves to find—i.e., know—the child now with them. They also need to adjust to each other as parents. All that takes being in a place and time that has no other responsibilities or duties.

And that brings us into a full confrontation with our time and place. 

We live in a time that defines success as being able to multitask—doing multiple things all at once. Thich Nhat Hanh reflected that multitasking actually means doing several things poorly—we cannot focus on multiple tasks; we need singular focus to do something well—so, do one thing, then do the next thing. I wish some of my fellow commuters from my time in Charlotte had heeded such wisdom—driving, while reading a folded newspaper on the steering wheel with a phone in her left hand spelled doom. Sure enough, crunch went the fenders, up shot the insurance rates, and a wonderful time was had by all! Yet, we fiercely hold to the illusion that we are fully capable of doing all these different things at once, and then wonder why so many different things end up in messes. Work becomes stress; families become strained as members fall to pieces under the strain of trying to keep six or seven balls in the air at once; and our health falls to pieces as we pull ourselves, literally, apart at the seams trying to be all things to all people at all times. 

“Remember the Sabbath at keep it holy” reads Commandment 4.

God’s dictum to set aside one day for doing nothing but being in the presence of God in quiet adoration, stillness, and rest was not to be an additional burden. It was a call to take time to recoup, recover, and recalibrate our being. It was a call to rehabilitate our souls. That it was weekly should tell us how deeply and how fully God knows us. 

And how fully God loves us.

God wants us well. God wants us whole. God wants us to know the wonder, joy, miracle, and glory of being alive. God wants us to fully realize the exultation of being made in the Image of God, to fully experience the powerful potential and profundity of being a child of God. 

That means we need to step back, stop, and be still. In that stillness, we can hear and completely appreciate God’s benediction on the creation of humanity—“God saw that it was good.” 

We are good at heart.

We have the potential to be good and well.

We have the potential to be all that God intended us to be.

To make it so, we need, ironically, to stop trying to do much of anything. We need to fall quiet enough for God to work within us. We need to give God space and time to work with us, in us, and through us. 

So, there is nothing wrong at all with a quiet Sunday where nothing much happens.

That becomes the play place of God.

Let it be.

All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.