On Advent and Christmas

Posted on | December 29, 2005 | 7 Comments

I was at church on the second Sunday of Advent this season and the pastor spoke about the child of light coming to the earth. I thought that discussion was very enlightened for any Christian church today. He used a story about some high-school kids on a retreat camping in the mountains and noticing how bright the stars looked. Their retreat leader changed their perspective by stating, “the stars aren’t so bright – it’s the world that’s very dark.” He went on to say that it is our role as Christians to reflect the light of Christ into the darkness of the world around us. This got me thinking.

I thought first about the whole idea of pinpoints of light in the darkness. Most of those points of light are actually VERY powerful, blazing stars in the vast darkness of space. I thought maybe the Pastor’s thought about our duty to reflect the light of Christ into the darkness of the world may have missed the mark a bit. Instead of reflecting the light of Jesus Christ, maybe our role is to BE a light in the darkness – like Christ. After all, isn’t the point Jesus was trying to make simply that there is a Christ in each of us waiting to be found and brought back to God’s light? Christ in you. Christ in me.

It’s easy to see why the reflection idea is important, after all, the brightest lights in our Earthly darkness are the moon and the planets in our solar system that actually DO simply reflect the light of the Sun. Some of the brightest people around us seem to reflect the light of the Son. But are the people who simply reflect the light of Jesus more powerful than those individual sources of light that happen to be farther away, but bring a light of their own to far larger volumes of darkness? I don’t know the answer, or if one answer exists. Maybe at times we are called to be sources of light in the vast darkness, and at sometimes we are called to reflect a relatively brighter light for the path of a relative few closest to us who are wandering in the darkness. Maybe we need to be doing both at all times.

The Christmas service was themed around the light of God becoming man. The original celebration was on the winter solstice, when light physically returns to warm the Earth in the form of longer days. The Christmas liturgy makes far more sense when examined in this context. This time our new Senior Pastor was giving the message, and correctly themed his message as one of Christmas being a time to remember that the light of divinity descended into human-kind. Predictably, but no less disappointingly, the orthodox Christian interpretation of this idea – that the divinity descended into that one baby – Jesus of Nazareth – and no other human was the substance of his message. I believe this misses the actual message of Jesus Christ, which is unsurprising, because most of his messages were misunderstood by even his closest companions. I believe that his message was that divinity descended into him, as it has into ALL humans – he was different from most in that he was able to tap and appreciate his divinity to help others, while most of us simply don’t recognize our personal spark of Christos.

What if Christmas was understood? What if Christmas was a reminder of the divinity in each human instead of a story of God’s divinity descending ONLY to one man who lived for around 33 years over 2,000 years ago and hasn’t been back since? How much better would our world be if each of us were accountable for the spark of divinity God gave us?

I think the world would be a far better place if each of us recognized this responsibility – it might even be a Heaven on Earth.

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