Christmas 1999 A radically different understanding of gift

The connection between Christmas, as we get it from these texts, and what goes on in our world, seems pretty remote at times. But there is one element that is common to both Christmas as we get it from the Biblical text and Christmas as an experience at the Mall.  It is that everybody is gift happy. Or maybe, I should say, gift unhappy. It is the issue of the gift that is common, however differently “gift” is construed.  I think it is construed fairly differently, at least in my family, from the way it works in these texts.  I’d like to examine that difference of understanding of gift and see where it takes us, and discover whether it cannot illumine what this feast is supposed to be about.

 

All during Advent I’ve been talking about hope.  Not just optimism, or self-confidence, or some vague expectation that the future is going to be better than the past has been, but about specifically religious hope.  I suggested on the first Sunday of Advent, that hope was “sin shaped”.  By that I meant that, to hope means always to anticipate the amelioration of my defectiveness, the appearance something that is not here.  In the Christian reading, what is not here, is my full humanity for sin is what de-humanizes me.  Then, further on, I suggested that hope, if it is really religious hope, is not just hope for me.  It cannot be just hope for me.  It has to be hope for everybody because sin is my free choice to exclude somebody however I may do that.  This description of course leaves all kinds of room for neuroses, bad memories and all kinds of other things.  Given all the possibilities and mitigating circumstances, sin is still a real possibility, and certainly I realize it in my own life, where I want to shut somebody else out of my life.  Whether it’s sexism or homophobia or racism or classism, as well as all the little individual repertories of sin that we have in our own families (Christmas is a good time for all that stuff to come bubbling to the surface often enough).

This vision of myself as a sinner, as absolutely entailed with everybody else, is itself a gift.  And here we come closer to what we are about tonight.  The gift of what?  The gift of this man’s life. 

 

We talk so facilely about gifts when often enough “gifts” are simply a form of repayment.  What we think is due to somebody because they gave me something last year and I have to reciprocate this year.  That’s not a gift.  A gift is absolutely free.  The appearance of Jesus on this planet was not necessary.  There’s nothing in the neediness of the human race, it’s brokenness, my own appetite, my own desires: nothing explains the appearance of this man.  This man’s very appearance is a gift.  So in the light of this man I begin to see that sin is not having bad teeth, or bad hair or a bad body or bad grades or bad income, but sin is something that deforms me as a human being and keeps me from other people.

 

Thus, the business of gift becomes much more complex.  It is the concrete reality of this man who seems to be open to everybody that is the gift.  We find this in instance after instance in the New Testament. In the gospel of John there is that extraordinary conversation between Jesus and this lady of questionable virtue at a well in Samaria.  Furthermore, we find the upshot of this openness in Matthew and Mark and Luke, Jesus asks disciples, who people think he is, and they identify him. 

Then something very interesting happens.  Jesus lets them know who they are.  I propose that that’s a large measure of the gift of Christmas.  In Jesus appearing on this planet, I receive my authentic self, rather than the self that the advertisers or my bosses or my family or everybody else wants to construct of me. But myself, which is only me, and nobody else.

If you look again at the instances in the Bible, Jesus was the person, it seems, from whom nobody had to hide anything, for better or worse.  And it was always for worse. But in the very fact of being able to appear, as one really was, the chance to become better, to become more authentically myself was opened to me.

This makes all kinds of sense to me, and I hope it does to you, because I find most of the time I’m running around measuring how much of myself is safe to expose to anybody else. More often than not, I simply fake it. “Oh yeah.  I can do that.  I’m really competent. I’m really in control.”  Or “Poor me.  I’m really helpless. I need you to give me a leg up.” Or whatever. There are those multiple forms of dissimulation, of self-concealment that we practise which absolutely obviate the possibility of this real self-coming into being.

 

So, again, if Jesus is the gift, he is the gift of God, period.  God’s love.  Secondly, out of that gift appears this further gift, whereby I come to know my real self.  I come to know who I really am, in a way that nothing else on earth that I know - certainly not television or films or my stockbroker if I had one (I don’t).  All these other people are giving me senses of who I am and all of these collapse to the extent that I stand in the light of this man who lets me be.  Who lets me be and who, in letting me be, lets me become.... me. 

 

It’s a simple fact that any sense that we have of ourselves is in relationships.  Nobody goes out to the mountain to discover himself or herself and manages to bring it off. We find out who we are with..... with  my parents, with my students, with my bosses, with my insurance agent, with the Price Chopper check-out lady.  All those selves are certainly partial, and often enough, not real.

 

We are here this evening in the belief that it is only in the connection with this man that we will come to know who we are, who we really are.  That I will really receive my life because I become aware that my life is gift, is given to me and therefore I can take it.

Very different notion of gift than the one I usually work with which usually originates from a sense of indebtedness.  You know.  I bring out my ledger.  Oh, yeah.  He sent me this last year.  He spent how much on that? Wow. I work out all the calculations. 

No.  Because of Christmas we have a radically different understanding of gift, and that’s why we can talk about this as a joyous time.  That’s why we can talk about our hopes as being religious and truly founded in our connection with this man.