Joy to Your World
How the birth of Jesus is prejudiced… against the church
As a kid in elementary school, I can remember December afternoons hurrying off the school bus and into the house just in time to watch Santa and his puppet reindeer read letters from kids who’d sent their Christmas wish lists into the local TV station. The shows were corny as could be, but they’re one of my many favorite Christmas memories.
I had ideal Christmases growing up. The artificial tree that took center stage in our living room is a big part of my holiday recollections. It fit inside our average eight-foot-tall living room, but it looked like a giant of a tree in my young eyes. I’d sit for what seemed like hours listening to The Living Strings and Voices, the Chipmunks and the Family Christmas Sing-Along records, stacking them on the record player’s multiplay spindle, then flipping them over when the needle got to the center label of the last record.
Back then, I never thought a lot about other people’s Christmases. As far as I knew, everyone had it as good as I did. Even as a kid, I knew that neither Jesus nor Santa was a respecter of persons, and I also knew that both rewarded good little boys and girls and denied bad ones.
Another album that often made my Christmas playlist was the magnificent Mormon Tabernacle Choir. All those instruments and voices just made Christmas that much bigger and more glorious!
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s Christmas Special aired this week on PBS. I watched it, and just like when I was a kid, I was enthralled by the bigness of the place and the enormity of the sound, but something else got my attention too.
The Mormon Conference Center in Salt Lake City’s Temple Square seats 21,000 people. The choir has 360 members, the orchestra 110. There are 32 ringers in the handbell choir and around 60 dancers and actors who make beautiful, inspiring performance art. I truly did enjoy the show, but I couldn’t help but notice how very, very, very, very, very… white it was.
I didn’t watch the show in search of racial diversity, but to me, it was hard not to notice the lack of it in that beautiful, huge room. I think I saw one person of maybe East Indian descent in the sea of 21,600 faces. (I’m fighting the urge to use a “White Christmas” reference here.)
I don’t blame the white people in that room for being white. I’m white. But it looked like all efforts to attract people of color to either perform or just attend either failed or just didn’t happen at all. As a naive kid, I wouldn’t have noticed, but as a conscientious adult, I couldn’t help but be struck by how homogenous the room was and how disappointed I was to see it.
The church I grew up in was all white too which meant our Christmas pageants were no more colorful. There were no Middle Eastern kids in our Christmas plays because we didn’t have any Middle Eastern people in our church. Our Mary, Joseph, shepherds, and wise men were all white and had heavy Eastern Kentucky accents. The angel was white. And even when he was played by a doll, Jesus was white because we also didn’t have any Middle Eastern dolls. As inauthentic as it was, it was a heartfelt effort and we still did a good little manger scene.
I know that predominantly black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American and other non-white congregations probably don’t have a Middle Eastern Christmas Jesus either. Their depiction of the Christ child’s birth is no more accurate than our white one. But unlike us white folks and apparently the powers that be at the Hallmark Channel, I don’t get the sense that those congregations are trying to make their Jesus into a version of themselves.
There are several memes making the rounds on social media lately. One of them is a drawing of a nativity scene without any Jews, Arabs, Africans or refugees. It’s basically a barn stall full of animals, and it’s actually pretty accurate. It’s interesting to me that some of the comments I’ve seen by conservative white Christians reveal an arrogance and ignorance of the message the drawing is trying to convey. It’s hard to tell if their anger is because their lack of Christlike charity has been exposed, or that someone would refer to Jesus and the others as anything but white.
This past summer I attended a worship retreat in Oklahoma City and got to meet Pastor Karen Clark Ristine. She leads the Claremont United Methodist Church in Claremont, California. They’ve been in the news lately because of the nativity scene in front of their church. In it, Jesus, Mary and Joseph are locked in separate cages just like the refugees seeking safety and asylum in the United States.
A lot of people, including me, understand the message and appreciate the courage it took to state it so clearly on their church’s front lawn. But some others don’t like it at all. “Why mess up Chrismas like this?” one inconvenienced person commented. “Jesus was American!” said another. The really angry Americans have phoned in death threats and other dangerous things.
“We thought about the most famous refugee family in the world, the family of Jesus,” Rev. Ristine said. “What if this family sought refuge in our country today?”
I agree that people should be upset about a scene like this. But most of the anger seems to be coming from people who are livid that mannequins are being mistreated while giving no compassionate thought at all to actual human beings in cages — in the U.S.A.
The sad hypocrisy became even more obvious to me this week when I heard Kristin Chenoweth and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing words that will be repeated in countless churches this Chrismas and Advent season, many of them that applaud the inhumane and uncharitable treatment of people just because they were born somewhere else, or look, sound, believe and love differently.
“Truly He taught us to love one another; His law is Love and his gospel is Peace; Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother, and in his name all oppression shall cease. Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we; Let all within us praise his holy name!”
Just like so much else that we Christians say, sing and preach with expert hypocrisy, we testify and sing of a Jesus we do not follow. He may have taught us to love one another, but for many, that’s only if the other is straight, white, Evangelical and speaks “American.” His law may be love, his gospel may be peace, he may claim kinship with the slave, but sadly, many in the conservative Christian church would rather discriminate, fight and lock them up.
This year is the 300th anniversary of the Christmas hymn “Joy to the World.” For those of us who believe in the good news of the life-giving, life-affirming message and ministry of Jesus, his birth is joy indeed. But I think it’s fair to acknowledge that the reason many others don’t find joy in his birth is because the Jesus they see nowadays from the hardcore conservative wing of the church doesn’t bring good news, isn’t life-giving, isn’t life-affirming, isn’t compassionate, isn’t loving, and isn’t attractive in the least.
There’s no joy in knowing Jesus loves his AR-15 more than the children of the world. Who can be joyful at the miraculous birth of a savior who drives greed and elitism? What joy is there in a holy baby who grows up to inspire bigotry and racism? When do the marginalized people of the world take joy in their stilted status at the hands of the baby’s emissaries? Where is the joy in having your child ripped from your arms in the name of the Christ Child? How is joy to be found in the oppression and slaughter of Indigenous and oppressed people by a culture born of Emmanuel?
I still believe that the Christ Child came to bring good tidings of great joy. I still believe his law is love and his message is peace. I believe he stands with the bullied and stands against the liars. I believe he is always on the side of the oppressed. I believe he would rather be honorably hungry than dishonorably full. I believe he is with the immigrant in the cage.
I believe Jesus is joy to the whole world, your world, whoever you are, wherever you are. Joy to your world, the Lord has come!