It is worthy to note those things upon which we wage war. There are those completely virtuous and entirely untainted causes that are birthed at those seminal moments when the very foundation of the whole of our existence is suddenly teetering on some precarious precipice. Indeed, in every generation there are those utterly horrifying moments when the foolishly benign and ridiculously petty issues that have so captivated us fall into immediate irrelevance as we now face a foe that threatens to obliterate our existence as we know it. It is at these junctures in history that we are melded together with others in the infinitely greater crusade of saving all that we hold dear.
The Real Nature of Our Battles
More often than not the battles that we fight are based on self-aligned agendas and selfish motives. The nobler cause is often ourselves, although we have become quite adept at articulating such causes as purposed for the betterment of mankind and hailing them as bold advances when the weaker among us are too fearful for such advances.
Or we get caught up in glitzy fads, or cultural trends, or politically-correct agendas that drive us because we fear ridicule, or we’re adverse to alienation, or we simply don’t want to expend the energy it takes to exercise a bit of mental acumen. It may be that we’re too insecure to believe in our ability to reckon things correctly, or we’re far too inadequate to hold up when challenged. Whatever the case, many of our battles are spurious at best and spawned of the herd mentality at worst.
The War on Great Things
It seems that great things call us to great things. The lofty ideals and robust principles of great things call us up and out to them when they engage us. It is indeed odd that we have an unrelenting and breathless passion for great things until those things call us to greatness. We have yet to understand that great things are simply not to be observed from some safe emotional distance. They are not be viewed through the thick plexiglas of fear gone mad and passion gone to rot that puts adventure as an item on safe display. Rather, great things demand that they engage us and we engage them.
Our solution to this fearful conundrum is to shape great things with an eye towards keeping everything fully safe. We purport to want a hearty adventure and we say that we yearn for a journey of the boldest sort. Indeed, we claim that we are cavalier and of the journeying sort. Yet, we rein these journeys in, we cinch them tight, we tame them comatose, and in the process we kill the very adventure that we allege to be on.
The War on Christmas
The nature of Christmas is such that it calls us to magnificently great things. Christmas is the greatest, most perfectly complete rescue mission of all time in any time. It is an act of the purest liberation, smashing anything and everything that would dare attempt to shackle us. Christmas will blow out the walls of any prison, it will level the most arduous mountain, it will construct a sure path through the landscape of the impossible, and it claims a place for us in the endless adventure called eternity. The gift of God’s Son to us is a call to radical liberation and an ensuing greatness unparalleled in the entirety of existence.
Yes, without reservation Christmas is that bold, that magnificent and that wonderful. And because it is, we cherish it but we often walk in dread fear of it. We want to feel the tug of Christmas and find ourselves elated by the wonder and captivated by the mystery of whatever wonderful destination it might be prompting us toward. Yet, we want to have the leash firmly in hand should the destination that God is calling us to prove too obscure or too frightening or just too much. And so we tame greatness, which is in reality to kill it outright.
The War of Reclamation
We need to draw the battle lines, raise the standard, and fight the war to reclaim Christmas. Christmas is God redeeming mankind from mankind’s notoriously failed efforts to redeem himself. It is the single, sure path to salvation, and it is the promise for an eternity that extends beyond our famished imagination. It is God declaring that not all is lost, that everything can be redeemed, and that hope will never be crushed under the heel of adversity. Christmas is an adventure that we could never comprehend, much less craft. And we are freely granted this greatest of all adventures by the simple act of simply accepting it.
This war of reclamation begins with us. The battle lies within our hearts and its battlefields stretch across the landscape of our souls. It is here that we need to lay renewed claim to Christmas, do a radical internal reorientation where we rigorously purge ourselves of anything that would diminish this great gift, and then disseminate that battle to those around us. And let’s do that by starting with us.
Craig Lounsbrough
M. Div., LPC