This is an Advent reflection that came up in yesterday’s entry in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas. It comes from pastor and theologian William Willimon, who is discussing the misplaced emphasis on the “season of giving,” and the real reason for the season–receiving.
In a society that makes strangers of us all, it is interesting what we do when a stranger gives us a gift.
And consider what we do at Christmas, the so-called season of giving. We enjoy thinking of ourselves as basically generous, benevolent, giving people. That’s one reason why everyone, even the nominally religious, loves Christmas. Christmas is a season to celebrate our alleged generosity. The newspaper keeps us posted on how many needy families we have adopted. The Salvation Army kettles enable us to be generous while buying groceries (for ourselves) or gifts (for our families). People we work with who usually balk at the collection to pay for morning coffee fall over themselves soliciting funds “to make Christmas” for some family.
Yet I suggest we are better givers than getters, not because we are generous people but because we are proud, arrogant people. The Christmas story–the one according to Luke, not Dickens–is not about how blessed it is to be givers but about how essential it is to see ourselves as receivers.
We prefer to think of ourselves as givers–powerful, competent, self-sufficient, capable people whose goodness motivates us to employ some of our power, competence and gifts to benefit the less fortunate. Which is a direct contradiction of the biblical account of the first Christmas. There we are portrayed not as the givers we wish we were but as the receivers we are. Luke and Matthew go to great lengths to demonstrate that we–with our power, generosity, competence and capabilities–had little to do with God’s work in Jesus. God wanted to do something for us so strange, so utterly beyond the bounds of human imagination, so foreign to human projection, that God had to resort to angels, pregnant virgins, and stars in the sky to get it done. We didn’t think of it, understand it or approve it. All we could do, at Bethlehem, was receive it. A gift from a God we hardly even knew.
…This is often the way God loves us: with gifts we thought we didn’t need, which transform us into people we don’t necessarily want to be. With our advanced degrees, armies, government programs, material comforts and self-fulfillment techniques, we assume that religion is about giving a little of our power in order to confirm to ourselves that we are indeed as self-sufficient as we claim.
Then this stranger comes to us, blesses us with a gift, and calls us to see ourselves as we are–empty-handed recipients of a gracious God who, rather than leave us to our own devices, gave us a baby.
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5 responses to “Strange Gifts in the Season of Receiving”
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“Yet I suggest we are better givers than getters, not because we are generous people but because we are generous people but because we are proud, arrogant people.”
Is that a misprint or am I just getting worse at reading. Enjoyed it either way.
your reading skills are on the money. just fixed.
I like the premise, except… our giving, especially to the poor, is an imitation of the Lord. We give of the self for the sake of someone else who cannot give back.
Touché, Frank. That’s absolutely true, and Willimon is quick to say that our giving, when it is right, is from God. “We love because he first loved us.” But what Willimon is angling at, is that our season of “giving” often just bolsters a higher anthropology than we ought to reckon ourselves.
Ethan,
Favorite Advent devo of all time – I can almost quote WW here like liturgy.
look forward to seeing you in Tyler in March!
Merry Christmas