Lessons and Carols and Theology, both Ancient and Modern

Many churches today will do a Service of Lessons and Carols.  It's a great way to give church folks a lower-key Sunday, after the work-intense week that includes Christmas Eve and perhaps Christmas morning.  Musicians already know the music, and if pastors don't want to preach, the lessons do the work.  Many churches won't have communion, so more people can take the day off--after all, pastors have families too, and many of them haven't had much holiday time with those families.

When I was younger, I loved this service.  Of course, when I was younger, I loved everything about Advent and Christmas, and I wondered why church services throughout the year were no match for Christmas Eve.  Even today, the Christmas Eve service seems the most perfect to me.  I know I should love Easter best, but I don't.

One of the gifts seminary has given me is an appreciation for various theologies that have been squashed throughout church history--and not just appreciation, but hearing about them at all.  I will always wonder what might have happened if Pelagius had become the go-to theologian, not Augustine.   Just imagine it:  a church based on God's love of all of creation, not a church based on ideas of a fallen, unworthy creation.  What if the idea of sin took a back seat to ideas about the beauty of creation?

Alas, most of us aren't living in that world, which is one reason why Easter isn't my favorite.  Even though we have an empty tomb at Easter, we also get a lot of substitutionary atonement theology in an Easter service, lots of references to that old rugged cross.  And if that's true in ELCA Lutheran churches, I can only imagine how much worse it might be in more conservative churches.

But Christmas Eve is different.  We might want to lean into Christmas Eve as a story of God vs. Roman empire--well some of us pastor folks/social justice folks might.  But Christmas Eve is about beauty, about a Divine love so huge that God comes to be with us, to experience all of human life.

I've often marveled at the idea of God who is willing to be a baby, willing to be a teenager, willing to experience pain the way we do.  Again, I think of a different way that church/theology might have helped me frame this differently:  a God who wants to experience the exquisite wonder and awe of being human.  If I had it framed this way, earlier, preached from the pulpit, maybe it would have taken me less time to feel wonder and awe at being human, less time feeling trapped in my body, my fallen body in all of its femaleness (the way the Church has framed it through the ages). 

I write today, surrounded by Christmas beauty, lights and decorations that will soon be packed away.  It's a good day for thinking about ways to keep this wonder and awe going throughout the year.  Now that's a new year's resolution that makes me happy.