My family no longer goes to church while on vacation, except when we do. And I can't remember a Christmas Eve when we've been together when we haven't gone. I always thought that Christmas Eve would be a relatively safe service, that we could go to any denomination of Christianity--most of us sing the same songs on Christmas Eve, and the message isn't likely to be too strange.
Usually we can find an ELCA Lutheran church, but there wasn't one nearby this year. So we went to a Missouri Synod Lutheran church--for those of you unfamiliar with church variations, Missouri Synod Lutherans are fairly conservative. They don't ordain women, for example.
We went to the 5 p.m. service which was packed--every seat in the room taken, literally. I wondered if their 9 p.m. service was the smaller one, or if it, too, would be packed. Did all these people live on Marco Island? Is it a hotbed of conservative Lutheranism that I didn't know about? Is the island big enough to have a this kind of critical mass of any religion?
In some ways, it was like falling back through a hole in time to wake up at a Christmas Eve service in 1959. The congregation was very white--the only person of color sang in the choir. We sang the older versions of hymns and prayed that a male God who had choirs of angels proclaiming good news to men, not humans.
In some ways, it wasn't 1959. Most women wore pants, which surprised me. And this church did allow women to serve communion; I'm told that some Missouri Synod Lutherans don't. And the music was amplified--very amplified. We got the words to the hymns both in the paper bulletin and projected on screens.
The older I get, the more I yearn for a contemplative service, and this yearning doesn't change on Christmas Eve. I wondered what the Mepkin monks would be doing--probably much of what they usually do, with a special something, but not a showy something special. They would probably not hear a sermon about the world as smelly stable: all the ways that humans make it so smelly with the horrible choices they make. But hey, good news: God can be found in the smelly stable.
I'd have rather sung more Christmas carols, but it was not to be. Christmas Eve doesn't really need a sermon, but perhaps there would be complaints if there was no sermon.
We used the gender neutral bathrooms before heading back to our home away from home--another sign that the church might be a tad more progressive than their God language indicates. They also had a meditative garden space that I could see from inside the church, but I didn't explore.
We drove back through the glitzy lights of a resort area. I thought back to Christmas Eve in San Diego, where we greeted the homeless who were making their camp for the night--what did they think of this jolly troupe of strangers wishing them a Merry Christmas?
I'd prefer a message about who is included in the stable and who can't even find a stable when there's no room at the end--but that message, too, might have irritated me. I much prefer the Advent reading of Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. She reminds us that success is really much more ambiguous, as is failure.
Here's a message for our Christmas morning: "The term 'politics of prefiguration' has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded. That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed. Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things but a home in which to take up residence and live according to your beliefs . . . " (pages 80-81).
Let us begin to live like the communities we're creating already exist. Let us create a larger home in the world for the changes we need to see, the ones we're creating, the ones that humanity desperately needs.
Happy winter holidays, to all who celebrate the return of daylight to our world, slow minute by slow minute, each day a bit brighter.
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