COMMENTARY: What we see isn’t always reality

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.) UNDATED _ My 7-year-old angel gets himself dressed for a choir performance at church. As he walks forward to sing, I notice he’s wearing an old YMCA soccer shirt and jeans. His eyes roam over the sanctuary, […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.)

UNDATED _ My 7-year-old angel gets himself dressed for a choir performance at church. As he walks forward to sing, I notice he’s wearing an old YMCA soccer shirt and jeans. His eyes roam over the sanctuary, barely pausing on the director. He pulls at the corners of his mouth.


Some in the pews might wonder if he even wants to be up there. Some who value decorum might banish him from sight. But I know for a fact that he has been excited about this performance and has been singing constantly, even in bed.

What we see isn’t always reality.

As another thoroughly modern Christmas season winds on, we need to see that frantic shoppers probably aren’t obsessed materialists, but God’s beloved doing what they think will please people whom they love.

And that non-stop advertising isn’t a tool of the devil, but another expression of a deep-seated worry that, in the end, only God can address.

And that the stress and foolishness of this holiday season aren’t an argument against God, but further proof of our need for God.

And that while today’s Bethlehem is on war footing and not”still,”modern nights are rarely”silent,”gentlemen don’t banish”dismay”at year-end and become”merry,”and a revenge-minded world is so convulsed in impeachments and hardness of heart that it has no time to be”joyful and triumphant”_ in fact, God still”imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven.” We see so little. God is working at a depth, even in ourselves, that we can’t imagine. Long before we think to pray, God is listening. Long before we sense our chains, God is acting to set us free.

The first Christians asked, Where did this all begin? Having seen Jesus, having witnessed his sacrifice, having stood outside the empty tomb, they looked back and tried to imagine how it began.

John looked back to the beginning of creation. Luke focused on Mary and how God set in motion miraculous events leading up to her giving birth. Matthew saw it through the eyes and genealogy of Joseph.

They saw what they saw, and Christians have spent 2,000 years arguing about their words and trying to come up with a definitive scenario. That’s just our pride at work.


The fact seems to have been that God set this messianic moment into motion long before anyone noticed and for purposes we don’t yet comprehend.

Maybe we can’t help but get caught up in details like Mary’s virginity, or exactly what the angels sang. But we shouldn’t think we are seeing reality in its fullness, not even in these beloved and well-argued accounts. Jesus seems to have confounded every expectation at the time he lived. Why would we expect him to be any different at birth or now?

When an anguished young pastor sat on a hillside overlooking Bethlehem and wrote a song about a”little town”where a”dark night”once awoke into”glory,”he wasn’t seeing the dusty reality of 19th century Palestine. He was giving voice to the heartache of Civil War in America and seeking desperately for a glimmer of”Light.” Phillips Brooks found his hope and went home to Philadelphia to teach it to his generation of distracted angels, and so will we.

We will find our hope, not by staging the”perfect Christmas,”but by looking into our frenzy, our seasonal heartaches, and those songs that not even department store loudspeakers can distort.

We don’t subject ourselves to endless lines at Best Buy because we are crazed, but because we want to express our love. That’s what we’ll look for on Christmas: recognition on the faces of our families and friends that we love them.

We don’t bake cookies and cakes by the carload because we are gluttons, but because the lonely and the grateful seem united in their belief that giving food gives love.


We don’t hum carols because K-Mart strummed our Pavlovian chords to lure us into a shopping mood, but because God placed a song within us. That song survived a civil war, and it surely will survive the”Christmas season.”

DEA END EHRICH

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