As much as I try to convince myself (and everyone else within shouting distance) that it’s hopelessly commercialized and contrived, I still like the Christmas season.
I like the cheesy music playing in every grocery store, mall, and coffee house… in fact, the cheesier the better. I like taking my kids around the neighborhood to see all the lights, especially when we pass the houses where you can clearly see they blew a month’s pay on their Griswold-worthy display. I like how random people in stuffy and crowded department stores will cheerfully say “Merry Christmas!” as they maneuver their bloated bags around our double stroller that’s somehow more filled with stuff than with kids.
But then the day comes: the day when the soundtrack at Starbucks veers back to obscure music from Zimbabwe. The day when ladders go up all over town to bring down the 10-foot snow globes from the rooftops. And that’s when the superficial veneer of holiday happiness is stripped away. We exit the Disneyland-world of Christmas parties and school performances and boat parades, and we go back to the real world. The one with all the project deadlines and leaky faucets and credit card balances that we ignored during December.
Christmas cheer is something we like to paste over our problems for a month every year. Whatever we’re lacking in real joy and hope, we replace with extravagant gifts and repeat viewings of It’s a Wonderful Life (or A Christmas Story for those of us who like a splash of cynicism in our cup of cheer).
Contrast that to the incredible, even illogical expectancy of the anonymous prophet who wrote Lamentations. He was probably writing just after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. With images of burning buildings and body-strewn streets seared into his mind, and with sounds of screaming motherless babies still ringing in his ears, he wrote this:
Remember my affliction and my wanderings,
the wormwood and the gall!
My soul continually remembers it
and is bowed down within me.
But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope.
(Lamentations 3:19-21)
What’s striking to me is the gut-wrenching honesty this guy had. Unlike our tendency to simulate hope by tuning out our worries, this prophet realized that true hope doesn’t ignore life’s tragedies. It doesn’t mean being happy-go-lucky all the time.
Hope-filled people don’t shy away from trials and tough situations. They don’t force a fake smile during holiday gatherings with people they’d really like to see run over by a reindeer. They don’t turn the channel when the Christmas-season relief organization commercials show pictures of starving African kids waiting for a little plastic cup filled with gross-looking mush that was left over from the filming of The Matrix.
Unlike us, the writer of Lamentations didn’t flinch from pain and suffering. I think that’s because he realized that things could be worse. Much worse.
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases
(alternate reading: “Because of the steadfast love of the LORD, we are not cut off“);
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
(v. 22-23)
So it’s not just that things could be worse. It’s that they should be worse. Like the rebellious Israelites, it’s only by God’s great love that we weren’t “cut off” for our sins. As Paul says in Ephesians 2, we were “children of wrath” by our very nature, so it’s only by God’s grace that we haven’t been wiped off the face of the earth.
That fact alone should give us all an unquenchable hope that goes infinitely deeper and lasts infinitely longer than the surface sheen of the Christmas season. And there’s even more from this chicken-skin-inducing passage in Lamentations that I’ll explore tomorrow.