Is there a Christmas gift you particularly remember? For me it was a red Schwinn tank bike that was under the tree (well, next to the tree) the Christmas of 1960. This was not a fancy bike – a boy’s bike, of course, with a horizontal bar, only one gear so no derailleur necessary and you applied the brakes by pedaling in reverse. I broke my foot on it once when the chain snapped as I was moving at warp speed, but it was my bike. I wonder whatever happened to it. Once you reach a certain age, however, the giving and receiving of gifts becomes more complicated. What do you get for the man who has everything! God is, of course, the ultimate giver. God gives freely, lavishly, abundantly. God gives us this lovely blue marble to live on. God gives us the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. (Let’s not waste it!) God gives us life and people to share love with. God is really good at giving gifts. Of course the greatest gift he gave us was Jesus. He is Emmanuel, God-with-us, who assures us of the divine presence in all of human existence. But God wasn’t done giving even with that. There was one particular gift that God gave to Jesus at his baptism. The voice from the heavens told him. “You are my beloved son. I am well pleased with you.” What a gift that was for Jesus – the blessed assurance that God not only had his back, but also had his front. The baptism put it right out there in front for all to see that Jesus was precious in the eyes of God.
However, that gift of God’s blessing was not limited to Jesus. Whenever an angel pops up the angel bestows blessed assurance to the recipient of the message. In announcing the birth of John the Baptist the angel says, “He will be great in the sight of God.” Joseph is called a “just man” when the angel visited him. When the angel visited Mary, Gabriel said that she is full of grace, favored by God, that the Lord is with her. The angel went on, the child to be born will be holy, Son of the Most High. Elizabeth gets in the act of giving blessings away during Mary’s visit when she says, “Blessed are you among women. Blessed is the fruit of your womb. Blessed is the woman who trusted.” Whenever a new character appears on the scene their identity as blessed by God is pointed out.
This is important because it runs clean contrary to the way of the world. The perennial message that is thrown at us in the world is that we don’t measure up. You’re no good. You’re not smart enough or pretty enough or rich enough or strong enough. After hearing that over and over again we internalize that message. I am a bad person, I am inadequate, I am a sorry excuse for a human being. But Church, this is all a lie. This is from the devil. That was the message that the devil gave to Adam and Eve (“You’re not good enough so you’d better eat this apple”) and that is the demonic message thrown at us. When you add in the trauma produced in an individual due to racism or sexism or patriarchy or homophobia the sense of our unworthiness almost becomes accepted as normal. It is not normal. What the Bible teaches is that we, each one of us, is a child of God. What the Bible teaches is that we are blessed just in being who we are. What the Bible teaches is that we are precious.
In psychological terms this sense of our being deficient is experienced as shame. Shame is that condition where I think that I am no good. Notice that guilt is not the same as shame. We feel guilt when we do something not good, when we do something wrong, when we make a mistake. Guilt can produce positive results since we seek to make amends for that mistake, and not to do it again. Shame is always a negative feeling — that I am the mistake, not what I do. I heard of a little girl, about ten years old who understood this perfectly. The teacher walked into the room where she was working on an art project and saw scattered all around her bits of cut paper, glitter, glue, string. “Oh Greta, you are quite a mess.” To which Greta responded, “I am not a mess. I made a mess.” And that is exactly right.
We know how to deal with guilt. We go to confession and God extends forgiveness to us. The very name of Jesus means savior, the one who frees us from our faults, from our sins. But what do we do about shame? How do we move beyond that sense of false-self which is so debilitating? The Bible holds out a model: have an angel come and tell you that you are full of grace, that you are blessed. Unfortunately angels seem to be in short supply these days. However, the word “angel” just means messenger and God wants to use us, the Church, as the divine messengers in the world nowadays. We are the ones who are going to have to gift those around us with the good news of our true identity as children of God. We are the angels. Be an angel and tell a young person how precious they are in God’s sight. Be an angel and tell someone who messed up big time that whatever they did does not make them a bad person. God can deal with our mistakes as long as we remember who we are whose we are. Be an angel and tell a family member that you are estranged from that they are blessed since they are made in God’s image and likeness. Be an angel and tell the person sitting next to you that he or she is a child of God. That will lead to a genuine celebration of Emmanuel, God with us. That deserves an Alleluia chorus. That would be a truly Christmas gift.
