God is All In at Christmas

Special offers abound in the holiday shopping season. We dance in the tension of loyalty and benefits as businesses and customers. Loyalty cards and programs allow us to build up value points in the company's hopes that they will keep our current and future business. The thought is that if we find greater value elsewhere, we will simply go there. In other words, they doubt our loyalty and consider it fragile and temperamental. It must be maintained with vigilant customer service and daily special offers. And the funny thing is that this system works. Companies do keep our business by their offers and customer service.

On the consumer side, we play company offers against one another by threatening to take our business elsewhere in the hopes of securing a better deal for our money, commitment, or time. The whole process seems to be based on doubt, lack of faith and fear that we really won't maintain our commitments to one another as businesses or customers without constant reassurance and special offers. And the funny thing is that this system works. We can get better deals by using our loyalty and dollars as bargaining tools.

That's the retail side of life. But it produces some funny side effects when we try to use it on the faith side of life.

When we consider ourselves as customers/consumers in our relationship with God, the biggest retailer ever, then we end up acting in ways more characterized by scarcity and fear than love and trust. We make bargains with God for love and healing. We pray to God as if interacting with a vending machine to get our desired results. We pledge to change our ways to avert major consequences of our actions, hoping for some special offer to make it all better and stay on acceptable terms with God.

Knowing our fragile-fearful-hopeful-sinful condition, God turns our retail reality upside down by making a personal, irrevocable commitment to us in Jesus Christ. No loyalty cards or incentive programs are needed in God's relationship with the world, just the Good News that "the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it...the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth" (John 1:5,14).

In other words, God is All In at Christmas. There's no holding back better deals and value until we show greater loyalty or clean up our lives. God acts first in love at the intersection of hope and fear so wonderfully expressed in the Christmas carol, "O, Little Town of Bethlehem":

"Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light; the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight."

May our retail reality be wonderfully and lovingly redeemed by the great gift of Jesus Christ again this Christmas so that we may give appropriate gifts of love and loyalty to God, one another and the world. Merry Christmas.

After this post was published as my December 2011 newsletter article, I found this prayer by Rev. Dr. Ozzie Smith, Jr. at the end of his address, "A Sight for Certain Eyes":


Thank you, God, for giving us your All. Your All that the world would later see. We would learn later that a leper would see All in Jesus coming and saying, "You can heal me if you choose to." A Syro-Phoenician woman would not leave the table without having some of this All. Nicodemus would sneak in for a night class for this All. A bleeding woman would crawl to touch the hem of this All. Crowds would be fed by this All. Peter would walk on water towards this All. A dying thief would realize it and be welcomed to paradise by this All. Water would turn to wine by this All. Millions of men and women would accept calls to the ministry by this All, and slaves would sing, "Nobody knows the trouble I see," but this All. Teresa of Calcutta would be known as a saint of the gutter because of this All. And when evil thought that it had done all that it could do by putting this All away, All would get up again and say, "All power is in my hand." Saying, "If I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men and women unto me." 

Thank you, God, for giving us your All, the Word made flesh in your Son Jesus. Lord, grant that we might have certain eyes in the midst of our present uncertainty. We thank you. We bless your name and we praise you for the giving gift of Jesus. Amen.