Our Losing Season
What does a baseball team “playing out the string” have to do with the way we are celebrating the holidays this year?
It happens every year. The final few weeks of the season, the contenders experience their sport in vastly different ways from the teams that are out of the race. For the contenders, the stress of the final weeks of the season will ramp up as the handful of top teams vie for position in the playoffs.
But for the rest of the teams, for the clubs that have no chance at championship glory, there is no drama. They’ve known they were out of contention for months. They still have games to play, but now they get paid to play the same games that children play in their backyards. They have the luxury of playing the games for the sheer love of their sport.
As of November 26, we have entered into “the Holiday Season,” that stretch of weeks between Thanksgiving and News Years Day when we try to cram too many good experiences into a narrow span of days.
The shopping
The parties
The decorating
The gift-wrapping
The cooking
The family gatherings
But, as we’ve already seen from our scaled-back Thanksgiving celebrations, things are different this year. It’s hard to gather with loved ones when we’re all hunkered down in our homes, limiting our contact with people outside our household.
And all this leaves us adrift, wondering how we’ll celebrate this year… even secretly wondering if we have anything to celebrate.
But like the baseball team playing not for contention but for sheer love of the game, all this constriction may be a blessing in disguise. It may be revealing our blind spot, that our celebrations have lost their focus.
I remember a cover story for the Christmas issue of a Christian magazine I saw years ago. It was a simple photograph of torn Christmas wrapping paper on the carpet, along with the article title, “Forgive Us Our Christmases.”
The point, of course, was that even in Christian families the Christmas season has devolved into something less – far less – than a celebration of the moment Christ was born. For many families – even Christian families – Christmas observances have become a celebration of the rich blessings of prosperity and family ties.
But with the economic downturn tightening purse strings and with the pandemic protocols limiting our social contact, what do we have to celebrate this Christmas?
Of course, as soon as I put the question that way, the fatal flaw is obvious.
I remember a friend telling me about a surprise birthday party that his friends threw for him that didn’t turn out well. He came away from that party perplexed and a little bit offended because after the initial burst of enthusiasm when they all greeted him, everyone drifted off into small groups for conversation. And no one talked to him!
He didn’t know whether to chuckle or weep at the irony that the people who came to his party were ignoring him at his own party!
I have often wondered if that’s what our Christmas season must look like for Jesus, the one whose birth we presumably are celebrating.
A year from now, when 2021 is winding down and we again turn our attention to “the holiday season,” we will (we hope) be “back to normal,” able to gather, able to celebrate together, able to sit tightly packed in the Christmas Eve service, able to throw ourselves unstintingly into the whole stressful mess of “the holidays.”
But this year the pandemic has enforced a stillness on us, and it has given us a chance to refocus, to remember what a precious gift it is that God has given us His Son. This year the distractions have been ripped away, and now we can see more clearly what we have to celebrate.
Let’s not let this opportunity escape us.
Let’s use these extra hours of stillness to turn our gaze to the quiet and magnificent beauty of what God has given us in Christ.
Instead of grieving over what we can’t have this Christmas, let’s celebrate the priceless treasure that we have in Jesus.
Persevere,
Pastor Paul Pyle
Discipleship Pastor
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