A reporter called to ask if our parish was doing something new and different this year to prepare for Christmas, perhaps some musical performance. While he was at it he also asked if there was anything new I had thought of to say in my Christmas homily.
His question got me to thinking about performance and how it differs from worship and about history versus mystery.
At the first Christmas, Luke records that a choir of angels sang announcing good news and great joy to all the people. Every Christmas people find joy in trying to replicate that experience. In fact, if heaven is a great choir worshiping God, as the Book of Revelation proclaims, then a little taste of harmony on earth is much to be desired.
But my concern was with the reporter's emphasis on performance and having something new to say. It is as if Christmas was a commodity and a good pastoral salesman should find a way of attracting crowds to the product he is selling. Performance alone can render Christmas a consumption of a good, the celebration of a memory of past events. Real worship on the other hand is an interactive sharing of a good, a community's participation in an historic reality.
Christmas is the whole of creation bursting forth with divine transformation. The heavens are open, angels proclaim good news and great joy. The stars attest to a call sent to all the nations, and the news shakes both the religious and political status quo.
Christmas is not something that can be contained in a performance or a sermon, nor put away until another commercial season needs to be rolled out. Christmas is not a measure of the health of a national economy. Christmas is an historic reality that calls for a complete change of personal, religious, and political life.
What was gestating in the womb of the Virgin Mary has begun to ferment in the whole human enterprise until it bursts into a new heavens and a new earth. Worship is the only response that is worthy of Christmas as an historic reality. That is why Mary worships, the shepherds worship, the Magi worship, and even Herod fakes worship as an excuse to find the child and try to stop the power of God from transforming the world. Even people who never worship at any other time in the year seem drawn to worship at Christmas when the calendar strikes Dec. 25.
But as Charles Dickens so beautifully displays in A Christmas Carol, the real transforming power of worship is to live the reality of Christmas every day of the year. The Herods, who try to manipulate the power of God which is transforming the world, we will always have with us. Marys and Josephs, the shepherds, and Magi, on the other hand, form a community of interactive response to an historic reality still unfolding until all things are made new.
The whole earth is changing since a portion of its dust is now sharing the divine nature in the person of the babe of Bethlehem, Jesus. Now that is a reason to worship with a community and stay around to see what else might become new.
Father Richard Chiola is a certified counselor, pastor of St. Cabrini Parish in Springfield and diocesan director for the ongoing formation of clergy.