by Kathleen Kastilahn

You can’t — no matter how much you bake, wrap, decorate, party, give, visit, sing, worship, or even do acts of love. You can’t, because God already did, 2,000 years ago and every year since. And God will do it again this year.

One wonders how we women, particularly, ever thought this task was ours and, with equal measures of obligation and delight and exhaustion, set about our Christmas busyness. We could delve into the annals of Victorian history, of course, but we don’t really have to do more than read the cover lines on the magazines at the grocery check-out counter to know that the cheering of the culture continues.

I read Unplug the Christmas Machine: How to Have the Christmas You’ve Always Wanted years ago, when I was a young mom. It offered then revolutionary ideas on how to stop the holiday frenzy, I recall, but still we women were the ones to flip the "off" switch. The control was still ours. That’s just wrong.

We lose our way to the manger early on when we think that what we do makes Christmas come — in our homes and in our hearts. Listen to these words from a Nativity sermon: "They did not recognize what God was doing in the stable. With all their eating, drinking, and finery, God left them empty, and this comfort and treasure were hidden from them. Oh, what a dark night it was in Bethlehem that this light should not have been seen."

The preacher of this sermon was Martin Luther. Translator Roland Bainton, in his introduction to The Martin Luther Christmas Book, observes that for Luther the great question was "why the Lord of all the universe should care enough about us mortals to take our flesh and share our woes." And that for Luther, "The condescension of God was the great wonder."

Luther was humbled by God’s humility in the Incarnation. And as Martha Stortz reminds us in her Bible study Following with Tempered Strength "Through Jesus we know the meekness of a God who suffers with us, enveloping us in a Father’s love."

The awe of this all makes me feel more foolish than frazzled when I consider the notion of my Christmas to-do list or of planning the Christmas I’ve always wanted. We certainly don’t need to fret that we will fall short on making this Christmas the best. Rather, we should fear that we’ll be too occupied with our holiday activities to recognize what God was doing in the stable, that we’ll be the ones left empty at Bethlehem.

Compared with that, well, how can we judge a Christmas "white" or "blue" based even on our particular situation? We all have years when this holiday is particularly blessed — as ours was last year, with a first grandchild joyfully stretching out our family circle. Or when it is painfully bleak — as it is for those facing a difficult diagnosis or worrying about family far away, especially in war zones.

Read from this letter written December 17, 1943, by Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer to his parents: "For a Christian there is nothing peculiarly difficult about Christmas in a prison cell. I daresay it will have more meaning and will be observed with greater sincerity here in this prison than in places where all that survives of the feast s its name....

"For the prisoner the Christmas story is glad tidings in a very real sense. And that faith gives the prisoner a part in the communion of saints, a fellowship transcending the bounds of time and space."

Bonhoeffer reveals the "tempered strength" of the believer who knows, as Stortz writes, that "God became one of us to share our suffering and show us the pathways of peace"

This is God’s Christmas.

To the manger
What should we do in these Advent days so the treasure of Christmas is not hidden from us, so we don’t leave the manger empty?

Perhaps we start by simply and, yes, meekly receiving this gift of God-with-us with thanks for all the days of our lives — the days of gladness and of sadness that come to each of us. "Of the Father’s love begotten," Jesus comes into our world, into our lives, embodying that love.

We know the story so well.

Maybe too well?

A missionary I visited in Thailand showed me a painting on the wall of his seminary classroom. It was the Nativity, the work of Sawai Chinnawong, an internationally known Christian artist who was raised Buddhist.

I loved the bright depiction of a traditional village, complete with an elephant paying homage at the manger. But I missed the remarkable feature: The separation between heaven and earth of classical Buddhist art — a continuous jagged line — was broken. Heaven had opened into earth. God had come to the people here, now.

This image would startle a Buddhist, the professor pointed out. That our God comes to live with us should still amaze us.

Sawai’s painting includes three people, presumably wise, bringing gifts. The first is a woman carrying a tray with a jar of water, a bowl of rice, and a fish on a plate. (Reminds me of the saying that if the wise men had been women they would have brought a casserole, among other things.)

That’s a sign of how we are to respond to the amazing gift of God. We give back. But before we think about what that means for us this Christmas, let’s listen again to Luther’s sermon: "There are many of you in this congregation who think to yourselves: ‘If only I had been there! How quick I would have been to help the Baby! I would have washed his linen. How happy I would have been to go with the shepherds to see the Lord lying in the manger!’ Yes, you would! You say that because you know how great Christ is, but if you had been there at that time you would have done no better than the people of Bethlehem. Childish and silly thoughts are these! Why don’t you do it now? You have Christ in your neighbor. You ought to serve him, for what you do to your neighbor in need you do the Lord Christ himself."

No one ever accused Luther of not speaking his mind. His blunt admonitions to his parishioners some 450 years ago can still direct us on our way to the manger.

We who have been given Christ don’t have to compete with God, to try to make this Christmas the "best ever." We do have to care for real people in real ways.

Who is the "neighbor" that Luther tells us to serve? It’s such an ancient question.

I love the answer we sing in the Ghanaian folk tune: "Neighbors are wealthy and poor, varied in color and race, neighbors are nearby and far away. These are the ones we will serve, these are the ones we will love; all these are neighbors to us and you" (With One Voice 765).

But it’s here, among all these neighbors, that we can get confused and confounded and even crabby. How can we possibly pass along our Christmas gift of life in Christ with all these people?

A centered life
We know our giving is in our serving one another in community. But, oh, what a balancing act that can be! And before we know it we’re in a rush again — rushing to do it all, struggling to do too much.

Where do we find time to knit prayer-filled stitches into a shawl for a new mother down the block? To coach the Sunday school children memorizing their lines for the pageant? To bake (and mail) family-favorite cookies for siblings far away? All the while, probably, keeping up with a full schedule at the office. It would be good, too, to get out for a walk if not to the gym. Sound familiar? We yearn for balance, the state-of-being those supermarket magazines also encourage us to strive for.

But Jack Fortin of Luther Seminary’s Center for Lifelong Learning believes that even this seemingly good goal of living in balance puts us in peril. A balancing act, after all, is a precarious under-taking. Think about stepping along a high-wire. That’s tension.

Fortin counsels that, instead, we should seek to center our lives. "The alternative to a balanced life is a faithful life," he explains in his book, The Centered Life. "It is a life faithful, moment by moment, to the God in whom we live and move and have our being."

He says the problem with striving for balance is that "it keeps us self–absorbed, and the elements of our lives rarely stay in balance."

Centering our life means we won’t get to everything on our Christmas to–do list. It means that we will listen each day for what God is calling us to do, whom God is calling us to be with. It means we will trust God’s guidance and give up, humbly, even our most earnest plans and agendas.

You know — or maybe you don’t, but I do — that even a desire to simplify Christmas can lead to disaster. I think back to the year I decided to forgo the expense and waste of commercial wrapping paper and, instead, made my own gift wrap from plain brown grocery bags with potato-stamp printed stars. I wound up in tears late on Christmas Eve with a mess on my hands and presents in plain boxes.

A department-store gift, on the other hand, can be a blessing for both giver and receiver. A nightgown was just that for my sister and me. We each gave the other a nightgown the first Christmas after our mother died — a reminder of her traditional gift to us during our childhoods. The present, of course, was the presence of her love in our lives and of our desire to give that to each other in cloth as precious and as real as that which swaddled the Baby Jesus.

I hear echoes of the angels, themselves, in Fortin’s telling us to "fear not" about perfect balance, but to live from our center in Christ.

More practical advice comes straight into our kitchens — a "center" place for many women   —  from M. J. Smith, a Stephen Minister and dietitian who is a member of St. John Lutheran Church in Guttenberg, Iowa. Her book Daily Bread offers recipes for nourishing spirit and body. I asked her once about her preparations for Christmas. What gift did she want to bring to the celebration?

"Our goal is to renew our faith," she said. "To pass it on to the children in our lives." (And I’d add neighbors.) "With that as our focus, we can look at every activity or responsibility or event and see if it will help us on our way — or not."

With companions such as these to walk with us on our way these December days, I’m confident that when we do get to Bethlehem, we will recognize what God is doing. And that God will not leave us empty.

Kathleen Kastilahn is an associate editor of The Lutheran and a member of St. Paul Lutheran Church, Evanston, Ill.