Liberating Christmas 2022

When Christmas was turned into celebrations of consumption and sentimentality, a few things got lost along the way. No surprise here. Reclaiming what was lost is another story, as well-meaning responses have mostly failed. Blaming consumers for hijacking Christmas overlooks that consumption is driven by bigger and more powerful interests. And efforts to “keep Christ in Christmas” make little sense when our images of Christ are hollow.

In order to liberate Christmas once again, let’s take another look not at what is familiar but what remains strange about the old Christmas stories.

One of the oddest parts of the Christmas story is that God joins humanity as member of a family of construction workers. Like today’s essential workers, these folks would have known firsthand the hardships of working for large economic interests and even of dispensable and getting laid off in Roman-occupied Galilee. While these are not happy experiences, there is a wisdom that goes with them, which may have the power to transform Christmas celebrations of imperial commercial interests and pomp, then and now.

The wisdom of working people may be the reason that the heavenly choirs of angels were more interested in announcing the birth of the Christ child to essential workers like the shepherds (without whom the food supply would have been severely disrupted), rather than to their superiors (Luke 2:8-20). According to the ancient stories, no angels announce this event to the ruling ranks in Jerusalem or Rome.

Without pursuing the wisdom of essential workers—the most diverse group of people the planet has ever seen—the miracle of Christmas may be forever lost. Essential workers are those to whom the heavenly choirs choose to sing, and Jesus, the child of an essential worker soon to be joining the ranks of essential workers, is born in an utterly essential place—a barn rather than a palace or a sanctuary.

God becoming an essential worker in Jesus the Christ comes as a total surprise in societies that absolutely depend on them but do not value them, then and now. Sentimental displays of affection, like during the peaks of the Covid 19 pandemic, count little. Moreover, Jesus stays in solidarity with essential workers until the violent ending of his life. He does not pursue the deceptive dreams of upward mobility, offered by the Roman Empire and the religious leadership of his time; instead, Jesus debunks the myth of the dreams of the Roman Empire that today have morphed into the American Dream (Matthew 4:1-10).

It is not hard to see that such a Christ and such a Christmas did not make sense to the Romans (who had no trouble granting divine status to certain human beings). Neither did it make sense to the interests of the high-ranking Jewish leadership of the time, who often served at the pleasure of the Romans. Such a Christ and such a Christmas never made sense to dominant Christianity either, and so the topic has been suppressed and silenced for almost twenty centuries.

The symbols of Christmas that are found in many churches this time of year might help us break through the suppression and enforced silence. Shepherds and sheep, stables and manger scenes, and angels in fields rather than in palaces, temples, or cathedrals, cannot be domesticated by dominant religion forever. In some small ways, these symbols have always remained subversive, as they keep carrying the dangerous memories of God’s unflinching solidarity with essential workers and thus with the working majority. Jesus’ family has its roots there. And even the heavenly host grounds itself in the lives of working people when it joins in open solidarity with them. The shepherds, in turn, do not remain passive spectators but become agents in their own right, joining the angels in spreading the message of liberation to a world in need of liberation from the dominant schemes of power that keep weighing it down.

From the perspective of the working majority—the perennial 99 percent, then as now a diverse crowd of people of different sexual, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, various abilities, ages, and various walks of life—Christmas looks totally different. Without this wisdom we will not be able to reclaim Christmas for everyone because this is where the divine elected to place itself in the world.

Start with Christmas as the celebration of consumption. Blaming consumers overlooks who is driving and fueling consumerism, and how working people are exploited in order to maintain the existing networks of power. While blaming the victims hardly leads to liberation, viewing things from the perspective of those in need of liberation might. Even the mythical elves in Santa’s workshop—not part of the biblical Christmas stories but deeply woven into popular Christmas sentimentalities—might help us see things from a different perspective. Sharing much of the fate of essential workers, even elves can help remind us of a God who joins the working majority, thus putting another Christ back into another Christmas.

So, from what does Christmas get liberated in this scenario, and from what does Christmas liberate us? Liberation happens from the all-too-common mistake of identifying God with the powerful and the mighty, be they Roman emperors, captains of industry and finance, or reigning religious professionals. Liberation also happens from exploiting and discounting the contributions of essential workers and the working majority, and from the false hopes and the deceptive American Dream that only supports the few and never the many.

Most exciting for people of faith is that Christmas also liberates us from the narrow boundaries of what is supposed to be religion, freeing not only minds and spirits but also hearts and bodies, as well as freeing us from oppressive political structures and extractive economic schemes. Liberating Christmas means finding divinity and humanity transforming heaven and earth in solidarity, starting in places where the powers that be least expect it: a manger, a stable, the fields, the shop floor, the office, and our communities.

Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology, Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion, Affiliate Faculty, Turner Family Center for Social Ventures, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, and the Founder and Director of the Wendland-Cook Program.