This week’s blog in our 2024 Advent series comes from Mir Knego, leader of the Anchorage, Alaska, Service Adventure unit. Service Adventure is Mennonite Mission Network’s service program designed for young adults ages 17-20. Through a 10-month service term (August-July), participants live together in a unit house along with unit leaders, serve with local nonprofit agencies, and connect with a supporting church congregation. Click here to learn more, and encourage a young person in your life to apply!
One of the joys (and occasional frustrations) of life in Service Adventure is discovering all the little choices and assumptions each person or family makes and takes for granted as normal. We each have our quirks, and living in community means having one’s own peculiarities contrasted against others. One person’s normal is another’s excessive, and this has recently become apparent in the context of Christmas music. The Anchorage unit agreed that November is the appropriate time to dust off the Christmas playlists, though whether it’s appropriate to do so on November 1 or wait until after Thanksgiving dinner was a matter of hearty but respectful disagreement.
One song on my Christmas playlist — though not in our hymnal — is God rest you merry, gentlemen.
I think it’s important to remember that the title is “God rest you merry [comma] gentlemen” (meaning “may God grant you peace and happiness”) not “God rest you [comma] merry gentlemen.” It may seem like I’m being pedantic pointing that out, and I suppose I am, but I do think there is an important difference between a call to bless or bring comfort to those who are already happy versus a call to bring peace and joy to all people.
I think this is particularly important in a holiday season that, in our increasingly secularized world, has come to represent for many people all kinds of expectations around possessions and celebration and the performance of joy.
I hope that many of you do feel excited about the holiday, whether it is excitement purely about the reminder that God became flesh and lived among us, or maybe anticipation at breaking out a favorite Christmas recipe. Maybe you’re looking forward to traveling, or time with family, or just a bit of a break from everyday life and work.
There is a lot to feel excited about this time of year, but I also want to remember folks in our community who may be struggling to share in that excitement this year.
There are many things that can make Advent and Christmas difficult, whether it is financial stress, family dysfunction, grief or mental health. If you are struggling this Christmas, or have ever struggled around Christmas, you probably know these reasons much better than I could ever explain them. I’m sure many of us have had Christmases where we felt for one reason or another like the Christmas story was not really ours, like we were not happy or healthy or wealthy enough to enjoy Christmas with everyone else.
In reality, Christmas is for those who need comforting at least as much as it is for those who are already comfortable. Christmas is the light that the darkness could not overcome, the world that was turned upside down in song, the promise of hope and the encouragement to be ready for God to appear anywhere and everywhere.
After all, even the first Christmas was not fully happy. In the wake of Jesus’s birth Herod committed terrible acts of violence, killing all the male babies in the region (Matt 2:16). In this way, we can see the Advent and Lenten seasons as inversions of each other. In Advent, we spend our weeks anticipating life and we get it in the form of Christmas. In Lent, we spend our weeks anticipating death and Good Friday brings just that. But where Easter turns that death into life, Herod’s violence tempers life with death. Try as we might, we cannot neatly separate these two things, these cycles, these inversions and these reminders that light and dark, life and death, are inextricably linked in deep and difficult and mysterious ways.
And within all the contradictions and confusion of our world, we receive Jesus Christ, Immanuel, God with us. Advent and Christmas give us time to consider that, but they are not the only times to remember and celebrate our Savior’s birth. God has made every day holy, and every day we have opportunities to respond to God’s love and holiness.
God rest you merry, friends.
