What would it be to really rest? What does that even look like? In my heart of hearts, I don’t know. I have a vague memory of rest as a child. But then again, the rose-colored, sparkling recollections of our youth tend toward the unreliable. They are shadows without edges. They fade back and forth between truth and what we wish were truth. For some of us, childhood was a wondrous time filled with ease, freedom, unstructured afternoons, imagination without limits, softly oversized beds with cool sheets, and unmolested dreams. Some of us have those memories. Not all of us.
“We turn to God for help when our foundations are shaking, only to learn that it is God who is shaking them.” – Charles West, Princeton Theological Seminary
Gates open and the procession begins. Thousands line the street, throwing flowers and laurels, waving madly, reaching to touch power as it passes them. Security guards watch the crowd for dissidents, agitators, and zealots, intent on doing harm. The man coming through the gate sits tall in the saddle, looking every bit the champion he is meant to be. A mantle of authority rests easily on his shoulders as he climbs higher to the center of the city, taking his rightful place as lord protector of this people. While this sounds like a political rally from our prolonged and protracted presidential season, the parade I describe took place two thousand years ago in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.No – not that parade – not Jesus’ triumphal entry. The other one – the triumphal entry of Pontius Pilate into Jerusalem.
Let me say right now that I do not subscribe to the current “War on Christmas.” It is a fabrication created by a partisan media desperate for an audience. I believe there was a war on Christmas, once, long ago – a calculated attack by the retail industry, supported by the marketing sector and sponsored by manufacturing moguls, in order to appropriate a holiday celebrated by most Americans and turn it into a festival of voracious spending. These factions created a sacrament of gift-giving, concocted our modern Santa Claus from the very saintly Nicholas of Myra, and replaced the Light of the World with blow-up nativity scenes that pay lip-service to Jesus being the “reason for the season.”
Once, long ago in college, I went through the necessary ritual of dating. On Valentine’s Day my junior year, I received a gift from a young man I had been seeing for several months. He sent me a singing telegram of the song “You Light Up My Life.” I think he meant it to be “our song,” because a month earlier at Christmas, he gave me a spinning musical unicorn plinking out the very same “You Light Up My Life” on a metal cylinder. He was clearly very excited about the Christmas gift, he thought it expressed our relationship perfectly: a brass, horned equine, revolving on itself to strands of Debbie Boone. I accepted my Christmas gift with a bewildered smile, not knowing what to say. The poor boy never realized I absolutely hate the song “You Light Up My Life.”
Mark Twain said “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”