Advent 4 // A Christmas of Love, Hate, and We
This is my final post of 2020. We have arrived. I look forward to more in the coming year, and I offer here a blessing to you and your family as we enter the beauty of the holiday season. Be well and God’s richest blessings to you!
Love is inherently unselfish. True love, that is.
There are kinds of love that are bent towards their own ends, and typically those kinds of love don’t survive the fire. They can’t exhale, they only inhale.
The final week of Advent brings us the theme of love because the last and greatest of the strands in the Nativity story is love. Selflessness.
Whatever we might think about the socio-cultural aspects of the story, love is the star. Yes, a young woman with a beautifully miraculous story is spared the expected cultural backlash and embraced by her husband-to-be.
The power structures represented by Herod are undermined by the stealth of near-Zoroastrian scholars from the ends of the Earth. The pipeline of information and Divinity is rerouted through the sod and manure of the sheep fields under the cover of darkness.
All of this is grace. All of it is holy. But at the end of the emerging and informing and disarming and reuniting, there is love.
The thing that I’m learning as my wife, daughter, and I all work and study from home is that love cannot keep score.
“No record of wrongs,” as Paul says, mainly because we’d get nothing else done.
Not to mention the lopsided blowouts that inevitably come when those we love come alongside us when we are weakest.
At the historical moment when life hung by a thread, the fullness of time, Jesus entered into the world. A divine act of love.
When our spouse is sick and we take up the slack, that is love. That is divine.
When our child really requires not our correct answers, but our presence. That is divine. That is love.
I’m beginning to believe that hate is not love’s enemy or opposite. That gives hate far too much credit, and honestly it distracts us from many of the ways we abuse love.
What we often call love is simply self-interest made manifest emotionally.
But in Jesus’ coming, we see his arrival in a world that immediately found him problematic. The child of an unwed mother, the fulfillment of a prophecy that messed up everyone’s comfort – these are not the acts of a self-interested love.
Hate is too low of a response to be considered in connection with love. It is the ruin of our eyesight – the inability of those created in the image of God to see the sameness in each other. Hate is when we forget our own face and begin to disintegrate our humanity, and therefore our connection to the Divine.
But love, love has a different enemy.
The true nemesis of love is selfishness.
Not the right and healthy selfishness that Edwin Friedman details in A Failure of Nerve, either. We’re not talking about the boundary-building, self-knowing kind of selfishness. That kind of selfishness is flinty, necessary, and even Divine in the sense of how we are designed both as individuals and also to live in community.
The selfishness that puts love under duress is the kind that can see no other end other than its own advancement.
It is the way of exerting our own rights even when the common good is threatened.
The way of saying to our spouse, “That’s your problem and not mine.” Interesting how when the flow of that argument goes the other way, suddenly the me/you turns into “we.”
It is the way of creating a spirituality that naturally excludes others. Not only excludes but does so in a way that reduces those who are “not with us” to less than human status.
These things are masked as love – even under the disguise of “speaking the truth in love” – but when pressed they reveal their deeper needs quite easily.
At the end it is merely love for me and my, and never ours.
When Jesus entered the world as a child, carrying love like a beacon and a scale, He entered a zero-sum game of “us versus them.”
He was born to them, in a city and culture of us, surrounded by them from far away.
The next 30-ish years would be spent dismantling a love that sees only its own end. He called everyone back to the only thing that mattered, casting off generations of legal wrangling and commandments to say, “Remember to give yourself to God with everything you’ve got, give yourself to yourself and in that same way to others. That’s it.”
And I do believe he meant it because to dig in with both hands, to rip through turf to the rich black soil beneath the “Great Commandment” is to shed selfishness in a way that mortifies it.
Chokes it. Strangles it. Slams it down when it dares to mount another attack.
Love can’t be bothered fighting with hate because hate is subhuman (i.e. beneath the image and likeness of God).
Instead, love wages war against selfishness because that is where the world is spun off into the abyss.
Love stood over the chaos and gave itself without condition (Genesis 1:1).
Love ached for those enslaved, marginalized, and broken by generational dysfunction and corruption (Exodus).
Love came quietly among the poor, the animals, and the accursed and announced itself as the only thing that mattered in a world gone mad via the pursuit of its own ends. (Christmas)
And here we are.
The final week of Advent is about the arrival of that which cannot be measured in our own advancement. Though we will move and be moved, we will find our being in such a love (Acts 17), ultimately there is a single horizon in Jesus’ newly opened eyes.
To take the “us versus them” down to the bare bones. To the studs. To the foundation.
To shred the selfish ends of what we sometimes call love when we haven’t been given a proper peek at the alternative.
And then, with the flare of a showman and the heart of a pastor, He sweeps open the panoply of creation to reveal one word. A word that says love so clearly that we often overlook it.
We.
The “we” of four lit candles, holiday dinners over Zoom, the “we” living in darkness who damn sure need a great light.
“We” who walk in the shadow of death accompanied by the Divine but also by each other.
The “we” who need to wear masks not because of some vast conspiracy, but because to love those among us who are vulnerable is to surrender our rights for a moment and think beyond our own ends.
We.
Love is not the opposite of hate. Instead, love is opposed to anything that would reduce our world to an extended skirmish between our ends and those who would thwart them.
For a reminder, see the scandalous birth we celebrate at the Winter Solstice. See the darkness begin its retreat in the light of one who had no other end in mine but one. One simple end:
We. We. We.
(Photo by Alexandra Fuller on Unsplash)