Imperial Christmas

Many years ago, the late Kerwyn Morris startled me when he described Christmas as the “commercial climax of the capitalist year” — hardly a Christian festival. He had lived overseas and knew how, during that season, business houses put people in a hysterical frenzy of desire for easy to get goods and goodies. Today, in St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), even the sturdiest Christian soldier will see that the stores, the shows and the churches come 1st, 2nd, 3rd in the competition for people’s attention {{more}}respectively. The top two agencies of commerce and festivity are more evangelical and insurgent than the Christian movement during this Christian season! Is that the way it should be? Is Jesus Christ okay with this treatment of his nativity, this surrender to mammon worship?

In the United States of America (USA), there was a murmur and grumble because the big stores, like WALMART and MACYS, ambushed the national Thanksgiving holiday and opened the doors of their shops long before dawn in search of that extra early bird dollar. “Greedy giants, disrespectful of our national day,” some complained. But you see the companies who manufacture and sell these goods that the billions of people want, know that they have created the end of year as a season of madness and hysteria among consumers. In this one month, they will unload special deals on us and turn over 10 times as much as they would on average in any of the other months of the year. As they reach the climax of their sales, they don’t want to miss any transaction opportunity, because for some of them, this is the time for them to make sure that their accounts for the year shift from a scary red to a beautiful black. This is their ultra-profit making season, Christmas.

The thousands of barrels that we are receiving, the 700 or so road/landscape workers in whose hands two million dollars will pass in and out, the Nine Mornings creativity and jollification, the food and drink, toys and clothes, the house brightening are all concentrated in this season. All this enlivens our spirit, eases the stress of the community, comforts the external-imperial economy and makes our merchants operations’ viable. Multiply one SVG share of the season’s business by 40,000 and get a modest idea of the size of the Christmas economy turnover in the Christmas world. It is billion in dollars and in people.

Back to Nativity

The militant Christmas economy and the undercurrent of charity that accompanies it does not interfere with the sustained poverty and injustice in our societies. Those of us Christians who operate and work in and even give leadership in the economy of the season must pause in the hustle. More than that, we need to revisit the nativity and the life of the one whose name we bear. What is the response from us, in accordance with the faith and witness and message that is in us for our world? What can be the way, not just as persons, that we need such text as Matthew 6:25-34, as an organise movement of faith with a message of hope? Of course, the way I see it is not that we are to rescue Jesus Christ from the grip of mammon, rather to seek the rescue He will engage us in.

I opened with the notion that startled me years ago. Today another situation disturbs me. It is the Christian Church’s retreat from a message of active solution of the world to one of passive expectation of the deliverer to come. Let me put it this way. The Gospel accounts in Matthew and Luke tell stories of the birth of Jesus as an interruption in the society and history of (His) people which unsettled their routine with the story that called them to hope/fear in an active way. Whether it was shepherds, Magi (wise men), two men and wife, a temple recluse, a Roman governor, or an expatriate/diaspora group in Egypt, the story moved them out of their comfort zones to be part of or against a mission of hope and engagement. The nativity implied and demanded their activity. Today, the church moves this season away from a Nativity focus to an Advent focus, implicitly and explicitly calling Christians less to engage and intervene in the salvation of the world and moves to anticipate and prepare for the Rescue Mission from outside the world, outside history – a passive salvation. No wonder mammon has evangelised the nativity of Jesus Christ away from the reign of God.

We need a new salvation, faith and commitment, as Christmas shows us.