Who Saves What?

Who Saves What?--December 25, 2017

I wonder—whose turn is it? 

Whose turn is it to save Christmas?

All my life I’ve been ingrained with this idea, from annual TV and movie specials, books and cartoons, all featuring someone whose job it is to heroically save Christmas.  There’s of course the classic 1988 slapstick comedy of “Ernest Saves Christmas,” the kids’ cartoon “Gekko Saves Christmas” that my PJ Masks-loving kids are sure to like, as well as a host of others, all filling up TV channels and streaming movie queues each December.  One favorite bedtime book at our house lately continues the trend in a variation with talking-farm-equipment, entitled “Tractor Mack Saves Christmas.”  And you can add to the list Garfield the Cat, Paw Patrol Pups, Elmo the Muppet, and Beethoven the giant St. Bernard dog, each of whom have had TV or movie specials in which they get to “save Christmas.”

Now, whether you have seen all of those movies, TV specials, and books, or not, you already know the basic plot just from the titles alone.  With a “So-and-So Saves Christmas,” you pretty much know what you’re getting, and if you’ve seen or read one, you’ve seen them all.  And chances are, you’ve lived some version of the plot, plus or minus a big shaggy dog or a talking tractor. The basics go like this: everybody is getting excited for the celebration of Christmas, and all the preparations are coming along swimmingly, when—dun, dun, dun!—disaster strikes, threatening to ruin the holiday festivities.  Sometimes it’s a magical conundrum, like Santa getting lost on a foggy night, or losing his sack of toys.  Sometimes a big snowfall is threatening to close down all the town festivities.  Sometimes it’s something as ordinary as a family argument when everyone is running a million different directions and wanting to make the Christmas celebration perfect, and Mom or Dad’s patience finally wears out until there are angry words and stomping feet.

Ah, but however it happens in all the Christmas TV specials, once the threat is unleashed, whether magical or mundane, the fear on everyone’s minds is that Christmas will be—<gasp!>—ruined! And the question on everyone’s lips is: who will save Christmas? 

Well, you know how these stories work.  Usually the one who “saves” Christmas is the character whose name is in the title of the TV special.  And usually, what the movies and TV shows mean by “saving Christmas” is that someone will swoop in at the last second and make sure that the celebration—the party, the presents, the festivities, and all the planned programming—still happens the way it’s supposed to.  No matter how many complicating details or plot twists get in the way: a side trip to the Island of Misfit Toys, or the Bumpuses’ dogs get into the kitchen and eat up all the Christmas turkey just before dinner, or Buddy the Elf needing to find the self-confidence and courage to fix Santa’s sleigh in Central Park—no matter what threatens the merriment, the hero has to “save Christmas” by making sure it all goes right in the end.  The toys have to get delivered.  The sleigh has to be fixed and get flying.  Kevin’s mom has to get back across the ocean from France to see her little boy on Christmas after he’s been left home alone. Ralphie’s family still has to eat something for Christmas dinner while he nurses his broken eyeglasses and clutches his BB gun. 

Basically—and pay close attention to this, in all of those “saving Christmas” type stories—the movies all say that no matter how many things look to be coming unglued in the second act, it only counts as “saving Christmas” if we get all the loose ends tied up, and basically as long as everything goes back to normal, with presents being delivered in the nick of time, the Grinch (spoiler alert) giving back all the stolen decorations, and Kevin’s mom making inside the doorway in time for a happy ending and the closing credits.  Any of those TV specials and Christmas-time movies basically boils down to the question, “Who will save Christmas?” And by “Save Christmas,” they mean, “Fix everything that didn’t seem to be going smoothly at the second commercial break.”

So, depending on which movie you are watching, sometimes it’s Ernest P. Worrell who saves Christmas, or Buddy the Elf, or Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, or any of a host of other animated talking animals….

And the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the reason our culture grinds out this same essential plot-line into the casing of new characters like so much sausage, is that somehow we have gotten this fear that Christmas is in danger. 

That’s just it, isn’t it? Whether the fear created the movies, or the movies created the fear, or whether they both reinforce each other like a vicious circle, somehow I think we have fallen for the idea that Christmas—the day, I guess—is in danger, is in trouble, and needs saving. Somehow we have gotten the idea that Christmas is fragile like a glass ball on your tree, and that it must be protected and held very gingerly, or else it will break.  We have fallen for this idea that Christmas is in danger of disappearing or fading away, or, I don’t know—melting—and that it’s up to some brave and virtuous soul to come to the aid of Christmas and put it right. We have just taken our fears of “breaking” Christmas and projected them onto stop-motion reindeer and Saint Bernards.

Sometimes our fears are local and close to home—we are worried that Christmas will be ruined if the day’s proceedings aren’t exactly like they were last year, or if someone is missing that we remember from Christmases past.  Sometimes we are worried that our hospitality won’t measure up when the guests come for dinner, that the roast will get burned or the turkey will be eaten by the neighbor’s dogs.  Sometimes we are afraid that if enough people don’t say “Merry Christmas” instead of something more generic, we will lose some kind of battle, or surrender some kind of prominence we had gotten comfortable with, and we are afraid, I guess, that Christmas itself might vanish in a puff of candle smoke if enough people don’t say, “Merry Christmas” like they are bringing Tinker Bell back to life in Peter Pan by clapping and promising that they do believe in pixies after all.  Sometimes, maybe we are afraid that if we don’t get it right, that Christmas itself will be broken, and oh dear, then what will we do?  See, I think that underneath all the goofy, derivative TV movies there is a question we keep asking, because we assume it has to be asked:  Who will save Christmas this time? we wonder… because deep down, we have become convinced that Christmas is a thing that needs saving.

Which has got me thinking lately: Who saves Christmas the first time around? 

Seriously.  In the first Christmas.  In the story of Jesus’ birth—the one we just heard, the one that we know from memory so well you could practically recite it by heart.  Before it was Elmo or Paw Patrol or Garfield the Cat… who saved Christmas the first time, on that night in Bethlehem when Mary starts feeling contractions?

Who jumps in at the last minute to make sure that Mary won’t have to make that terrible trip, leaving behind her familiar home in Nazareth and her reserved room at Galilee Regional Medical Center’s maternity unit? 

Who silences the arrogant and self-absorbed Caesar Augustus when he is about to decree that everyone has to go back to their hometown in order to enforce compliance with his new census and tax initiative?

Who finally finds a nice quiet private guest room for Mary to have her baby in, when at first it looks like there will be no other available space but the place they keep the animals for the night?

Who swoops in at the last minute and brings a well-built, handcrafted crib for the new baby to be laid in, so that he doesn’t have to spend his first night on the planet plopped down on some moldy hay in a spare food trough?

Who defeats crooked and cruel King Herod from his terrible plan to wipe out any would-be kings?  Who makes sure that the baby Jesus is never in any kind of danger again?  Who stops the tyrant’s plan so that Jesus and his family don’t have to flee as refugees and live in a foreign country with their lives dependent on the welcome lasting in their new host country of Egypt?

And who comes up with some proper, dignified spokesmen to announce the birth to the world, instead of those scruffy-lookin’ night-shift sheep farmers?

Who makes all those scary, dangerous plot twists and snags go away on the night when Jesus was born?  That is to say, Who saves the first Christmas?

Ah… that’s right.  Nobody.

Nobody “saves” the first Christmas, at least not the way the movies and TV shows all teach us to expect it.

No Roman adviser reins in Caesar Augustus to tell him he has gone way out of line stroking his own imperial ego, or prevents the emperor’s tax registration plan from going through.

No ragtag band of rebels deposes King Herod to stop his horrible plans for the babies of Bethlehem.

No talking animals arrive on scene to build baby Jesus a nicer crib, nor does Buddy the Elf find a spare room for Mary to have a quiet, private delivery.

Nobody saves the first Christmas, in the sense of making sure it all comes off without a hitch.  And nobody pretends that is the point of the story, either. 

And that, dear Virginia, is quite simply because Christmas doesn’t need saving.  It never did.

Christmas doesn’t need saving. We do.

All the movies, books, cartoons and TV specials, along with all of our antsy fears that Christmas is too fragile to touch, or somehow under attack or in danger of breaking, all of those fears have it backwards.  Christmas doesn’t need saving, because Christmas is just a day to remember a story—and the story itself is about how we are in need of rescue, how humanity is in need of saving, and how God steps onto the stage of human history in a unique and unrepeatable way in the tiny hands of a baby boy born to peasant parents in the backwater of the Empire who will bear a cross one day.

The angels do not say to the shepherds, “Go into Bethlehem, because Christmas won’t happen unless you get there to fix it all!”  Notice that—the message from the angels is not that everything hangs on their showing up at the right time.  The angels don’t show up to tell them, “You have to get into town to save Christmas!”  No, just the opposite!  The message is, “God has given a Savior.  God is doing the saving.  You have been picked to be the first ones to see it, but fixin’ it ain’t up to you.  God does the saving, because it is humanity that needs rescue, not the date on the calendar when we remember that the rescue happened.”

And this is the news we most deeply need to hear on this day: even when all the other details and troubles of the story stay unresolved, God doesn’t give up on the birth.  God doesn’t say, “Oh dear, nobody arrived to make it all turn out neatly?  Well, Christmas is cancelled!”  God doesn’t say, “Somebody had better get their Christmas cheer going and make their spirits bright, or else I’m not coming!”  And there is not a hint at all that if the townspeople of Bethlehem don’t recognize the day and call it Christmas that the miracle will be withdrawn.  No—the incarnation of God in the human life of Jesus is not so fragile as all that.  Christmas—the actual birth of the actual savior—can’t be broken, or destroyed, or lost, or overruled or disappear—because the wonder of this night is that in a real moment in real history, which cannot be undone or erased, the Maker of the universe took on the fullness of what it means to be one of us, in order to put right all that is broken in this whole hurting world. 

And so our calling, not just on this day but every day, is to tell people what God has done, not to fret about how we are supposed to do this or that to “save Christmas.”  Christmas didn’t need saving.  We did.  Our job is to pass along the news.

Who saved the first Christmas? Nobody—because it was never about protecting or preserving the day, or the tradition, or even the turkey.  And even when all those things went wrong and remained unresolved on the night of Jesus’ birth, it didn’t break Christmas.  Nobody can undo what God has already done in Jesus.  Nobody needs to “save Christmas” because Christmas can’t be broken.  The Savior has already come, and the rescue is already accomplished.

The real question for this moment is simply, Now… who will you tell?