Okay, so for those of us who follow the liturgical calendar, Christmastime technically isn’t here yet – we’re in the season of Advent. I’ll probably write more on that later on… maybe on Sunday or Monday, after Advent has officially started.

But to the retailers, this is the beginning of the Christmas season: Black Friday – a rather appropriate name, if unintentionally so. As I drove back from a lovely Thanksgiving meal with friends last night at midnight or so, we saw people already lined up outside the Target and Best Buy in my neighborhood, just waiting for the stores to open at 5am so they could get the deeply-discounted flat-screen TVs and all those other wonderful “door-buster” deals the retailers were offering.

And I couldn’t help but have a thought that’s recurred in my head for the past five years or so around this time of year: How far we’ve come from the Son of God being born in a humble manger, one of an oppressed people in an occupied and war-torn country.

How far we’ve come from Mary’s words in the Magnificat, with the Christ child growing in her womb:

[God] has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.

He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.

Look outside at Black Friday – at people trampling one another to save a hundred bucks on a plasma TV, at angry faces behind steering wheels in mall parking lots as they try to find space, at the insane amounts of money working its way from regular folks’ Visa cards up to fat-cat CEOs while they lay off American workers and hire more children in the 2/3-World to work for a buck a day in unsafe factories. Look outside at the orgy of consumption, while it’s almost certain that within a mile of these big-box retailers is a homeless family trying to keep warm another night in their car.

Is this how we celebrate a Savior born into the least majestic of conditions? Is this how we celebrate the humble being lifted up? Is this how we celebrate the hungry being filled with good things, the rich being sent away empty?

Perhaps more to the point: Shouldn’t Christian believers – those who take the story of the Advent and Christ’s birth to heart – be offering another way? When the world is crying out for justice and compassion, isn’t God calling us to sacrifice of ourselves to make this happen?

I’ll be continuing this series probably tomorrow, with some reflections on how we might be more just and compassionate during this holiday season.

(Oh, for those who were wondering where the title came from, it’s from perhaps the greatest Christmas movie ever made.)

This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 10:13 am and is filed under Economic Justice, Human Rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.