Part I of the Advent series “A Family Christmas”
Genesis 1:26-28; Matthew 3:13-17
The first Sunday in Advent is always a time of anticipation. The decorations are up, Christmas music creeps into our consciousness, cookies are being baked, gifts are being purchased and wrapped. It’s a time for traditions, a time when we harken back to Christmases past, memories of family and friends. Indeed, when most Americans are asked to name what Christmas is really about, they will say it’s about gathering with family.
The family Christmas is a deeply ingrained image in American culture. From those old Currier and Ives images from the 19th century that still adorn Christmas cards, to the memories of idyllic Christmases in the 1950s and 60s that stay at the forefront of Baby Boomers (the same people, like me, who will watch Ralphie try to get his Red Ryder BB gun in A Christmas Story over and over again on Christmas Day), we all have in mind what the “perfect” Christmas looks like. And every year we do our best to keep that tradition going.
The shadow side of the perfect Christmas, however, is the fact that many people do not experience it. According to the National Institutes of Health, 45% of people dread Christmas. It’s the time of year when health professionals see the highest incidence of depression and attempted suicide. Many people endure this season with a high level anxiety, mostly because the “perfect” Christmas isn’t working for them. Most pastors will tell you it’s the time of year when more people get really upset about little things—like the story I’ve told you before about the guy in my first church who threatened to leave because we didn’t sing The First Noel as the second hymn on Christmas Eve. The perfect Christmas is easily ruined. In fact, most of the Christmas specials we grew up with on TV remind us of that fact. Whether it’s The Grinch That Stole Christmas, or Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, or A Charlie Brown Christmas, we’ve learned that Christmas is always a hair’s breadth away from disaster. Couple that with the fact that our families aren’t exactly perfect and our perfect Christmases are always set up for disappointment.
But there’s a different way to think about Christmas and a different way to frame it as a family story—a way to think about it and celebrate that is actually life-giving no matter what circumstance we find ourselves in. Rather than focusing on the Christmas card image of the perfect family Christmas, we can instead embrace a different sort of family story—one that actually speaks to the real meaning of Christmas. It’s the family story found in the whole Bible. In fact, I would argue that the whole Bible is the story of a family of which all our families are a part. When we understand our family stories in the midst of this family story, then we can begin to see Christmas not as another standard of perfection, but as a story in which imperfection and brokenness are redeemed.
The whole Bible is a family story of which our family stories are a part.
During this series, I want to invite you to hear this story afresh as we tell it out through the Scriptures. God works his will and way through families, and none of those families is perfect except one—the very first family. And that’s where our story begins.
In Genesis 1:26, God says “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” This usually raises a question: who’s the “us” God is talking about? Most Old Testament scholars will point out that this was an expression God uses to describe the heavenly court. The ancient Hebrews believed there was one God (as we do today) but that God also had other beings (angels, seraphim and cherubim and the like) surrounding him. God is thus expressing a desire to make humans like this heavenly court, but with an earthly vocation.
New Testament writers and subsequent generations of Christians, however, will tend to read Genesis through the lens of Jesus and the concept of the Trinity. There are lots of clues to this interpretation, especially in John 1 where the Gospel writer says that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Father, Son, and Spirit were present at the beginning of creation. The Trinity—one God in three persons–was doing the creating, and the crowing achievement of that creation was humanity made in God’s image.
Now, it’s interesting that most of us Protestants tend to frame our understanding of the Trinity by using objects—a triangle for example, or a shamrock. Some will want to describe the Trinity using properties in nature, like H2O, which can be a liquid, solid, or gas but still retain the same molecular structure.
But these images tend to miss the point. In Scripture, and in the reflections of some of the early church fathers, the way to describe the Trinity is not by using objects but by describing relationship. At a basic level, the Trinity is really a family—the first family—a relationship of love, of connection, of indwelling and mutuality—three distinct persons in such deep relationship with one another that they are one. We see this image throughout the Bible and especially in the New Testament. At Jesus’ baptism, which we read about earlier, notice the language. The Son presents himself at the water, the Father speaks—“This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased,” and the Spirit descends like a dove. It’s a family moment—the original, perfect, family of God.
Andre Rublev, who was a 14th/15th century Russian iconographer, presented the Trinity as a family in this icon, which reflects the story of the three visitors who visited Abraham at the oaks of Mamre later in the book of Genesis. It’s an expression of relationship—a family with an open table that invites us to be a part of it. The Trinity is a family relationship, and it’s only natural, then, that the Trinity sought to create and invite others into relationship with the family—a family creating a family!
That’s what’s happening here in Genesis 1. The Trinity creates humankind “in our image” and creates them “male and female.” We are so often trained through our Western individualism to see the image of God as resting in us as individuals, but in reality the image of God rests in community. Its deepest expression is found in the human family—a family that reflects the relationship of God’s own Trinitarian nature (and that’s why we have mirrors on the chancel this morning—to remind us that we are angled mirrors reflecting God’s love and reign to the world). Like the Trinity, this family has a mission—to “be fruitful and multiply” and make more family relationships, to maintain stewardship over God’s creation and reflect the Trinity’s righteous, gracious, loving rule. Father, Son, and Spirit reached out to create fathers, mothers, and children who would reflect the Trinity’s love, grace, and care, multiplying it over and over in God’s good world. It’s the image of the perfect family—it’s the way we were created. We were created as families with a mission.
So, what happened? Well, it only takes 2 chapters of Genesis before things go bad. Now, we know that the basic problem, the interloper that shatters the human family, is sin. Eve eats the fruit from the one tree in the Garden that God had forbidden, gives some to her husband “who was with her” (a fact often ignored in the interpretation) and we’ve been dealing with sin ever since—sin that turns us inward so that we desire to make ourselves gods in our own image. That’s basic Christian theology about original sin.
But while that interpretation is absolutely true, there’s another dimension to what happens in the Garden that speaks to the broken nature of families. Scott Hahn, a Catholic Old Testament scholar, points out that in Genesis 2:17, God tells Adam not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “for in the day that you eat it, you shall surely die.” Now, there’s an interesting twist in the Hebrew that’s not evident in the English translation. What the text says, literally, is that “in the day you eat of it, you will die die.” It’s a double verb, a way of expressing an emphasis. It’s like when someone asks if you’re hungry and you say, “Well, I’m really not hungry hungry”—there are different stages of hunger. In Hebrew, repeating words like that is like our way of saying something ultimate, using the suffix –est. Like, “the greatest death.” God’s instruction to Adam seems to suggest that there are two kinds of death—we might call them “small d death” and “Capital D Death.” The first is bodily death—which was clearly part of God’s creation to the point that Adam knew exactly what God was talking about—but then there is Capital D Death: a spiritual death, an eternal sort of death, a separation from God. All Adam had to do was obey this one command and he would live free of death forever.
Turn to Genesis 3, then and watch what happens. The snake comes on the scene—the implication being that the snake has the potential to inflict small d death. Whenever we see a snake, our first concern is whether it’s poisonous, and in the ancient world all of them were considered that way. In fact, the word for “snake” here is actually translated as “dragon” or “sea monster” elsewhere in the Old Testament. Whatever its form, it was a dangerous beast. The dangerous serpent addresses them both—not just Eve, as generations of misogynists have assumed. The pronoun is a plural “you”—like “y’all” or as we say back home, “both yins guys.” Remember, v. 6, Adam was there with her. And yet, only Eve responds to the snake. What was Adam doing there, keeping his mouth shut? After all, he was the one to whom God had explained about the tree and about death (Eve wasn’t on the scene yet). Adam allows Eve to take up the serpent’s challenge. Why?
Well, remember that God saw that Adam’s aloneness was not good. Like in Genesis 1, God desired his image, the image of the Trinity, to be borne in community, in a family. And the goal of the family, like the nature of the Trinity, was for mutual love and care. One of Adam’s charges was to “till and keep” the Garden—“keep” is another way of saying “guard.” Adam was to guard the garden from outside forces, which God knew would abound—forces of sin and evil that had the potential to cause both small d and capital d death. Now that force was here in the form of the serpent. Would Adam step up?
Well, we know the answer, but here’s the reason why. The serpent says to them both, “you will not die” if you eat the fruit (note, only one “die”—exactly half of what God said). He shifts the conversation from one type of death to another. The couple would not die (small d death) if they ate the fruit, but—and the serpent’s voice trails off to allow Adam and Eve to fill in the blank. The implication? They would die (small d death) if they refused to eat it. The serpent would make sure of it.
And so, Adam—who was supposed to guard the Garden and his family—keeps his mouth shut because he fears small d death more than he trusts God. Note that he never cries out to God for help, even though God is nearby, walking around the Garden. Adam feared his physical death more than he feared offending God through sin and being subject to capital D death. His fear keeps him from protecting his wife, his family. He does not sacrifice himself for his family or for his Creator. As Scott Hahn puts it:
“Knowing the serpent’s power, Adam was unwilling to lay down his own life—for the sake of his love for God, or to save the life of his beloved. That refusal to sacrifice was Adam’s original sin. He committed it even before he had tasted the fruit, even before Eve had tasted the fruit.”
The New Testament seems to support this view. It’s the sin of Adam, not the sin of Eve, that gets the most ink. When God confronts Adam with his failure, instead of sacrificing himself and taking the blame, he blames his wife, who in turn blames the snake.
Genesis 3 describes what happened as a result. The mutuality, indwelling, and sacrificial love of the Trinity was replaced in the human family by hierarchy, jealousy, pain, and toil. The human family that had been created to reflect the family of God was broken—a brokenness that began to extend itself to the next generation. In chapter 4 we read about Cain and Abel. What was the dispute over? Sacrifices. Abel was willing to sacrifice to God, Cain tried to take a shortcut. Cain kills Abel in a jealous rage. The refusal to deny himself and sacrifice his pride led him to destroy the family. We’ve been doing the same, from one degree to another, ever since. Rather than being driven by faith, we’re driven by fear.
In fact, you could argue that most of the dysfunction in our families is caused by fear and the refusal of members to sacrifice themselves for the others—not just in their family of origin, but in the whole human family as well. Extramarital affairs are caused by fear of real intimacy and vulnerability and the unwillingness to sacrifice one’s own desires for the good of the family. Divorce rends the family when one or both partners are unwilling to sacrifice for the other. We smother our children because we fear death and we’re afraid of letting them go. Pettiness and backbiting become the norm when people are focused only on themselves and refuse to give up old grudges. Children rebel against their parents because they refuse to sacrifice their own desires and see themselves as part of a family. Fear of small d death keeps us pursuing things instead of trusting God. The result is the fact that our families reflect the brokenness of the first human family. Perfection is a pipe dream. It’s no wonder we’re depressed at this “family” time of year!
But here’s the good news. There is still one perfect family. Despite what happened there in the Garden, the perfect family of the Trinity did not give up on the human family. The story of the rest of the Bible is the story of how God raises up another family through whom all the families of the earth will be blessed, restored, and renewed.
Out of that family will come the perfect son, the new Adam, who will make a different choice than the first Adam. He will speak up, point to the evil and name it. He will guard his family from the serpent by sacrificing himself to small d death on their behalf. In doing so, and in rising again and beating that death, he will defeat capital d death as well, crushing the head of the serpent and the evil and death he represents. He will then begin a new family that breaks the boundaries of blood and invites everyone to be a part—a family founded on faith, on sacrificial love—a family that reflects the image of the Trinity as it was meant to be from the beginning.
Oh yes, Christmas is about family, but it’s really about becoming part of God’s family—to become his children, and to join in family with the Trinity. As John puts it, “But to all who received him, who believed [who put their trust] in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born not of blood or of the will of the flesh or the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13).
We don’t need to pursue the perfect Christmas. We’ve already been given the gift of the perfect Savior. We’ve been invited to join God’s family.
During this Advent season, I invite you to join me as we explore the depth of what it means to be part of the family of God—a family on mission; a family where people become redeemed; a family where sacrifice is offered out of love; a family where faith abounds; a family that reflects the image of God.
This is the story that can redeem our families—the story we need to be reminded of again and again. It’s the story that can lift us out of depression and anxiety and into joy and faith no matter the circumstance. It’s the story of a Christmas that can never be ruined.
“Fear not,” said the angel to the shepherds on that first Christmas Eve, “for I bring you tidings of great joy that shall be for all the people.”
That’s good news for the family of Adam. Even better news for the family of God!
Source:
Hahn, Scott. First Comes Love: Finding Your Family in the Church and the Trinity. New York: Doubleday, 2002. p. 62-74.
Williams, Ray. “Why People Get Depressed at Christmas.” Psychology Today. November 28, 2010.
