Faith & Values: Everything belongs

It was winter break after my first semester of seminary, and at the ripe age of 22, I suddenly felt like I knew everything. You might say I knew enough to be dangerous — or more accurately, annoying. Very appropriately for the Christmas season, I had just finished up a course on the Gospels, which included Matthew and Luke’s birth stories.

At home on my parent’s farm where I grew up, it was so nice seeing the Christmas decorations and candles in all of the windows. But when I came to the Nativity scene set up in the living room, and I said, “Mom, the wise men and the shepherds didn’t visit Jesus at the same time! Why are they all together in the Nativity set?” If she rolled her eyes, I didn’t notice because I was too busy moving the wise men across the room.

While it is true that the wise men probably came a couple of years after Jesus’ birth, the honest truth is that I was just being a snotty first year grad student. Thankfully, I learned to appreciate the beauty of nativities once again. I love the way in which they feel balanced even though they aren’t symmetrical.

Everything is in the right place. Everything belongs. Even the wise men and shepherds. Last week my family watched the holiday classic “Elf.” In the movie, Buddy is a human adopted by Santa’s elves at the North Pole. As he grows up, he struggles to fit in because he is three times larger than the elves.

And so when he’s about 30 years old, he goes on this quest to New York to find his real family. But when he does, he struggles to fit in there, too, because he’s only ever known the world of the North Pole. In one of the movie’s pivotal scenes, Buddy runs away from his family through the dark and snowy streets of the city, saying to himself, “I don’t belong here.

I don’t belong anywhere!” It’s a sad sentiment during these days of Christmastide. But my hunch is that many of us can relate. The desire to experience true belonging is something that is universal to the human experience, and something that most of us struggle with at some point in our lives.

This past week I stumbled upon a Christmas cartoon from one of my favorite social media accounts, “Naked Pastor.” (I promise it’s not what it sounds like!) He is a pastor turned artist whose cartoons challenge problematic norms within traditional Christianity in order to enlarge the circle of belonging.

His cartoon depicts the familiar Nativity scene, but labeled in a way that makes it come to life in an entirely new way. At the center is the baby Jesus, a Palestinian Jewish infant lying in a food trough for animals — a manger. Along with animals, tired and dirty shepherds gaze upon the Christ child; they are labeled “unclean” for literal and religious reasons.

The wise men are there, too, bearing their gifts, but they are labeled as “foreigners;” they weren’t Jewish, hailed from the Far East, spoke different languages, and practiced astrology. Mary and Joseph are labeled as “nobodies”— new parents who have no significant status or wealth or power in this world, and who would soon become refugees, fleeing from their homeland to save their child’s life.

What struck me is that, to a person, the people in the Nativity are the sorts of people who don’t belong. If you were going to script out the arrival of the Christ child in the world, you might’ve planned something a little bit more grand and included powerful and important people instead. Furthermore, straw and animal droppings litter the floor of the stable.

As jarring as it is, I found myself thinking, “of course there was poop!” I’d just never considered it. Life — even the beauty of Christmas — is so much more messy and complex and beautiful than we give it credit for. But the divine heart can hold all of these things together so that everything belongs.

All of it. In the Christ child, God bridges the divide between human and divine, sacred and profane. And this is one of the gifts of the Christmas story. The incarnation of God in human flesh represents a fundamental embrace of all things, creatures and humans and matter alike. Through the birth of Christ, God meets us in the messiness of our lives, and especially in the places where it feels like we don’t belong.

The beauty of the incarnation is not a magical beam of light shooting down from heaven. It’s divine hope wrapped in blood and afterbirth, and surrounded by straw and animal droppings and a bunch of nobodies. In the birth of the Christ child, God insists that everything belongs. Your hope and peace and joy and love belong.

Your grief and doubts belong. As do your hopes and dreams and disappointments and failures. The message of Christmas has radical implications for how we understand and love and accept ourselves — even the hard to love parts. It insists that you are beloved and you belong. Christmas also has radical implications for how we understand our neighbors and the world.

Because if you belong, then that means that your Palestinian neighbor also belongs. And your Jewish neighbor belongs. And your neighbor who won’t vote the same as you next November? They belong, too. As does the nonbinary child who doesn’t know which bathroom to choose at school. And the retired person who’s struggling to find a sense of purpose.

And you do, too, even when you struggle to feel a sense of belonging in your life. My hope is that you all will feel a deep and profound sense of belonging this season. And in turn, may we be people who extend that sense of belonging to the entire world. Merry Christmas, beloved ones..