The eCrozier

“For you kids watching at home, Santa just is white…You know, I mean, Jesus was a white man, too.” – A Cable News Anchor

What’s really sad about the above quote is that people who heard this news anchor say these words on a “news” station might actually be led to believe that she, as a news reporter, was reporting the truth. I’m intentionally withholding her name and network because I have no desire to pile on, adding to the national hullabaloo her clearly ignorant statement has created. That just keeps us all deeply entrenched in our own tribes and then, depending on the issue and the instance, we get mobilized into attack or defense mode for our tribe (if you’ve followed this story then you’ve seen that’s exactly what’s happened).

What I find much more interesting, important, and therefore more to the point of our sinful humanity, is the pattern into which we all, bar none, are inclined: Creating God in our own image. If we’re honest with ourselves, we all want a god who looks and acts like us. We want a god who shares our prejudices, proclivities, and politics. We want a god who agrees with us so we can rest easy knowing we’re OK, while those who don’t look and act like us are bound for eternal judgment. One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons shows an Episcopal priest at the breakfast table with his wife saying to her: “Darling, last night I had the most wonderful dream. I dreamt that God agreed with me on everything.” I’m sure God finds this more than a little bit amusing.

But the irony in the news anchor’s ignorance was that she was on to the truth: That was exactly what God did in the incarnation of Jesus at Christmas…but with a twist. God became as we are. God became fully human and not just an idealized form of humanity. Jesus became human into the same wonderful, diseased, joyous, alienated, beautiful, and sinful humanity as the rest of us. And here’s the twist: he became human, not so he could be like us, but rather so we might be like him. He came to take us, in the complexity and messiness of our humanity, into the divine life of God.

Vassar Miller in her poem: The Wisdom of Insecurity, wrote this: God will not play our games nor join our fun, Does not give tit for tat, parade His glories. Christmas celebrates the most profound of acts: God fully sharing our humanity in Jesus. But in our celebration, let’s be clear: In becoming human God doesn’t share our prejudices, proclivities, and politics. God doesn’t play our petty tribal games, nor does God engage in silly, retributive one-up-man-ship. God comes to us at Christmas, not to play games, but to reveal his nature and to redeem the world in and through Jesus.

Jesus is black, brown, red, yellow, and yes, white, and every other possible hue of human skin because he’s God incarnate, the Creator and Redeemer of humankind. In a way that I’m sure she didn’t intend it, the news anchor in question, in a clueless, backdoor way, got it kind of, somewhat right. Santa, however, is pretty much all pink with a blue nose and toes. You know how cold it is at the North Pole, don’t you?

+Scott