Celebrating Christmas as Americans

As we approach the joy of Christmas this year, the Cole family rejoices in a very particular way: we have been honored and blessed with the gift of citizenship in this remarkable country. God is good, and full of surprises. I would never have imagined, when Lorraine and I were married thirty-six years ago, that we and young Tim would be settled here and celebrating Christmas as Americans.

Our excellent Senior Warden, Scott Campbell, marked this new beginning by giving me a short book by Walter Isaacson entitled The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. I suspect you can guess which sentence he has in mind. It begins, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”, that is, true by definition in the same way that the statement “all unmarried men are bachelors” is true.

That sentence refers to our Creator twice: that He created us equal, and that He endowed us with certain unalienable rights, including Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. These words are well worn, perhaps so well worn that we barely hear them. And yet, to my ears as a very new American, they carry a fresh resonance.

This may be because they are shaped by the Common Sense School of philosophy found among Scottish Enlightenment writers such as David Hume, born of the same soil from which my own roots spring. More deeply still, they reflect a shared conviction, held by both Deists and more orthodox Christians, that these things are gifts from God. They are not earned, but bestowed. That distinction matters. It guards us from arrogance and entitlement, even as it allows us to defend these rights as truly ours, because they were given by the Author of all things.

It also strikes me that, unlike Life and Liberty, Happiness itself is not a right. What is given is the right to pursue it. In this, there is a generous blessing upon all our innocent and noble strivings after joy, strivings that more puritan philosophies have sometimes frowned upon. The actor Denzel Washington once described true desire, desire for anything good, as a gift from God placed within us as an invitation to walk into the relationship that is already ours for the taking.

As we celebrate this Christmas, the Word made flesh, the eternal light and hope that Christ brings into the world and into our lives, we are once again confronted with that unavoidable contrast between darkness and light.

The darkness remains all around us. The shootings at Brown University, and across the world at Bondi Beach in Australia; the foiled terrorist plot in Los Angeles; the continuing and terrible suffering caused by the war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East, the litany of darkness is long. And in our own lives, too, moments of joy and light must inevitably stand alongside struggle, sadness, and sin, which each of us faces at different times and in different ways.

Yet surrounded by darkness as we are, it is the darkness itself that makes the light stand out more clearly, like a candle in a room that goes unnoticed until all the other lights are switched off, and suddenly fills all our vision with its radiance. This Christmas, though many of our founders would have stopped short of saying so, it is this light that is truly self-evident in our hearts and homes, and in the life of the Church: “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” He does not stand afar off, but comes to dwell among us.

May the Christ who comes among us in humility and light draw near to you and to your homes this Christmas, and to our beloved Christ Church. And may He draw near also to our nation: to bless what is good, to heal what is wounded, and to reconcile what is divided. That, walking in His light, we may learn again to cherish the gifts we have received, not as possessions to be grasped, but as blessings to be stewarded, until we find in Him the true Life, the true Liberty, and the joy that is ours to pursue in love and gratitude.
 
Merry Christmas!
The Reverend Timothy A R Cole

Christ Church, Georgetown in Washington, DC