Giving and Belonging

Wouldn’t Christmas be better without the gift-giving?

Two things caused this bah-humbug-ish thought experiment. First, I found out there is a website called “Black Friday Death Count,” which is exactly what it sounds like and is exactly as depressing as it sounds. The second reason, which is decidedly less morbid, is the toy Brittany and I have to assemble for our son, Wallace, for Christmas day. We haven’t had to go through this parental rite of passage yet for a reason: I hate building pre-fabricated furniture. The instructions for our porch set said it would be a 30-minute job, but it took us more than three hours, most of the time being spent on my dramatic exhalations and occasional muffled outbursts of words that pastors probably shouldn’t say. The instructions for this toy we got for Wallace says that assembly should take an hour, so maybe you can understand why I’m reconsidering the whole Christmas enterprise.

So, again, wouldn’t Christmas be better without the gift-giving? Wouldn’t this reclaim the sanctity of the season from the grip of unchecked commercialism?

Like Scrooge, a ghost from my past recently rebuked this line of thinking. While trying to find an old sermon, I stumbled upon a talk that I gave a few years back to some VCU art students about the creativity of God. It was a meditation on the nature of God’s goodness in the thought of several early church theologians. For them, that God exists in a consubstantial triune community shows that divine goodness is not something that can be kept to itself, but must always be poured out. In short, divine goodness is generative; it demands self-giving—hence creation, the incarnation, and the cross.

So would Christmas be better without the gift-giving? Probably not, because we are made in the image of the God who gives gifts.

That being said, divine gift-giving does offer some helpful critique. I think the best example of this is that when God gives, he gives himself. That’s what we celebrate at Christmas. In Jesus, God gives himself to us so that we might be united to him. So this raises a question for us: to what extent are we giving ourselves to others in imitation of Christ? How are the presents we give not just obligations fulfilled but physical reminders of the greater gifts of our presence, attention, and love?

This weekend I’m going to build Wallace’s toy. I will probably complain and dramatically throw across the room the plastic baggie of screws too small for human hands. But I’ll build it anyway because loving means giving and giving means sacrificing because I am not my own but belong in body and soul to Jesus Christ and to this little boy that he has given to me.