December 6, 2005

Dear Friends in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.),

At this time of renewal and rededication, Keiko and I want to give thanks to you for knowing us well enough that we can really be ourselves with you. We thank you for making room in your lives for Keiko and me. We thank you for caring about who we are as persons. We thank you for supporting our work in Brazil. We thank you for sharing my laments and complaints, which are frequent, and our joys, which are many. We thank you for being genuinely happy when a very good thing happens to us even if you don’t really think it’s going to happen to you. We thank you for doing for us what faith is supposed to do: guarantee that we never feel alone when we really need not to feel alone. Your friendship and support are precious to us. Thank you. We love you, we miss you, and we mention your name to God whenever we get a chance.

Merry Christmas!

What follows is a brief essay on Christmas and Brazil. It’s offered at no additional charge and is suitable for reading by both Jews and Christians.

In parts of Brazil where there is a large German-Brazilian or Italian-Brazilian population, Christmas may still be a major religious event. But here in Salvador and in most of the country Christmas just isn’t one of the more important or interesting festivals. The reasons for this probably have to do with the Brazilian understanding of Jesus Christ.

As many authors have pointed out, the God of Israel can’t be depicted and can’t even be conceived of except by analogy, but how warm or cuddly is analogy? It’s no surprise then that many people need and want to know God in a more accessible, more human way. The Christian faith, with its understanding of Jesus as God-with-us, demonstrates that desire quite well.

The dominant form of Christianity in Brazil is still traditional popular Catholicism, which considers Jesus so divine as to be remote and insufficiently human for popular tastes, which require saints of all kinds to meet the demand for accessibility, humanity, and companionship. Hence various saints’ days and their accompanying celebrations, sometimes lasting several weeks, have far greater popular religious significance than Christmas. For the same reason, statues of Jesus or crucifixes are commonly found in and around public spaces and offices but are thought of more as architectural features or decoration than as something with personal religious significance. In fact, the crucifix often has negative and perverse connotations, since historically in Brazil it was often associated with oppression and authoritarianism.

In any case, the purpose Jesus serves in traditional popular Catholicism is to guarantee eternal life, understood as life made longer—much longer. One of the real contributions of Protestantism to religious experience in Brazil has been to emphasize the humanity of Jesus and to show that following Jesus calls for living a qualitatively better life now, a life at once more fully human, more helpful to those in need, and more pleasing to God. And isn’t that what is really meant by “eternal life” anyway? In any case, with the rapid expansion of Protestantism in Brazil over the last 30 years, it is becoming harder and harder for Brazilian Christians to pretend that they don’t know that their faith is supposed to change them and their society and make both more acceptable to God. But because shameless corruption and outrageous inequality are still to be found everywhere in Brazil, I can’t guarantee that Brazilians have actually gotten the message.

As an appreciative student of Jewish religious thinkers, I especially like the concept of tikkun olam, which means “care of the world” and refers to the responsibility which the people of God have to clean up the mess in the world so that God can once again look upon the world and say, as at the creation, “Hinneh, mah tov!” (“Look how good it is!”) All of this leads me to offer my peculiar ecumenical understanding of Christmas: It is God’s way of telling us Gentiles that we also have this responsibility, that the process of tikkun olam is already in motion, and that we are all invited and strongly encouraged to help it along. Participating positively in this transformative process is deeply joyful and satisfying, hence the “merry” in Merry Christmas.

Bob Butterfield

The 2006 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 45