December 22, 2005
Dear Friends,
We have fresh drifts of snow in Moscow this week. As I was walking
in the park across the river from our apartment this morning I
stopped to look up at a grove of snow-covered birch trees. The
white birches stretching high above the snow-blanketed earth and
leaning slightly over my path seemed to tell of the purity and
beauty of Christ whose birth we prepare to celebrate. It allowed
me to draw a breath of joy this morning as I plodded through the
deep, freshly fallen snow. I hardly noticed up in the tops of
those trees the flock of Moscow’s big black ravens flitting
about, heckling and cackling. This is the kind of “white
Christmas” weather we dream about.
Around the world Christmas is celebrated as the great family
holiday. This is especially the case in the United States. I have
often wondered, “Why does every mother or grandmother in
America dream of gathering her entire family for this holiday
of holidays?” What makes Christmas a “family”
holiday any more than, say, Easter or Pentecost? Many popular
songs celebrate Christmas as a holiday when all the family should
be together. In one such song a young man far from home sings
“I’ll be home from Christmas, if only in my dreams.”
One of our favorite movies often shown at Christmas in America
is called “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It tells
the story of a family living in an insignificant town in New York
in which the father, a good, honest man, the owner of a small
bank, who has helped many people in his little town, comes to
be on the verge of committing suicide because his bank has lost
a large sum of money, and he is suspected of stealing it. He has
not stolen anything, but his rival who wants to destroy him uses
the event to discredit him and calls for him to be prosecuted
as a criminal. An angel who is dispatched from heaven to save
him, adopts the strategy of showing him what the town and his
family would have been like had he not been born. In the end he
does not commit suicide, but returns to his family because the
angel helps him to see that life, with all its difficulties is
still a wonderful gift, that one of the most wonderful gifts of
all is his loving family, where he is valued and needed. Marriage
and family, in the movie, are faithfully portrayed in biblical
terms as the remedy to the deep human predicament of loneliness.
Throughout history Christian art has portrayed Christmas in family
terms. I think of beautiful paintings as well as icons of the
holy family, images of love and piety. Mary is gazing lovingly
at the child Jesus. Joseph is watching over the child and his
mother, standing with the shepherds, animals, and the wise men.
But we should remind ourselves that the beautiful picture of
the holy family that artists across the centuries have depicted
in warm romantic tones must be seen against the background of
harsh threats to the family. According to the Scriptures, the
first Christmas was no holiday. Jesus was born and raised under
paradoxical and contradictory circumstances, far from ideal.
The first threat to the holy family came from God himself, whose
ways are not easy for a person to understand. Mary was carrying
the child Jesus in her womb when she was still engaged to Joseph.
As the evangelist Matthew tells us (1:18-25), when Joseph realized
that his betrothed wife was pregnant, he planned to quietly break
off the engagement, because he did not want to create a scandal.
But the Lord interceded through a dream, in which an angel told
Joseph not to fear taking Mary as his wife because the child she
was carrying was conceived by the Holy Spirit. With God’s
help, the family and the child’s life were preserved.
The family of Jesus faced a second threat when they were required
to make the trip to Bethlehem to pay taxes (Luke 2:1-20) just
at the time of Jesus’ birth, and there was no room for them
in the inn for travelers. If they had had more money, a place
could surely have been found for them, but they were poor people.
Instead of a lying in a bed with his mother in a house, Jesus
was born in a stable where he was laid in a feeding trough for
animals. These are not the best conditions for a newborn child.
We ought not to miss the point that at the time of his birth,
the family of Jesus was without a home. They were poor and homeless.
But with God’s help the family and the child’s life
were preserved.
The family faced a third threat, as Matthew (2:13-23) tells us,
when Herod the king, who had heard from the wise men about one
born to become king of the Jews, decreed the death of all the
male children in Bethlehem under two years of age. In the middle
of the night, Joseph, warned in a dream, got up quickly, roused
his wife and set off with her and the child Jesus in search of
safety in Egypt. The family was not only homeless, but they were
refugees in a foreign land, fleeing from the threat of murder
by a power-crazed politician tormented by fear. Who provided shelter
for a mother and her infant child along the desert road which
leads to Egypt? Where did they live in Egypt? No answers to these
questions can be found, but with God’s help the family and
the child’s life were preserved.
The family of Jesus was threatened by divorce, homelessness,
poverty, and murder, but the family was not destroyed by these
threats. The family was preserved. Jesus was protected by his
family, who acted in faith and in love.
It is not hard for us to see that countless children today do
not live in that wonderful circle of family protection that Mary
and Joseph, with God’s help, created for their child. Children
are the victims of disaster in families. Children are neglected
and abused by their alcoholic and drug-addicted parents, left
to their own devices on the street or in front of televisions
and computers. Families are destroyed by divorce, homelessness,
and poverty, by war and by foolish decisions of politicians.
In the birth of Jesus, the light has come into the world, but
all around him loomed great threatening shadows, just as they
loom over us today. It is hard to estimate how great the threat
to children is when the family is destroyed, because the child’s
well being depends more upon his family than upon anything else.
The younger the child, the greater the dependency.
Here in Russia it is my privilege to work with a number of church
groups that minister to children in orphanages and in children’s
hospitals. One such group is the group of Russian Orthodox Christians
from the downtown Moscow Kosma and Damian Church who regularly
visit children in the National Children’s Hospital on Leninski
Prospekt. Children with cancer, leukemia, and other very complicated
illnesses are sent from all over Russia to this hospital. The
church members visit and befriend the children and do all that
they can to care for and support family members who may arrive
in Moscow with no place to stay. Our Narnia Center recently received
a request from the priest of this church for books for children
in this hospital.
When I was a child at Christmastime my father used to read to
our family stories about the one hundred neediest cases in New
York City printed every Christmas season in the New York Times.
We listened to the stories and as a family agreed upon one case
to which we made a financial donation. This year our family here
in Moscow will be doing something similar. We will be giving a
sum of money to buy books for use in this children’s hospital
and in orphanages throughout the Russian Federation.
I am inviting you to join us in remembering needy children at
Christmas. Narnia Center publishes wonderful books for children,
and with your help, we can make some of these books available
to children in hospitals and orphanages. You can donate funds
for this purpose by sending a check to The Outreach Foundation
of the Presbyterian Church, 318 Seaboard Lane, Franklin, TN 37067.
Make sure to designate in the memo area of the check: “Narnia
Center - books for orphanages and hospitals in Russia.”
The Son of God came first to boyhood, then to manhood in the
circle of a loving family, a family that struggled against the
threats to its survival. Every child needs a family in order to
become the person God made him or her to be, but we can do something
to help those children who suffer so greatly, because they are
not protected in the circle of a loving family that seeks each
day to trust and obey the Lord. May you find great joy this season
in celebrating the birth of the Savior!
Donald Marsden
The 2006 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p.
188 |
