What is Merry?

When Christmas comes around we begin to throw out words like “merry.” Merry is an older word, out of use until we get to this time of year. It means full of cheer and glee, and it makes sense that we associate such a word with the time of year we celebrate God coming into the world as one of us. But in our own celebrations I always try to remember that there are those for whom this time of year is not so merry. It probably has nothing to do with religion that makes this time of year hard on some. Instead it is simply the truth that life is hard for many of us. The difficulties of life always become magnified in times when cheer is what is expected of us. It is hard to be cheerful and merry and happy and whatever else when there are gapping holes in our lives. When loved ones are lost and we find ourselves alone. Solitude is easier to feel when we believe there are so many others wrapped up in the love of their families. And yet we do not see the problems of other people’s lives as easily as we see the problems in our own lives. That makes sense because everyone tries to hide their problems. I know I do. I am afraid that if people knew all of my secrets, the skeletons in my closets, they would judge me and ostracize me. It is a common fear I think, and so each of us wears a mask, an image of who we want the world to think we are. We portray ourselves as happy, successful, put together, in a problem free marriage with children who are perfect, and most of the time people believe it. Or perhaps they let themselves believe it, because they are trying to believe their own stories. That happens too. We put on these facades for so long, and do it so successfully that we begin to buy our own stories. Then something like Christmas rolls around, and we believe that everything should be merry in order that Christmas can be said to be merry. But as we have admitted there is something about forced merriness that magnifies life’s difficulties, and the facades are harder to keep, and the stresses pile up, and we wonder how others can do it when we cannot. The truth is they cannot either. Life is hard for everyone. But this is Christmas, and there is something to be merry about. It is obvious in the little broken family into which Jesus was born. He was born as a bastard to an unwed mother in a place where animals ate and defecated. There his soon to be step-father did his best acting as a nurse, and his teenage mother cried out in drugless pain as he entered into the world. This was the kind of family that is easy to judge. If we were to consider how God would come into the world, this is not the story any of us would have chose. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe God comes into the mess, the filth, the mire, the brokenness, and too frail and all too human to let us know that at Christmas time we can take off our masks and put away our facades and just be free of it all. God knows who we are with all the skeletons in our closets, with all the things we judge ourselves for and all the things we know others would judge us for that we try to hide. God knows all of that and comes anyway, comes to redeem the messiness of it all anyway. And you know what? I am pretty sure that means I can have a merry Christmas. Go ahead and judge me for my faults, God has chosen to redeem me anyway. I will do my best not to judge you for yours for God has chosen to redeem you too. I will not hide anymore, for in my hiding God has found me and says, “Be merry for I am here to redeem you.” Yes Christmas is hard for many, but that is simply because we do not know the good news yet. Into our difficulties Christ shows up and loves us through them. He is born right there into the midst of it all, and that is good news no matter how you slice it. So have a merry Christmas for you have every reason to be merry!