Christmas Hope and the Scouring of the Shire

Redemption is not Mere Fixing

We got our boys an air hockey table for Christmas. We didn’t purchase this (giant, expensive, very loud) contraption. We found it on the side of the road, with a sign that said “still works!”, and we stuffed it in our car and lugged it home to set it up in the basement for Christmas morning. The whole thing cost us $0, which is the price I like to pay for giant toys that will soon break or get discarded.

            The only problem is that the table is missing a very small cord that connects the goal to the scoreboard, so the digital scoreboard does not light up and keep score. Though the table works, it does not work as it is supposed to, and the promise of something it might do that it does not do provides a small sense of disappointment even in ordinary play. In other words, the gift that we gave our boys is a joy that brings with it a reminder of further joy that will not be, of a loss of what might have been.

            I fear that many of our Christmas sermons and spiritual reflections think of the God-man coming to earth as the completion of our missing joy. God in such a view comes as a baby, a small thing that might better accommodate the gap we experience in our happiness. Here on earth, the story goes, we humans bear many griefs and sorrows. Some are large- the loss of a husband, singleness, when marriage is desired, and infertility when children are desired. Some are smaller- strained relationships with relatives, still renting when home ownership is desired, and financial strain when more resources would relieve household stress. But Christ comes to bring joy in the midst of such woes. He brings with him the hope that wrongs will be righted and sorrows eased. In such a view, Christ is thought to bring a fix to our broken hearts. He is the stopgap between the modest joy we have and the profligate joys we had desired.

Though a good story, this narrative of Christ coming as the “fix” to what is broken is not quite right. This is the tension in telling aptly the story of God come to earth. The repair that we long for and receive in Christ is a world that we have never known. God does not simply provide more of that which we love already. He remakes the world in such a way that our loves are reordered. We might in such a world love entirely different things. It is less a fix than a complete renovation.

We do not even know how to hope in the right ways. Alas, so many of our hopes are twisted and hollowed out by what this world tells us are sacred goods- family, private single-family households, happy marriages. This is why Advent is rightly understood as an apocalyptic moment in the church calendar. God comes to disrupt our worldly hopes in order that they might be reordered heavenward. And what is more disruptive than a baby, whose arrival changes our plans and routines and makes of us something different than what we had been- a mother of a Virgin, a father of an unmarried man, a family where there was simply a betrothal?

The kingdom to come is one where our hopes will be reordered. The coming world we are promised is one we would now experience as strange. This kingdom to come is a world where marriage is no longer needed, where the Son has prepared a place for those who desire to be with him not in single-family houses but in a shared dwelling-place of praise.

Mormonism’s chief apologetic win over Christianity is the promise of this worldly happiness extended forward into time. When Mormons teach of an eternal life that is simply the household extended forever, each man king over his own planet, they take our best hopes for this world and make them eternal. Who would not want domestic bliss- children numerous and happy, financial resources abundant, every day a happy Christmas- forever and ever?

But the hope that Christ brings with us is not a future hope identical with our present desires. It is our desires refracted and reordered in the Virgin’s womb. After meeting the Christ-child, we no longer want what we used to want. The world's best is no longer the best we can conceive. This is why we see, repeatedly, Gentiles anointing Christ with the most precious oils the world contained. Myrrh and frankincense are offered to an infant and poured out on the feet of a man because this God was worth all the world’s best offerings.

Do not get me wrong- someday all tears will be wiped away and all sorrows cease. But this is not because someday you will receive all that you have longed for in this life or more of what you currently have. Our Christmas hope is not that Christ comes in the midst of our fighting and loss and makes such things go away. You will not have a Christmas morning do-over where your teenagers do not sulk in another room or your husband finally chooses the exact perfect gift. Christmas hope is that in Christ’s coming, he more than fixes what is broken. He restores things we did not know we had lost and replaces our desires for earthly things with the promised fulfillment of heavenly ones. Enmity turned to love by swords into plowshares suggests that the means by which we wound each other are not halted but transformed entirely. We do not simply stop fighting and enjoy a Jefferson-style dinner. We turn all of our gazes heavenward, our lives reordered entirely by praise.

The fellowship returns to the Bridge at Brandywine and finds it not as they left. The first unbelievable fact is that when the Hobbits approach the bridge after nightfall, wet and tired, they are denied admittance. There is a new gate to keep them out.

There are newly built houses that are efficient, ugly, and forbidding. In fact, the guard-house, to which they are begrudgingly allowed admittance feels like the near opposite of the Shire they left. Rules are posted all about. There is not enough food or wine. “Gatherers” regularly come around and take their share of the harvest, denying the people of the Shire the abundance of their fields. The whole picture is dim, restricted, and depressing. The Shire was characterized by song and feasting- remember the improbable birthday celebration for Bilbo? Now the Hobbits find a home that is gloomy and not at all as they left it.

What the Hobbits had hoped for is not what is returned to them. This is a heartbreaking disappointment and would be crushing if the only hope of their mission had been to once return to the Shire. But the hope of the Hobbits was not a simple return but a reordered world in which the threat of darkness had been silenced once and for all. Much of what they loved in this earth had been lost to such darkness. So, for us- the darkness of the current powers of this world has destroyed marriages, youthful innocence, parent-child relationships. It has made many of our churches simply places where finite goods are given seemingly infinite attention, instead of the places where our finite desires are exchanged for infinite ones. It has corrupted our desires and made us a hollowed-out people who long for a peaceful Christmas more than a reconfigured one. It has made us a people who can imagine canceling Sunday morning worship because “family comes first”. But the Christ child comes with a wail in the dark and in that cry destroys the darkness itself. He comes not that we might have what we want, but that we might want things we cannot currently even imagine wanting. He comes to defeat the darkness so that we might start the work of repairing in the light. This is the work our dear Hobbits will undertake in the final chapter. My hope for you is that your Christmas hopes are themselves reordered. The Benediction for Christmas worship is- May even your hopes be reordered in the light of Christ’s coming. May you exchange the hope of this-worldly “more” for the hope of infinite things that will not tarnish or break. May you offer up the sadness of what might have been and receive back the good things God is even now inviting you into.

Merry Christmas, friends. I’m off to play air hockey.