CROSSING THE BAR - XII
Details
By Jim Johnson

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The devil, as they say, is in the details.

I see a lot of gleams in a lot of eyes in the Bull’n Bear Saloon at Christmas time. With many of my friends and patrons, being a former pastor leaves me with somewhat of a checkered past as far as they are concerned, and they love to tell me “religious” jokes to see my reaction.

Here’s one: The three wise men finally found the stable where Mary and Joseph were staying. The first two entered just fine, but the third was an exceptionally tall fellow and he hit his head on the door jamb on the way in, exclaiming in pain “Je-sus Christ!” Joseph looks at Mary and says, “That’s a pretty catchy name.”

Another guy set me up one night by pretending to ask me a question.

“Say Jim, is it true that Mary had to ride on Joseph’s donkey all the way to Bethlehem that first Christmas”?

I nodded, but I could see something coming.
“I know how Joseph felt,” he said. “Last Christmas my wife rode my ass all the way to my in-law’s house in Wyoming.”

And last Sunday, as he and his dance partner, Vi, were making their way to the door after our monthly “Old Friends Gathering,” Don stopped and told me that someone he had run into while shopping had said to him “You know, whoever the guy was that started all this Christmas stuff ought to be strung up.” The gleam in Don’s eye told me that he, too, saw the irony in such a statement.

I got to thinking about Don’s statement as I was mulling over what to say at this year’s Christmas campfire, an event that started years ago when I felt about as unwelcome at church as most bar people do. (For years now, Nancy and I have invited to the banks of the river behind our home friends who have no connection with the church, where we sing Christmas carols and read one of the Christmas stories from the Bible. I also give a little sermon about how what God did that first Christmas might relate to them. The shepherds, by the way, have always been popular, I suppose because these “bar people” wonder what it might mean that God sent angels to people like them.)

As I “mulled,” it occurred to me that the God who came into the world that first Christmas, just like we sing about in church and around the campfire, came crashing into lots of different kinds of worlds in that one birth: not only the world of the church people, but also the world of the bar people (witness the shepherds).

It also occurred to me, and not without some sense of sadness, that each of these “worlds” have, in some ways, not really liked what they got for Christmas, softening or buffering the bare naked truth of God with us with all sorts of other stuff that was related to, but did not really bear witness to, the truth of it all.

The devil is in the details.

Those who have heard the story but have not really understood the vastness of what it all means for their own lives and deaths – those to whom I have referred as “bar people” – get hung up either in the romantic, sweet details of the story, or on the other side, the sheer lack of sense so much of the story makes. So they tell jokes, or go shopping in observance of the “real” meaning of Christmas (which they think is “giving”). They don’t really believe that what they got from God for Christmas is entirely true, or perhaps simply that it is true for them, so they find other things – details – to fill the Christmas void.

On the other hand, church people – those of us who have (hopefully) heard and grasped what “God with us” means for our death and life – have believed what we’ve heard. We just don’t like it, at least not all of it.

True enough, much of the story of God’s incarnation has brought us great joy. But much of it has not. “The little Lord Jesus asleep in the hay” cannot, after all, be separated from the Jesus who was a friend of sinners, and who said and did things that ultimately brought him to the cross on which he died.

The giving that is so much a part of the meaning of Christmas is not, of course, the giving of gifts, but the giving of God’s very self in Jesus.

The call to us who worship the baby Jesus is a call to give our very lives as well. To give them, not especially to correct belief and doctrine or even the retelling of the wonderful story – the details in which we often wrap ourselves up at Christmas time – but to give ourselves also to those who have been left with only the “details,” all the while not knowing what the details are all about.

And what would that be? That God wants us back badly enough to come and get us, “each and every one.”

My friend Ed, who at age 63 is now reading the Bible for the first time, said something to me over a couple of beers that conveys an attitude that seems to be true for both bar people and church people.

“I’ve decided that alcohol and faith are a lot alike,” Eddie said. “Just the right amount can make you feel pretty good, but too much of either one will get you into big trouble.”

He’s right, of course. Both can be trouble. The trouble that comes from faith, however, is of a different kind. It is the same kind of trouble as when a new child comes into your life and nothing is ever the same again.

If I could have what I want for Christmas, it would be that those with whom I stand beside the campfire Christmas night will finally get it…get it enough to get into that kind of trouble; that the details with which we are so often distracted will be stripped away and that they will see God in Jesus, come to get them.

I don’t ask for or expect angels from the realms of glory or a starry sign in the sky. I just ask for the right words to say, coming from someone they’ve come to know and trust, that will help them see that the angel’s song from long ago about God coming to be with us, stripped of all the distracting details in which we wrap it, is still true.

All the rest is just details.