The Complexities of Christmas

With Christmas just around the corner, it’s easy to get lost in the comforts of gifts, gatherings, and familiar holiday carols. Yet in today’s podcast, Dan and Rachael remind us that the true celebration of Christmas means embracing the profound disruption Jesus brought to the world—a call to love, bless, and challenge the status quo, even in a world often defined by hatred and division.

This conversation invites us to see Christmas as more than a season of comfort. It’s a time of transformation, calling us to step into the work of love, justice, and restoration.

Merry Christmas from all of us here at the Allender Center! We’ll take a short break on the podcast next week, and will return on December 27th with a year-end reflection from Dan and Becky Allender.

Episode Transcript:

Dan: I’ll say it again. Merry Christmas to you, Rachael. And to our audience, we are but days away from obviously a very sweet but also disruptive celebration. So given that I want to talk about the interplay of how memory, both in terms of our memory of scripture, our memory of our own experience of this particular glorious holiday, how it plays out in shaping our entry not only into the day, but into what the incarnation brings, and that is a revolution. So start with what do you remember as to, in one sense, the good, the lovely, the difficult, the complex, maybe even the ugly with regard to you and your own experience, particularly as a kid, your encounter?

Rachael: Yeah, gosh, I mean, so I was raised in a Christian home, so there was certainly an element of Christmas that was celebrating the birth of Jesus. And I always loved the songs and the candles and this sense of wonder, I was a kid who was very full of wonder, even in the midst of trauma, even in the midst of chaos, even in the midst of heartache. I think that’s actually true for a lot of kids who know the depths of danger, that there’s a lot of magical capacity to a belief in magic. So Christmas for me, more than probably any season, holds the stark contrast of some of my most joyful, beloved feeling, delighted in and loved memories and also some of the scariest and most painful because it was a season that always felt… we did do the Santa Claus thing, and I think my parents so badly wanted us to, I guess I’ll just say in my more radical self now, the capitalist kind of promise of your kids will feel most loved with all these gifts always brought such stress and hardship to our home and conflict into our home. And so I have memories of Christmas that again, I loved, there were so many rituals of Christmas that actually were so formative for me, have very little to do with Jesus. We have an Italian family. We made a three day sauce together. We had these very clear rituals. We went to my grandparents’ house, we left in our pajamas and listened to Christmas music all the way home and looked for Santa and the stars. And there was just a lot of magic and a lot of pain. And so that’s how I was. And I think it’s always, there’s been a way that I’ve been deeply shaped to be able to hold that kind of complexity in my body and even in my rituals and even in my own just relationship with God and relationship with others. So there’s no part of me that’s like, I’m so glad there was heartache. I just know it’s deeply formed who I am, so the Christmas season holds a lot of ritual and memory.

Dan: Yeah.

Rachael: What about for you?

Dan: Well, the dilemma for me was I had no clue that this was about Jesus. My family was not religious. We didn’t go to church, we didn’t have the Bible. We didn’t talk about the birth of Jesus. For me, it was a context, given my father as a baker, I ended up from I think at least age nine or 10, working pretty much from mid-December through actually New Year’s Eve, and then get a day off. And then you’ve got again the new year coming. So this is the season of which as I remember my dad saying 60% of his business came in the month of December. So it was a hard working month. And when you don’t even have sort of the secular notion of Jesus, let alone a true understanding, it was a lot of work for a lot of presents. And yet even the presents as an only child, I was certainly endowed with vastly more than most people ever receive. But even that felt like, a burden in that I’m supposed to be both thrilled and surprised. And there was always, it was the one point where I could tell there was significant conflict between the gifts my mother purchased for me versus the gifts my father purchased for me. And I needed to show a certain amount of joy for each gift. But I also knew that if I had more joy for my father’s gifts, it was going to be a long day of tending to the complexities that my borderline mother would have brought too. But I knew that if I didn’t show a lot of thrill for the kind of gifts that would be tending toward more what a boy would want my dad would buy, and the gifts that my mom would buy felt like the prototypical underwear and sweaters and things that like, okay. So it was a lot of artifice, a lot of work and a lot of artifice and a lot of complexity. And I’m like, when the day’s over all the packages had been opened, the trash has been removed, I could finally almost have that relief for another day or two before we had to go back to work for New Year’s Eve. So there’s not a lot of joy until I began to see how my wife created, again, back to the word magic. But I think my kids would say, oh geez, that was a lot of tension in the home until they got old enough to go, what did you bring into the room? Because there was something, shall we just say there was an odor you brought into Christmas, dad? And again, without justification, because there’s a lot of grief for me in what I have brought into our celebration, I’ll go back to your word. There was a lot of complexity, something really sweet, something really sour and dark. But I would also say, now that I know much more of the story, that’s not too far from the original Christmas, so I’m like,

Rachael: Well say more.

Dan: Well, I do want to open up Matthew 2 and we’ll not read all portions of it, but just to remind people that the Magi come and they go to Herod in Jerusalem and essentially they set up this dynamic of kingdoms right from the beginning because they’re asking, where is the one who is born king of the Jews? Well, to say that to Herod essentially of another empire, you are already competing empires right there. The king of the Jews versus you and what you represent with regard to your own authority and power. Well obviously he’s not pleased. And so he tells them, let me know when the birth comes about. I want to come and worship as well. So lemme know, thankfully, they received dreams and dreams. Let’s just say dreams show up in this chapter a lot. And so the Magi worship, they depart and Herod finds out and eventually creates a genocide, killing within that large region, all boys that were two years of age and below. So Jesus and his family flee to Egypt and until Herod dies and until some of the authorities related to him guy, they don’t return. But even when they return where they would’ve located, they can’t. So in some sense, they have to become exiles, immigrants, to be able to become nazarenes living in that area. So in Galilee, let’s just say the Christmas story is deeply disruptive. And all I can say is even when I became a believer, even when I would go to church celebrate on Christmas Eve, this story for some reason in my circles, never got told, who are the magi? Well, they’re magicians. They are anything but what could be called people of God. So what’s that about? And then Herod’s murder. We don’t want to darken Christmas with a form of a genocide. So let’s just talk about silent night. All I can say is every time we come to this so-called holiday, something of my body and heart needs to reengage Matthew 2 and ultimately address the issue of what’s going on in this story. So what is going on in this story?

Rachael: I dunno if I could go there to what’s going on in this story, what is coming to my mind right now is what I know so many people feel, especially those who are more vulnerable to the empire and the empirical powers of our day and why we would, again, I actually love Silent Night. So I’m not saying don’t love the song, but it feels akin to the prophet saying, you say peace, peace when there is no peace. Part of what’s going on in this story in the disruption is that it’s the paradox that a baby is coming in the power to turn every empire of this world that exploits, that oppresses, that privileges a few at the sake of the many that, I mean, there’s so much more in the Bible critiquing money and economy than almost anything else. And it’s because of all the byproducts of it. So there’s something about this baby who is coming that is going to expose and dismantle and disrupt in ways that change the metaphysical reality of our world and the possibilities. That is not something many of us necessarily, we’d like to think about it and its impact on our individual relationship with God and the way the life of Jesus changes our access and our sense of goodness. I don’t know if we like to ponder what does it mean for the powers in which we live within and function within and have in many ways often contorted our faith to maintain.

Dan: Yes, well maintain through a form of individualism that makes the gospel virtually nothing other than, I’m so grateful my sins have been forgiven, which by the way I am, but then I get eternity and no judgment. And that’s it. That’s the summary, complete summary of the gospel versus the plan of God to bring heaven to earth. That is the restoration of the earth where justice proclaims the honor of all. So in that fundamental sense of we’ve got to be aware this is a revolution, empires are crumbling when we worship the king of kings, the Lord of Lords as a baby. And in that trajectory from incarnation to cross, from cross to ascension, we’re entering into the story that Herod intuitively knew he’s got to ruin, he’s got to destroy. So I think we can start with an obvious sentence, empires opposed to the kingdom of God. And that’s every empire. It depends to some degree on violence and degradation. So his plan from the very beginning was destroy this one who either is or others proclaim as the king of the Jews. So that problem of who rules, who is the ruler, who has true authority because they are the author of life who has the authority to send us in the direction of what life really is. And Herod, I don’t know what Herod knew, but what Herod did know is there need to be murder, there need to be destruction and violence in order for, and almost every, shall we say, empire from legitimate empires if you will, to illegitimate empires all depend upon the use of violence to sustain their power, to define and project as to who are their foes or their enemies. And then justify, which is another way of saying empires don’t just depend on violence, they depend upon, and I’ll use the broad word propaganda, but another word for that is deceit. We need enemies in order to cohere the splintered groups that actually cannot find union through anything other than hatred. So we need, the empire needs an enemy, even if indeed the enemy is not our enemy. We need an enemy in order to deceive the real intent of what the empire is attempting to accomplish. And you see that with your card to what Herod says, oh, lemme know because I want to worship and you go liar, liar pants on fire.

Rachael: I’m contemplating what I want to say because these feel like such risky places in this day and time because I see more clearly more and more and more, even in our own nation, which is one of the world’s largest, most powerful empires, that there is this like apparent sincerity to really deceive and to hide true intent. And it’s this question I’ve had just about leadership in general, any kind of power of this world that has to function within the systems of this world, what kind of integrity do you really get to have if you have to function within systems that are created to oppress, that are created to need scapegoats, that are created to need division, and in some ways need you to defend yourself with violence in order to maintain the protection and power and prosperity that you have. So somebody’s always losing, even if somebody’s winning, which I just can’t believe is God’s true economy. So I just feel the closeness of it in a way that like, yes, in a more cognitive way, I’ve been aware of for a long season because of my studies because of the privileges I’ve had in learning from so many faithful Christians in lots of different social locations, but to have to contend with my own heart that wants to join in the deceit because it’s more comfortable, it’s less scary, it’s less despairing even if it’s fully despairing. So in this season where you can’t… it’s in your face in a way that you have to feel so much more clearly what you’re co-signing, it just this reenactment of our world just feels very close and very personal.

Dan: Well, let’s just name it again, you’re a downer here. You just already are poo-pooing on the celebration of capitalism and tinsel…

Rachael: I know. I know.

Dan: ..coffee cups and warm buns and being able to sit around and open gifts. And again, here’s our dilemma. I’m not going to keep that privilege from my children and my grandchildren. I hope to be able to buy a few gifts, to receive a few gifts, et cetera. But just having the clarity that a capitalist structure intends to incorporate, if not assimilate the celebration of the one who’s going to disrupt all structures, including America as an empire, and to go, oh, isn’t this a happy day? And you go, oh, wait a minute. We are much more like Herod than the Magi. And I want to be like the Magi. I want to be a magician. Actually, I’ve always kind of wanted to be, but let’s just say the notion that likely these Zoroastrians who, from very far away, have felt the impulse of there is life and there is a truth and something bizarre that’s compelling beyond everything else. That’s who I want to be. And that innocence is not over tinsel, but it’s fine for four year olds, 8-year-old, 12 year olds, and maybe even sometimes 22 year olds. But the bottom line is are we celebrating the revolution? Are we celebrating that this savior is no more for Afghanistan than it is than he is for America? And so all forms of Christian nationalism, all forms of, but we’re a Christian country who annihilated multiple people groups in order to in one sense plant the new Eden on the North American soil. We are a people who have blood on our hands and we want to wipe that away through levels of deceit, propaganda, denial. How do we enter into true celebration in the midst of lament that also is going to take down structures that I benefit from as a older white male. Again, I can see why many people would have basically said, you’re not, this is too much. You’re asking too much. Just let me have a freaking holiday to celebrate the king of kings coming in flesh. We simply want to remind our own souls that we may need to flee to Egypt and we need to listen to dreams. But in one sense, the dreams of those who are dispossessed, the dreams of those who have been quarantined in a way in which they don’t seem to quite fit the assimilation into the larger empire. So thoughts?

Rachael: Yeah, I mean I know we’re going to talk more around how do we disrupt, how do we join the disruption? How do we actually celebrate, join the king of kings because this is actually, revolution is incredibly hopeful and incredibly risky. And I’ve just been thinking about, I’ve been seeing this James Baldwin quote floating around social media when he just said, “Love has never been a popular movement and that the world,” it’s going to me cry, “The world is actually held together by a strikingly few radicals who understand the true power of love.” And then he goes on to use language like… because if you look around you and you see the homeless, you see the addicted, you see the disenfranchised, that’s you in some ways that sense of how we really do belong to each other. So thinking about that, what Jesus is inviting is not just a false peace, he is the prince of peace. And it’s not a, so nobody get mad or let’s just in order to keep the peace, make sure the status quo remains intact. So there isn’t more violence or there isn’t more disruption. But there are real tools and real postures that come with this baby that we’re meant to lean into and borrow from and participate in.

Dan: Yeah, well start us off on it. What’s our agenda? If we’re celebrating disruption and salvation, the restoration of heaven and earth and the movement of our hearts and the systems that we’re part of in directions where we can, again, pray the Lord’s prayer on earth as it is in heaven, what’s the disruption that’s ahead for those who celebrate this baby?

Rachael: Well, I’m going to need help with this first one. Heart is not there, so I’m just going to need help. But I feel it. I feel the invitation to give into a kind of hatred that feels like it’ll keep me safe and we’re all being invited to hate somebody because that’s actually like currency of empire. It keeps it going and it keeps us obedient and it keeps us afraid. So I think we are called to disrupt hatred with blessing. And I love your words here, but not naivete. And I would also say not again, I just want to be really careful. I think there are people who could hear this, so I just have to, and we work with abuse victims, I just have to let go of my pain and be in relationship and move toward, that’s what letting go of hatred is or disrupting hatred. It’s like, no, I don’t think that’s what we’re saying. So maybe you could put some more words.

Dan: Well, the idea of blessing your enemy, loving your enemy. And I think we just have to say that in the current status of the conflict, in the broad sense of Republican, Democrat, Trump versus Harris, that hatred is alive and well. And so to be in a place where we ultimately are able to name, at least for me, I’ll just say there’s something more of my heart that’s closer to Herod than it’s to the Magi. And that’s really problematic. And I need to be more mature to know what it means to love my enemy, but also the freedom to be able to say there are people who in the stance of harm to others are my enemy, but I’m still called to bless and love. Now what that means, we could spend an entire podcast and we should soon on what that may involve, but at least to put the stance negatively to own that hatred, to hatred only brings joy to the kingdom of evil. And therefore a stance of being able to say, even in the face of great harm, I will stand to see you as an image bearer and attempt to move into an understanding of your heart, your motive, your desires. In other words, to your humanity. I refuse to dehumanize you as you have dehumanized me and many others. So holding one another within the realm of humanity instead of degradation, instead of hatred to hatred I think is at least the beginning point to say it’s a refusal to join evil, to create more evil by becoming the very thing I despise. So that I think is at least the beginning point of going, I want to follow this baby. And this baby is not built, not created, not in one sense anything but the presence of the love of God. So in that it doesn’t mean peace, peace where there is no peace. It means I want to become a man of peace on are your my behalf. But I think it also requires a disruption of all forms of propaganda, of all forms, of decedent lies. Again, evil is called the father of lies. And again, the last thing I’m going to say is I’m a man of full and complete truth. I’ve lied lots in my life. So being able to go, where am I bound to forms of deceit that I don’t even know? Where am I indeed holding onto things that are just not true yet provide me in a mythological way, a sense of comfort and control and convenience rather than being able to say, this country is built on blood and not sacrificial blood, on creating sacrifices on an altar of false, deeply false notion of what it means to have pursued Jesus as the king of peace. So when we begin to then go, well, how do those lies embed themselves on multiple layers? And then how does propaganda work? And we’re going to spend time, I promise next year, talking about conspiracy theories, talking about cults, talking about propaganda, because I think we are in an era where decedent lies have become the structure of normalcy for how we engage one another to a point where, again, it is very likely that a person who suggested that fires in California were due to Jewish space lasers, and you want to go, are we out of our freaking minds that the whole earth doesn’t stop at that point and go such insanity, wickedness has to be exposed versus Oh yes, every politician’s sort of extreme and some of their hyperbole and yeah, we all say crazy things, but no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We’ve got to have a commitment to again, not align ourselves and dismiss outright to deceit and lies. So at least that if there is a heart to bless, but also a heart to bring facticity truth, a common sense awareness of realities that this world seems to have just utterly askewed. Those to me are some of the ways that we begin to live out the empire of the kingdom of God. Anything else that you would bring?

Rachael: I was just thinking about how I feel the grace that’s come to me to engage the own, to expose places where I’ve been formed in a kind of propaganda that’s actually a distortion of the story of God. I mean, this is why I talk so much about spiritual abuse because I think so much of this propaganda for many of us has actually come through our churches, has come through the ways we’re invited to read scripture. And I know so much of what’s disrupting me is being in relationship with people who experience and see the world differently than me. And not that that means they’re immediately always right and everything they say and feel and see is true, but there’s something I’m missing or I can’t see of God, I can’t see of the story just I actually think that’s part of what it means to be made in the image of God, that we’re meant to come to a sense of reality together in our difference, to have a more multidimensional perspective that will invite levels of repentance and transformation. Or if you want to talk about it like disorientation and reorientation, then yeah, I’m feeling such gratitude for the many people who have written or created spiritual formation processes that stand in opposition to empire with a more explicit, I think about the Black church or the Indigenous church, even liberation theologies coming out of different cultures again, what does it mean to be in conversation, to learn, to see, to wrestle together? Because I think I was just talking to my good friend, TJ, and she said, really, I think anywhere we have tasted or known something of power of this world that gives us a kind of comfort is a place we actually haven’t seen God. And so what do we have to share and to learn with each other both in our places of profound power and privilege and our places of dispossession. I just continually think it is going to be relationships. And again, I’m not, I think in some ways in the work in the United States around race relations, that there’s a reason why especially Black women are so in despair right now in the wake of this election, it’s because of the relationships that gave a sense of this is changing us, we’re transforming. And then numbers that say, actually no, we’re moving in a completely other direction. So that’s not what I’m saying, that if we’re just in relationship, I mean there’s something that also there is a giving up. There is a joining the King of Kings in a different radical way of love that says, solidarity means something, that says protection means something, that says the labor to move towards, yeah, enemies means something. So that’s what comes to my mind because there is something of experiencing up close and personal, the impact of the propaganda for me that is absolutely heartbreaking and terrifying to see people I love saying things and believing things that just tell me the depth of the ways in which their fear and their hatred and their shame has been exploited.

Dan: Well, you’re not going to like my next sentence, so let’s just, lemme just say that. The fact is what you created, and I say you’re not going to like it because it is an advertisement and I have no shame and you didn’t ask me to say it.

Rachael: You had me really scared. What’s he going to say?

Dan: Well, if I could encourage people to think about a Christmas gift on behalf of a friend, a spouse, your new online course on spiritual abuse, if we can just use a simple sentence. And that is bad theology actually is always spiritually abusive. And anytime a theology in one sense, capitulates and assimilates into empire, it’s bad theology. So this is, I mean, the gift that you have created is a rich gift for the community of God. I think particularly in this age, and I’ll just say again, that was not planned for our conversation, but further to say, empires as we’ve said, are terrified of the prince of peace and therefore one of the great powers that holds, yes, violence, yes, propaganda, but also mockery, mockery, the jubilation for many is a form of mockery of those who lost. And oftentimes those who lost resort to mockery of those who won in order to, in one sense annul the despair, the hurt, the hopelessness

Rachael: Or the terror.

Dan: The terror. And to be able to go, at least I speak for myself, I just have to become a wiser man to know that so much of the surrogates of Trump were attempting to provoke response by mockery to call Puerto Rico an island of garbage, defaming, untrue, degrading again, a form of propaganda. When another surrogate says, as a man, yes, we own your bodies women. Then you go, oh, oh my God, my God. And in that every portion of rage, hatred, my own form of propaganda I want to operate. Now, in other words, in the face of mockery, we either wither and hide because shame often creates a sense of I want to be unseen and silent so that the barrage no longer comes in my direction, or we mock those who mock. And in that mockery we again have joined. And so how to deal with provocation, well, I’m setting up a few of the conversations I want to have next year, and that is how to deal with power struggles due to the provocation of insult, mockery that demeans degrades, but also is an invitation either to be silent, which is egregious and a deep err on the other hand to respond in like. And so wisdom feels like one of the great gifts that we need to grow.

Rachael: Well, and where that takes me as thinking about the nonviolent protests of the civil rights movement, to me as a clear example of what it was to have a strategy and training and a wisdom as a way to expose the provocation in some ways have to bear some of the violence of it, but to not join it as a form of exposure so that it actually loses its power. And again, there’s so many also different ways to do that. And just again, there are those who have resilience here that can be learned from. Jesus is also… you know, you watch, the way Jesus interacts with the amount of times that he, it’s being provoked through mockery, set up to be humiliated or to retaliate. I do like learning a lot from Jesus. He’s very powerful in his grounded playfulness, but also his, I think, very gracious exposing that I’m sure doesn’t necessarily feel gracious to the people being exposed.

Dan: Exactly whose coin is this? Yeah, there is, shall we say, a disruptive, this will sound very self-serving, a very disruptive, bold love that is needed to be lived out in this day. But as we come to an end, I’ll simply say this upside down kingdom, this wild, wild call to joy feels like joy at this moment feels like one of the hardest things to find sustenance in. And yet there is something in that defiant, deeply defiant choice to say, the king has arrived and this toddler is going to lead us when he returns from Egypt into conversations and directions and to repentance that I can truly say at least as we anticipate the year 2025, it’ll be good, deeply good to be in conversation with you. So to that end, my dear friend, Merry Christmas.

Rachael: Merry Christmas to you as well.