The Work of Christmas

What is your favorite Christmas song? Maybe it is a religious song such as “Mary Did You Know?” Maybe it’s “O Come Let Us Adore Him,” or maybe it’s “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” or “O Holy Night,” or “The First Noel.”

Maybe your favorite Christmas song is one of the secular songs, like the Temptations singing “Silent Night,” or maybe it’s the classic written by Robert Wells and Mel Torme,’ but sung by Nat King Cole, “The Christmas Song?” By the way, nobody can sing it like Nat King Cole.

My favorites are “The Christmas Song,” sung by Nat King Cole, “Silent Night,” sung by the Temptations, and my all-time two favorites are “This Christmas,” sung by the late legendary Donny Hathaway.

Donny Hathaway’s “This Christmas” is one of my top-two favorites because first of all, it was written by Donny and Nadine Theresa McKinnor. It was composed in Chicago on Ontario Street at the Audio Finishers Studio in the fall of 1970.

The main reason the song is one of my top-two favorites is because the lyrics focus on the joy of relationships. Listen to the lyrics or read them yourself; you will notice that Donny was showing how all the other trappings were background to the importance of relationships, be they intimate or family or friendship.

His point is that all relationships overflow into the joy of being in community as we hear in his lyrics at the end of the song when he sings, “Shake a hand, shake hand, all over the world.”

The other song of my two favorites is “Santa Claus, Go Straight to the Ghetto,” written by James Brown, Alfred Ellis and Hank Ballard. James sings along with the jazzy background of his incredible band.

No, the song does not have the harmonious, smooth voices of the Temptations singing “Silent Night,” but it is the message that James conveys that is closest to the message of that brown-skinned baby born in a barn in Bethlehem.

James is singing for children who were and are growing up like he did amidst squalor, destitution and systemic poverty. That’s why he has a line in the song that says, “Don’t leave nothing for me, I’ve had my chance you, see, but Santa Claus, go straight to the ghetto.”

The message of his song is the message of the meaning of Christ-mass. That Jesus was born in poverty in Nazareth where many people in the first century asked the question, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

It is the message that when God stepped from immortality into mortality in the form of Jesus, that God did not choose to be born in a gated community of the well-to-do; Jesus did not come to a palace of well-connected, high-profile people; Jesus did make his entrance into this world among the European oppressors from Rome.

No, Jesus came from among the peasant class, and Jesus was born to a 15-year-old dark brown-skinned girl and a 16-year-old dark brown-skinned poor carpenter, and neither one had enough money to pay the proper tithes in the temple.

I tell my congregation each year at this time that it is important “That Jesus came,” but it is equally important “How Jesus came” and “When Jesus came.”

Not only did he come to poor Northeast African people who were being colonized by the Roman empire, but he also came at a time when that subjugation of the indigenous people of North Africa, who traced their heritage back to Abraham, were losing faith in the temple and in God.

Why did God come this way into the world?

To first of all demonstrate that the people who had been systematically despised and rejected by the Empire were the people God held a preferential option for, to quote the Latin liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez.

Second, Jesus’ birth in humble circumstances demonstrates that God cherishes, values and sees worth in Black bodies that had been demonized and stereotyped by white hate.

And in Luke’s telling of the birth of Christ, the message gets even more profound. Luke’s gospel shows that God used Black women from the margins of society to take center stage in the greatest revelation ever proclaimed, the birth of Christ. Luke shows us both Elizabeth and Mary in their divinely orchestrated pregnancies discussing passionately the coming overthrow of every earthly empire through the African Jewish babies they were bearing for God. That adds new meaning to the hymn, “Mary Did You Know?”

Black women not only were loyal at the Cross to Christ, and not only did Black women first preach the good news of the resurrection of Christ. Black women were the ones who God sent Jesus and John through, to proclaim in their beautiful bodies and loyal lives that God takes “the living stones that the builders rejected to make those stones the chief corner stones” of the ministry of Jesus Christ. “If it wasn’t for the women…”

I adore all the above Christmas songs beloved; however, the two that convey deep meaning to me are Donny Hathaway’s “This Christmas” and James Brown’s “Santa Claus, Go Straight to the Ghetto.”

Therefore, I leave you with Merry Christmas greetings and this meditation, a poem by African American theologian and author Howard Thurman, published in 1973:

The Work of Christmas

“When the song of the angels is stilled, When the star in the sky is gone, When the kings and princes are home, When the shepherds are back with their flock, The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost, To heal the broken, To feed the hungry, To release the prisoner, To rebuild the nations, To bring peace among brothers, To make music in the heart.”