The Language of Christmas

Certain words catch one’s attention. During a brief online surf of U.S.
news I found a rare word expressed in two separate articles. The first article chronicled a juvenile correction center in Florida that violently punished young boys back in the 60’s. The second article came from the opposite corner of the nation, Washington, where a woman has been sent to jail for smuggling a monkey on a flight from Thailand to Los Angeles. She sedated the primate, hid him under her shirt, and posed as an expectant mother. These are two very different scenarios, but contain a common word:
egregious.

I don’t believe I have ever used the word “egregious.” I know I have heard it, for the pronunciation is as familiar as the word is rare: egg-ree-juss.
Prior to my present reading I could not have defined the word for anyone.
The context, however, helps us know its function. Based on these two articles I would surmise this word connotes a kind of naive misconduct, an arrogant carelessness, and a foolish flippancy. Egregious must mean one demonstrates disrespect toward others and expresses it in self-condemning behavior. Perhaps one may, also, find the word in an article on Illinois’s Governor.

Now, I’ll check the dictionary…(jeopardy music playing)

(Two minutes later) Okay, so maybe I was a little too specific…Webster’s Dictionary simply defines as “outstandingly bad.” However, Webster’s Thesaurus does support much of my impression: “conspicuous, enormous, extraordinary, flagrant, great, gross, huge, monstrous, outrageous, prodigious, remarkable, tremendous.”

The point of all this is: We learn what words mean by the contexts in which they are used. Hear a word one time and you can kind of make it out. Hear it a second time and it becomes a little clearer. With every new situation in which the word is spoken its meaning becomes more distinct, because the appearances of the term allow for intersections among stories. And intersections give definition. You may even start using the word…as in – “King Herod was an egregious old man, who protected his throne by killing powerless infants!”

We learn what words mean by the contexts in which they are used.
Therefore…be outrageously generous with your Advent language. Connect the Christmas story with the rest of your discipleship life, and learn to articulate it. There are many who hear of Christ every year at Christmas, but have no other intersections. No other stories give definition for understanding why this baby arrived. For the church, it’s obvious…the story is enriched with hope for a redeemed humanity, goodwill toward all men, community gatherings of worship and adoration, finding needs in others then sacrificially giving in love. We even do such audacious things (like last
Sunday) as share Communion during Advent – so necessary for understanding God-with-us in our world.

But what about those who do not yet know the rest of Christ’s story? And what about our kids? Do we want them to forever think Christmas is about circling everything one fancies in a toy catalog? We want to teach them to give, yes, but we, also, want them to learn to receive rightly. All these nuances of Christmas – they are filled full as they are held in tension with the rest of Jesus’ life, and the mighty acts of God in Scripture.

The Word has come but for some remains ambiguous. Be generous with your Advent language. Allow it to intersect with your daily discipleship that does not end when we throw the wrapping paper away Dec 26th. Just think…those curled up little baby fingers will one day straighten the legs of a cripple. Those eyes that fail to focus on his own mother will one day pierce the heart of a rich, young ruler. Allow the story of this powerless baby to intersect with what He has done in your life. Then tell it. It is a great thing to be called by His name, and we discover the richness by which we have been defined as our lives intersect at the manger.

- Chet Bush