How many of you know the legend of Thistlehair the Christmas Bear? Spreading the good news everywhere? About Christmas time and what it means to all the children of the world. Every little boy and girl out there loves Thistlehair. I first learned of old Thistlehair from the Southworth family when Kristen and I started dating. Oh I knew of Rudolph, and Frosty, and Santa, but not Thistlehair, who comes around this time of year spreading lots of Christmas cheer; the kids all love his shiny coat and the smell of honey on his nose. I searched far and wide for a video, even a picture of Thistlehair, but alas, all that exists is the song that bears his name, courtesy of the true kings of 80s and 90s country music: Alabama, who wrote about Thistlehair to give kids another magical character to believe in during this magical season. I cherish listening to this song every year, if for no other reason, then it gave us the most brilliant musical lyric of all time: “He tells us all about the star....and everything that it stands far!” Oh Thistlehair, the Christmas Bear! Click the video at the end of this post to listen for yourselves. Alabama will make believers outta all y’all!
That line, that one spectacular line! He tells us all about the star and everything that it stands far! My favorite service of the year at my little church growing up was the midnight Christmas Eve service. We started at 11 pm, so that always meant that it was Christmas as we drove home. And I’d look up at the bright sky – the good thing about growing up in Appalachia is that you got plenty of stars to light the way home – and I’d think about that star. Maybe not everything it stands far, but I’d wonder if one of those stars that I was looking at was the same star that shone in the Palestinian night over the place where Jesus lay, the light that led the shepherds from their fields and would lead the Magi to their great Epiphany. As I told our folks on Christmas Eve, it’ll be dark when we leave church, and I wonder still, if one of those stars shining on us, is the same one they saw.
So what does it stand far...or for, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing? Does it stand for the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, and Prince of Peace foretold by the prophet Isaiah? Does it stand for a new song that the whole earth is singing to our God, as Psalm 96 declares? Does it stand for the grace of God that has appeared, bringing salvation to all, as in the Letter to Titus? It stands for all these things, yes, but I suspect so, so much more.
It is the light that stands for the Light; that which broke at creation, shining in the darkness, yet the darkness did not overcome it, and does not overcome it still. The Light of the world. A child born in a cattle stall. His mother Miriam, herself named after the sister of Moses the liberator, named him, in her native tongue, Yeshua, the same name as Moses’ successor, who led their people into the Promised Land; a name that means “God saves.” He will be great, an angel had told her when her unplanned pregnancy was announced. Yes, he will, but right now he is merely a child, wrapped in the arms of his mother, held safe and warm. He will stand for many things throughout his life – good news for the poor, justice for the downtrodden, liberation for the prisoner, forgiveness for the sinner, hope for the lost, and an end for tyrants. Above and beyond all this, as his mother holds him, he stands for love.
Love often gets dressed up, like a house at Christmastime. Neat and tidy. But those of us who know love in its deepest, most profound form know that it is rarely either of those things. True love, agape love, divine love, gets messy. The birth of Yeshua, or Jesus in our tongue, certainly was messy, like our own. Sweat and blood permeated the atmosphere. A child born on the margins, born under suspicious circumstances. This the beginning of the Gospel according to scandal, as composer and lyricist Tony Brown writes in his Child In the Dirt, that holiness is born in the places we hide. Such is the love of God that enters the world, not through clean doors but through open wounds. That love that is the Light of all creation.
There is no place in all of existence where the Light cannot get in. There are those who would have us believe otherwise; strong men try to snuff out the Light, like the Caesars and Herods of old, leaving bitterness, sadness, and hate in their wake, but they cannot succeed. They could not then, and they will not now. In the same Palestinian fields where the shepherds lay keeping their sheep, where that star shines still, a group of Anglicans and Lutherans gathered on Christmas Eve to sing carols in Arabic and English, reading once again this story, the greatest story ever told, of the extraordinary events that brought divinity into the messiness of human fragility. They did so with understandable fear and concern, as a new illegal outpost set up by a settler group has been built nearby, threatening deeper disasters in Bethlehem, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank than they have yet known. Their carols rang out the joyful declaration of God’s presence among us, yet they were also an act of defiance and resistance. Theirs are the open wounds in which the love of God once more enters the world as the star shines upon them.
We do not have to squint to find such places. In his collection Love Poems from God, Daniel Ladinsky paraphrases and expands upon an original poem by the 16th century mystic San Juan de la Cruz: “If you want, the virgin will come walking down the road, pregnant with the holy, and say, ‘I need shelter for the night, please take me inside your heart, my time is so close.’ Then, under the roof of your soul, you will witness the sublime intimacy, the divine, the Christ, taking birth forever, as she grasps your hand for help; for each of us is the midwife of God, each of us. Yes, there, under the dome of your being does creation come into existence eternally, through your womb, dear pilgrim, the sacred womb of your soul, as God grasps our arms for help. For each of us is a beloved servant, never far. If you want, the virgin will come, walking down the street, pregnant with light, and sing.”
If you want. If we want. If we want to see the star and all it stands far we don’t have to look....far. Amongst the wreckage of hospitals in Gaza, in immigrant detention centers, and under over passes, and the Christ Light is brought into the world again. In the moments when folks as poor as shepherds and as wise as Magi stand up to tyrants determined to plaster their names across the world and say “No more of this!” the virgin gives birth anew to the song that casts down the mighty and lifts up the lowly. This is a messy world of ours, and humanity itself is a messy lot, but it is into such a mess that love was personified, coming in lowliness then, and coming in lowliness still. A more modern mystic, blessed Thomas Merton, wrote that “Though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes, yet with all that, God glorified Godself in becoming a member of the human race.” Merton knew what the angels sang out to the shepherds, what Mother Mary pondered in her heart, what the star that shone in that cattle stall meant: that everything, every single piece of creation, in all of its messiness, especially our own often flawed and broken human condition, has been redeemed through the grace brought to us in the physical presence of the One who gave breath to it all in the first place. If that ain’t good news, I don’t know what is! A gift, a Christmas gift, if you will, unearned and undeserved; the gift of grace that finds its deepest meaning when it is given away.
The best part of that song about Thistlehair is that Alabama doesn’t elaborate on what the star actually stands far. It’s almost as if we have to figure that out for ourselves. What about you? The star, the child, his mother, the shepherds; the world as it was, the world as it is, the world as we hope and pray it could be. Will you tell them? Will you go tell it on the mountain that Jesus Christ is born, tell people that grace, love, and mercy have been given to humanity, as tender and vulnerable as a child, and powerful as the great I AM? Will you tell them all about the star, and everything that it stands far?
