For as long as I can remember my family has had the same
nativity scene that went on display day after Thanksgiving and went back into
the box on New Year’s Day. When I came home from college, I was surprised and
thrilled to see that it looked quite different.
With an empty nest and no one to stop her, my mother had
painted the Holy Family. The once pale white, blue eyed and blonde haired
family now looked a little more like ancient Jews.
I was the child of the closest thing to a mixed race family
that I knew for most of my life. My Armenian father, with his olive skin and
dark features, is part of the less than three percent of people who are
identified as not Caucasian in our
small New England Community (really, that is what the pie chart says). My mother,
a native Vermonter, identifies with the other 97%. I was somewhere in the
middle, even though I looked like a white kid and enjoyed the same lifestyle
and privileges as most of the population. When there is very little diversity,
it is easy to pick out who is different.
I knew there was something that wasn't quite right about the
nativity set for a long time, at least since I had some idea about the
connections amongst geography, race and ethnicity. My father's family was
decidedly not white and blonde, and Armenia looked like it was pretty close to
the Holy Land on a map. Thus, I decided that Jesus must have looked Armenian. I
like to think that I wasn’t that far off, but looking Armenian and being Armenian became very intertwined
in my mind.
"If our conception of God is radically false, then the
more devout we are the worse it will be for us" (Kindle loc 2170). I
thought first of the Westboro Baptist Church when I read this, and then Islamic
Extremists. But I wondered how we can avoid being radically false. So much of
our conception of God comes from our own experience- and where else would it
come from? We can only imagine our God from what we know. The dinner table
conversation from Talledega Nights was funny, because it is an over-the-top
version of what many people do: The beautiful blonde Holy Family, Jesus as a
loving father, or even viewing "Self as God" (loc 2314) (or Armenian
as God, in my case).
The Shema prayer is a practical way for Christ-followers to
ground ourselves in the one-ness of God amidst a society and culture that
demands worship as consumerism, and value based on possessions. Lavishly
decorated churches equal respect for our faith and our God, and success is
measured in wealth, possessions and appearance. When we value things, God is not at the top of the
pyramid, as in Hirsch’s drawings, or all the lines are squiggly and confused.
We lose direction.
Valarie Kaur, an interfaith leader and civil rights lawyer,
told the story of her faith journey at a youth program I helped coordinate. As
a child and teenager, Valarie felt out of place with her Sikh family and Indian
heritage. While singing Christian hymns with her vocal coach, she said, the
realization of the one-ness of God washed over her, and she understood how to
live her faith, to fit into the Sikh faith in a place where she was a minority.
The one-ness of God that she was proclaiming through a hymn granted her the
understanding of faith that would allow her to produce a documentary film,
obtain a law degree, and now travel the world to speak about peace building and
religious tolerance.
I recognize that Valarie's story is not a Christian one, but
it was one of the most powerful testimonies that I had ever heard in the
subject of faith and works. The recognition of the one-ness of God can be life
changing; though we are told that God is One, though we profess that belief in
the best of times, Christmas rolls around a few months later and we begin to
worship the things we don't have, the things others have, the things we want.
Of course, Christmas isn't the only time of year that we consume, but we see consumerism with much more intensity in November and
December.
Questions: How do you experience the One-ness of God? If God is One how does that change what
it means to be created in God’s image and likeness?
-Katie Kevorkian is a young adult leader and the Field Coordinator for Imagine No Malaria in the Cal-Pac Conference. Learn more here: https://www.facebook.com/imaginenomalariacalpac
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