Christ Is Always in Christmas

This is my favorite political bumper sticker: "God Bless the World — No Exceptions."

If you don't think that's a political message, then you haven't paid much attention to the presidential race, not to mention the past few polarized years in America.

A colleague of mine used to have that bumper sticker on her car. She jokes that she was never sure whether it was her driving or her message that brought out considerable hostility from some fellow drivers on the road, but she definitely noticed a bump in the cranky factor. These days, the bumper sticker hangs only at her desk.

Maybe it's because I'm a columnist and regularly read my mail, but I'll bet that some fellow Americans took offense to her inclusive version of faith, and felt the need to let her know, too.

It's the times we live in. What used to be the guiding — and private — principles for individual lives are now public fodder for campaign debates, political ads and ballot issues meant to divide us on everything from the war in Iraq and gay rights to whether a woman should control her own reproduction.

One exception to the God-is-on- our -side debate is immigration. I've heard plenty lately from those who want to give the boot to 12 million immigrants, including their children born here, but no one is invoking God as the reason for why this is the right thing to do. Maybe they all are hoping God isn't paying attention, just this once.

This time of year does bring out a particularly prickly kind of Christian who grouses on talk radio that everyone's taking the Christ out of Christmas because public schools hold "holiday programs" and overworked store clerks won't chirp "merry Christmas" with every swipe of the Visa.

This is very confusing to Christians like me. I picked up my mother's tattered copy of the New Testament, and no matter how much I searched, I couldn't find anything about Jesus insisting on commercial support for his endeavors. Perhaps he was counting on our faith being stronger than that.

It is one thing to be guided by our beliefs.

My quibble is with those who use God's guiding light as a searing lightsaber.

Good people of faith, any faith, can disagree on major issues of the day without ripping out each other's lungs. I never have understood how some decide that they, and only they, know God's true intentions and are allowed to use them as weapons of mass destruction. Shouldn't a belief in something, or someone, greater than ourselves also keep us mighty humble?

I, for one, am not comfortable insisting that when it comes to Scripture, I'm your translator. If I'm so enlightened, why am I still down here with everybody else?

My mother had the right idea, I think. Long before I saw that bumper sticker, she was insisting that God loved everybody, no exceptions.

She was one devout Christian, too. She used to love to play a game called "Bible Jeopardy" on the computer. I still can picture her sitting at the desk with my daughter, yelling out her answers: "First letter to Thessalonians! Market of Appius! Nicodemus!" She was unbeatable.

Growing up, our home telegraphed God's inclusiveness, especially at Christmas. Over the years, Mom had merged so many sets of nativity scenes that, by the time I was in fourth grade, we had about 20 wise men and enough livestock to start our own mega-farm.

She always set up the creche on a pile of sparkly cotton that she spread over the top of the TV set. Quite a welcome for the Christ child, that was, what with the plastic snowmen, wax Christmas trees and the free elves that came wrapped around bottles of Lemon Fresh Joy.

Whenever one of us suggested it was highly unlikely that giant elves in striped pajamas were touring Bethlehem at the time, she'd just laugh.

"Well, if they had been, Jesus would have welcomed them, wouldn't he?"

Hard to argue with that one. In fact, I don't want to argue at all when it comes to faith — mine, yours or anyone else's.

So may God bless you, dear readers. Every last one of you.

No exceptions.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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