Dai­ly Reflec­tion
Decem­ber 24, 2001

It’s Christ­mas Eve.  Chil­dren are just about pop­ping out of their skins with antic­i­pa­tion of gifts and can­dy and the prospects of a long peri­od of no school (always my favorite ele­ment of the hol­i­day).  My aunt would height­en the joy­ful­ly anx­ious wait for THE DAY by hap­pi­ly inton­ing to us: “HO HO HO” as she still does for my cousins’ children.

My youngest sis­ter began about two weeks pri­or to Christ­mas plea-bar­gain­ing with my father for a “pre­view,” oth­er­wise known as an ear­ly present.  Now my youngest sis­ter was the most per­sua­sive of us when it came to my father so we nor­mal­ly chan­neled all requests through her.  I can’t remem­ber a Christ­mas where she did not man­age to get her pre­view, a sam­ple of the delights to come on Christ­mas morning!

Anthro­pol­o­gists have always stressed the impor­tance of gifts.  In fact, Levi-Strauss tells us there would be no soci­ety or civ­i­liza­tion with­out them.  Mar­cel Mauss, in no way relat­ed to Mick­ey or Min­nie, even wrote a book about gifts called The Gift.

Gifts make relationships.

But there are dif­fer­ent kinds of gifts.  In Amer­i­can soci­ety we like our gifts to be equal and imme­di­ate.  We are com­plete­ly embar­rassed if some­one gives us a gift and we don’t have one to return.  We are only slight­ly less embar­rassed if our gift to a per­son is not of equal value!

But the read­ings for today talk about anoth­er kind of gift-giv­ing, imbal­anced and delayed.  Hard­ly gifts in our eyes it would seem.  Yet imbal­ance and delay are the nature of the Divine gift.

Imbal­anced means the recip­i­ent can nev­er return the full val­ue of gift.  That’s what the first read­ing is about.  The peo­ple of Israel TRY to return the gift of their free­dom and elec­tion as the cho­sen peo­ple by giv­ing God the grand­est tem­ple of all times.  Not only does the Lord remind the peo­ple what the Lord has done for them but also tells about even more bless­ings that they will receive.

But the Lord also receives the gift of the tem­ple from the people.

Delayed means that gifts are not giv­en one for one imme­di­ate­ly but that exchange is per­formed at dif­fer­ent and some­times unex­pect­ed times.  Thus in the Gospel Zechari­ah, the father of John, proph­e­sizes about his own child who will announce the com­ing of the Lord and tells us of the bless­ings we will receive from the Christ Child: light, free­dom, mer­cy, jus­tice peace.   There are gifts the world has wait­ed for and indeed we still wait for!  But we have tast­ed them in the past and we antic­i­pate and work for them in for our future.

They sure beat an Easy Bake Oven, Bar­bie Cell Phone, or even a Har­ry Pot­ter Action Figure!

Tonight and tomor­row we will be pop­ping out of our skins to receive and to give gifts.  I bought a neon ele­phant for my grand-nephew John!  It in no way repays the gift he is to me when he hauls up on my lap with a book for me to read to him or hugs me for no par­tic­u­lar rea­son but it’s a return.  It’s also delayed - I live in Oma­ha and he in New Jer­sey and I don’t see him too often.

Our best gifts are not the ones where we even up the score.  Imbal­ance and delay are what sews us togeth­er social­ly and spir­i­tu­al­ly for as we wait for HO HO HO, we remem­ber that the great­est gifts can nev­er be rec­i­p­ro­cat­ed and that we are a peo­ple in antic­i­pa­tion of the ful­fill­ment of God’s promis­es, the com­ing of Christ, remem­bered at Christ­mas and antic­i­pat­ed at the end of time!

Gifts keep rela­tion­ships.  Think about what we have received!  Think about what is yet to come!