On a bitter-cold Thursday afternoon near Christmastime last
year, I pulled up to a stop in Roseville;
a modest rambler with a yard full of Christmas lights and figurines (aka "gaak"). I was
training in my friend Mark, another underemployed Lutheran pastor who, like me,
thought there was something oddly fitting about “men of the cloth” hauling
trash.
I flipped the lid on that first can of the wintery morning,
and looking back at us was the cherubic face of a plastic figure of the baby Jesus.
Mark and I looked at each other and broke into laughter, wondering at the odds
that the first stop together of two pastors in a garbage truck would involve
Jesus in the trash. We also mused at what moved people to throw it out: Was it
broken? Light no longer worked? Faded from exposure? Or just time for a new cresh…perhaps
one where Jesus does not have pale skin and blue eyes?
Anyway, I showed Mark how to tip the can with the hydraulic
lift and we moved on. By the end of the day we had all but forgotten about baby
Jesus until we got to the dump. Because first in is last out, the last item to
fall atop the pile of garbage we had collected that day was the figurine of
Jesus, only now smeared with the garbage in which he had been compressed.
I simply had to snap the picture. And, like so many of the
images that present themselves in trash, this got me thinking. I thought about
the extent to which it is a startling image of our disposable culture. Use it
and toss it, the turning of natural resources into mountains of trash, but also
the way in which people, workers, are increasingly viewed as disposable. This
Jesus was disposable too. Is not that the way the story goes in the Gospel as
well? He is disposed of at Golgatha, the site where it is said garbage from the
city was tossed.
But it is Christmas, and not time to contemplate such
unpleasantness, right? A time for hearth and home, warm welcome and good cheer,
tidings of comfort and joy, except…
The story is that Jesus was born into poverty and dirt, his
family was homeless that cold night. They took shelter in a stable, most likely
a dank cave full of animals and manure. From birth to death, the Gospels speak
of Jesus as a person of lowly means and estate who lived with the “unwashed”
and the out-cast, whom the powerful refused... and treated as refuse.
The more I think of it, the more “The Little Lord Jesus
Asleep in the Dump,” as my daughter gleefully sang when she saw the picture, is
a truer and more powerful image to contemplate at Christmas than the shiny,
happy, pretty ones we would rather imagine and place in our yards.
