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Are you ready for Christmas? During the season of Advent – which annually begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and leads up to December 25 – followers of Jesus traditionally look for ways to prepare themselves for the coming of God’s own Son into the world. Throughout December we’ll ponder ways that we can ready ourselves to receive Jesus, once again, into our own hearts.
Every fall, the editors of Dictionary.com choose a Word of the Year.
It’s a term or phrase that captures a “pivotal moment in language and culture” – something that reflects social trends and global events of the previous 12 months.
This year they chose a pair of numbers: 67.
If you looked at that and said, “sixty-seven,” you are so not cool. It’s pronounced six-seven, and can also be written 6 7, 6-7, or six-seven. Early this year, 67 first appeared as online jargon – one of those internet memes that explodes in popularity via millions of social media exchanges. By summer it had become an international phenomenon. As far as anyone can tell, the craze was launched by the song Doot Doot (6 7) by the rap artist Skrilla.
What in the world does it mean?
“There’s not really a meaning behind 67,” explains Ashlyn Sumpter, a 10-year-old who lives in Indiana. It’s more like an inside joke. It’s funny. And it’s especially funny because younger generations can torment their parents and grandparents, who, when asking for a definition, are only confirming the fact they are hopelessly clueless.
The reason you don’t ask for a definition of 67 is that there is no definition. Some kids say it means “maybe this, maybe that,” or “so-so” – something akin to the French term “comme ci, comme ca.” It’s an all-purpose answer to any question. Then there’s the signature hand gesture – raising both palms face up, moving them alternately up and down.
If you haven’t seen anyone do that, just watch the next time a basketball team scores 67 points. Younger fans will jump up and start moving their hands, while their elders look on with incomprehension.
Dictionary.com acknowledges that their Word of the Year is “impossible to define. It’s meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical. It’s the logical endpoint of being perpetually online, scrolling endlessly…”
So, what’s the best way to respond to the 67 people in your life? Laugh along with them. After all, it’s just a joke – something that means nothing at all.
Which brings us to Christmas. According to contemporary society, what is December 25 supposed to mean?
American culture has settled on a formula that goes something like this: “Be a bit nicer to everyone during the last month of the year and buy lots of stuff to help the economy.”
According to the Hallmark Channel, as we’ve previously noted, Christmas is a great time to (a) get a new boyfriend or girlfriend, (b) reconcile with an estranged friend, (c) meet someone from a royal family, or (d) get a new boyfriend or girlfriend who used to be an estranged friend or someone from a royal family.
This is another way of saying that Christmas – with its exhausting demands, colorful decorations, and commercial obligations – has devolved into little more than an annual multi-week distraction. From a secular perspective, it really doesn’t mean anything.
This should not come as a surprise. For a very long time, a number of our culture’s highly regarded influencers – authors, artists, and philosophers – have assured us that nothing has any meaning at all.
Cartoonist Charles M. Shulz, the creator of Peanuts, said, “I don’t know the meaning of life. I don’t know why we are here. I think life is full of anxieties and fears and tears. It has a lot of grief in it, and it can be very grim. And I do not want to be the one who tries to tell somebody else what life is all about. To me it’s a complete mystery.”
When novelist Kurt Vonnegut was asked by his young son, “What are people for?” he replied, “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”
The late satirical British writer Douglas Adams, who penned “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” declared, “The Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is…42!” We can only wonder what he would have thought of 67.
Novelist Henry Miller observed darkly, “Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.”
Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus observed even more darkly, “The literal meaning of life is whatever you’re doing that prevents you from killing yourself.”
Then there’s Israeli philosopher of science Yuval Noah Harari, who declared, “As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual… Hence any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion.”
So, what is the meaning of life – or the meaning of anything at all?
So many voices, so many choices.
What we know for sure is that we all have to make a decision. Which of these voices – or which of the myriad other opinions expressed through the centuries – is spot on? Even if we say, “I don’t know,” or “I believe there is no meaning,” we’re making a choice. We’re choosing to trust our own perceptions.
We will either assign meaning to whatever gets us through the next 24 hours or numb ourselves in the face of meaninglessness with work, sex, substances, or perhaps our favorite Christmas albums.
Or we can ponder another possibility.
We can assess the claim that Someone has actually declared an answer to the riddle of life’s meaning. Jesus said, “And this is the real and eternal life: that they know you, the one and only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you sent” (John 17:3).
The Westminster Shorter Catechism, which was written in the 1640s as a kind of crash course in Christianity, is composed of 107 questions and answers. The most famous question, the first one, has been recited from memory by generations of children (with the understanding that “man” stands for “humanity”):
“Q: What is the chief end of man? A: Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
Which is a powerful clue concerning the meaning of Christmas.
At the center of the Bible’s account of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth there is a mind-bending miracle.
God becomes a human being. The artist becomes part of his canvas. This is so startling and unexpected that an entirely new word had to be coined just to describe it. That word is incarnation. Think of chili con carne – chili with meat. God himself became enfleshed – he took on carne – in order to become one of us.
It may be, as you make your way through December, that you will become exhausted, frustrated, or misunderstood. Things will go wrong. Accidents will happen.
But God won’t be watching from a distance, like a spectator seated in a heavenly balcony. He will know exactly what it feels like to be you. In the person of Jesus, he has personally been there.
In the immortal words of Linus, “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”
And no internet meme will ever compare.