I was about twelve when my mother broke the news to me that Santa --the one who came around our neighborhood the week before Christmas --would not be bringing me a gift. Of course, I knew he wasn't the real Santa, but it still hurt. The years were passing, my body was changing, but I didn't feel old enough to get dissed by the local Kris Kringle. To make matters worse, a miscommunication days later revealed to me that even the real Santa wasn't real. I'd looked at my dad's unshaved face (not sure what was going on there; typically, he was Brylcreemed and baby-faced) and in response to his whiskers called him "Santa." His response was, "Who told you I was Santa?" Huh? All the innocence of childhood shattered in two prosaic conversations. But I've made it; I've lived quite a long time without Santa or his other imaginary benefactors. And it's been quite some time since childhood. There are those, however, who might claim I'm just as foolish, those who have derogatory names for the One in Whom I do believe. They might say I'm a special kind of stupid to worship The Invisible...
...unless He exists.
C.S. Lewis famously said, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." Of course, Lewis wasn't talking about believing that Christianity exists or that real Christians walk the land; he was alluding to the validity of the beliefs and tenets of Christianity as given in the Word of God and walked out by Jesus Christ. Lewis believed in the truth with enough wholeheartedness and passion to pursue The Truth. He allowed it to transform his life and the way in which he saw everything. And that is both the difference between belief in the imaginary and the evidence for the invisible God.
Those days of believing in Santa, his fairy friend and cotton-tailed counterpart were times of imagination; not because their fetes were so incredulous, but because their existence was so manageable. We could send them wish lists, leave them empty vessels to fill with exactly the items we craved, stick useless body parts --okay, teeth under our pillows and be assured of the desired result. Almost. For the greater part of the year, these were unheard of, awaiting summons on some island of imaginary patrons. A month before Christmas, a week or two prior to Easter, and the second our tooth began to wiggle, our parents trotted them out with warnings to be good. As if that would regulate our behavior. Absent their generosity and absent any more baby teeth, they were of no consequence to us whatsoever. They changed nothing. Our deal was done; their obligation was fulfilled, and our fealty fell away. There was no relationship.
Despite the mockery of others, however, I have no need to give argument for belief in Jesus versus belief in Santa Claus. I will instead draw comparison between belief in the gods of this world and belief in such things as comprise the heroes of childish traditions.
In 1 Samuel 5, we read that the Philistines had captured the Ark of the Covenant upon which the presence of God rested. They took it to the temple of their god, Dagon, hoping to harness its power like some sort of amulet. Instead, the following morning, they found their statue of Dagon face down before the Ark of the Covenant. So, being good little worshipers, they helped their god up, dusted him off, and stood him in his place. The next morning, it was worse! Dagon was face down before the ark, only his face was in one place, still attached to his head, but his body and hands were severed. Did the Philistines break out the glue gun and get to work? I don't know, but I do know that was only the beginning of their troubles. And all for a god who needed the help of men to pick his face out of the dust. The god they worshiped could not talk or walk or think or create or save himself, much less save or judge human beings created in the image of God. Any god unable to stand, any god who can be coerced out of retirement by a tooth, any god who can be manipulated into doing as I desire is no god at all.
We make spouses our gods, jobs our gods, money our god, status and "LIKEs" and homes and education and food our gods. We can even make our church god. We put these things before everything else because we are getting something from them; they are filling some empty place within us. But when we run out of teeth? When the god is too small for the emptiness or too broken to stand on its own? When we have to keep grinding and giving to feed our god that it might feed us, where is the peace? Or when the god can be tossed out with the candy wrappers or given away like the bike we've outgrown, when we impute our god with worth, what sort of god is that? Or when the god sits silently in our wallets or hangs in an 11x14 frame on our wall as our character and our relationships burn to the ground, how can that be a loving god?
I'm not going to argue the existence of God. He is alive and He is God. But I will encourage you to question those things that have your attention. Can you say your character has been permanently, positively transformed because of them? I will encourage you to evaluate the fillers of your empty. How often must they be fed? I will ask you to inventory the activities, the relationships, the possessions you hold tightly and determine whether they are earthly treasure or eternal treasure. I will urge you to fall on your face before the One True God, and if your gods fall with you, leave them there. By the power and truth of the Invisible, the insufficiency and folly of gods crafted by human design is made visible all year long.
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