Besides, if the point is to have a civil conversation about our differences, then let's begin by owning our differences and then see how much headway we can make talking to one another. A conversation about what we all hold in common is a conversation about something none of us believe. That's easy to do, except for the part where you expect the other person to surrender the particularity of their views. That's when you discover that conversations about the lowest common denominator between religions is a western, post-Enlightenment conceit that almost none of the rest of the world finds tenable or tempting.
The third impulse is embarrassment. Have Christians misbehaved in the name of Christ? Of course—as do all human beings, with and without a cause. And when the members of our own communities behave in ways that are cruel and abusive, it is natural to long for some distance between "them" and "us."
But there is no cause or commitment that we live into with perfection. There are times when we would like to shed our own skin, never mind distance ourselves from others.
Refusing to name the Christ who comes at this time of year might sound self-aware. But it is sophomoric. It is the easy resolution of the tensions that arise between our values and the lives we actually live. Refusing to name the One who comes abandons us to a faith of our making and that self-made faith is no less susceptible to subterfuge and evil than the confessions of the church. In fact, because it is of our own making, it could be argued that it is even more susceptible.
Such are at least some of the impulses at work in this year's batch of revelations about Jesus. I find it helpful to remember that they lie behind each new, earth-shattering revelation that the media machine shares with us at the time of year. It allows me to assert a certain amount of freedom from the self-important announcement that so many make, urging that—at long last—there is convincing evidence that I can't believe or that there is something else I should believe other than the faith into which I was baptized.
It's too much to hope, I suppose, but at some future Advent perhaps everyone will take seriously the admonition of one of the church's great Eucharistic hymns: "Let all mortal flesh keep silence."
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