For Wilshire Baptist Church
Somewhere in my boxes of stuff that need to be sorted through and thrown away, I have a red campaign-style button that says “WIN.” It’s a souvenir from the 1970s and the Ford Administration when economic inflation was out of control. The letters on the button were an acronym for “Whip Inflation Now,” the hope being that people would pin the button to their shirts and be motivated to help get things in balance through personal savings and disciplined spending. Skeptics suggested the buttons should be turned upside down to spell “NIM” – “No Immediate Miracles.”
I don’t know where I got that button, but I never wore it because it didn’t really apply to me. I saw the news and I understood things were tight, but I was a teenager and economic policy was something for the adults to figure out. I had everything I needed and most of what I wanted. I didn’t pay much attention to the real sacrifices my parents made to keep food on the table and gas in the cars.
Years later, the WIN campaign and the button it spawned is considered a marketing disaster, but I think the flip side – the NIM message – may have some merit in this COVID-19 environment. While the speedy development of vaccines has been called a “miracle” by some, and there is excitement about lining up and getting stuck, it will be many months before enough of the population has been vaccinated to allow us to take off our masks and move around freely the way we want to. Meanwhile, we’ll have to be patient and continue social distancing while waiting for the miracle.
In some ways it’s like the Christmas story we’ve just walked through during the weeks of Advent. A messiah was promised, and a messiah was born, but it took some 30 years before he began his ministry of redemption and salvation. And now, 2000 years later, the declaration from the angels of “peace on earth and goodwill to all people” can ring as hollow as a bad marketing slogan on many days. We’re still waiting for that miracle, but I think the problem may be that we don’t understand what miracles are really about.
If you’ve watched any Hallmark Christmas movies, you know they throw the word “miracle” around quite a bit, but their “Christmas miracles” are the fleshy, superficial type: bakeries saved from closure, towns brought back to life, lost relatives located, personal dreams resurrected and most especially true love found just in time at the Christmas tree lighting. Those miracles are experienced in nice compact timeframes of a couple of weeks and have no connection at all to the true miracle of Christmas other than the holiday decorations and music.
The true miracle of Christmas – eternal life – comes at the end of life as we know it with smaller miracles encountered here and there to refresh our sense of wonder as we wander down the path. The true miracle of Christmas is not immediate unless you begin living now as if you already are living by the eternal calendar. When you do that, you start to look beyond yourself at the bigger picture. You start to care about people you don’t know. You fret less about the little irritations of life and give more thought to injustices that impair others’ lives. You start to do things that are motivated by hope, faith and love.
We don’t need a button or slogan for that. We just need to live it.