Commentary: Christmas and the laughing God

PARIS, Dec. 23 (UPI) -- It is not customary to welcome Christmas by citing the Second Psalm. But the state of the Church calls for it. If one looks at the success rate of those trying to squash Christianity by terror, torture, court rulings and municipal edicts, one verse from Scripture comes to mind:

"He who sits in the Heavens laughs; the Lord has them in derision." (Psalm 2:4).

Somehow Christianity's foes simply do not seem to get the message. The more they try to suppress or dilute the message that about 2,000 years ago the Immanuel, or "God with us," was born to a virgin, as prophesied by Isaiah eight centuries earlier, the more vibrant the Church becomes.

It has survived the vilest heresies and the most gruesome persecutions; it has survived Hitler and Stalin. It suffered horribly under Mao, and yet there is hardly a place on earth with a more robust Christian community than China.

What Nestorian missionaries in the 8th century did not accomplish; where the Jesuits failed in the 16th century and Anglicans and Lutherans in the 19th, the godless Mao Zedong has succeeded. During his bloody reign a sturdy indigenous church grew underground. One day its emergence will be rated as one of the great miracles in church history.

If tyrants only understood that Christians worship a Jewish God - one with a sense of irony, that is - they would probably proceed more gingerly against them. But then, how would a tyrant, who by definition is driven by hubris, ever understand the dictum of the church father Tertullian (ca. 150-240 A.D.) that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church?

As the world's 2 billion Christians celebrate the birth of their Savior this weekend, they might just join the Creator in laughter, especially when pondering the way the Spirit blows in the new millennium.

Europe, once the principal disseminator of the Christian message, has lost its faith, or so the cliché goes. But then this is not the first time in history. Central and northern Germany, for example, had become pagan again by the time Luther came along in the 16th century, at least the countryside.

And between 1848 and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), German Protestant churches were about as empty as they are now.

Then as now the faithful bemoaned this state of affairs, but the Holy Spirit, that aspect of the Trinity that gives life and creates faith, will not have his direction dictated by humans, not even by the most pious.

Today, as even wise European business leaders cry out for an end of "secularist fundamentalism," and as more and more young Europeans express a "craving for God," the nations once colonized by Europeans embrace Christianity with a fervor never seen before in these parts. They send missionaries north to bring the descendants of their former colonial masters back to the fold.

Meanwhile, North Korean Christians are being tormented in ghastly ways reminiscent of the late Roman Empire. And yet we know that their communities grow and grow, well aware that they risk having molten steel poured over them or being forced to vegetate in cages not higher than two feet.

One wonders what explosion of faith will become manifest when their country's Communist system finally implodes, as it surely will.

Compared with all this the actions of Christianity's detractors in the West seem so ludicrous one its tempted to laugh before the end of this episode comes in sight.

Given the unintended outcome of persecution elsewhere in the world -- and in church history -- do today's secularist ideologues really believe they can subdue this religion by banning crèches and the display of the Ten Commandments in public?

Does the "gay" lobby really expect to gain anything from instigating laws that would punish pastors and priests who dare to preach on Biblical texts that define homosexual acts as an abomination in God's eyes?

Could there be anything more foolish than the assumption that carnal desires are stronger than the inspired Word of God, which 2 billion of us affirm?

Of course it would not be silly if what we celebrate this weekend were nothing but a fairytale. But as Ronald Reagan once said:

"I still can't help wondering how we can explain away what to me is the greatest miracle of all and which is recorded in history. ...

"He (Jesus) never gets farther than an area perhaps 100 miles wide. He (preaches) for three years. Then he is arrested, tried and convicted. There is no court of appeal, so he is executed at 33 along with two common thieves. ...

"This ... propertyless young man has, for 2,000 years, had a greater effect on the world than all the rulers, kings and emperors, all the conquerors, generals and admirals; all the scholars, scientists and philosophers who have ever lived - all of them put together.

"How do we explain that, unless he really was what he said he was?"

Reagan echoed in an astounding way what almost 2,000 years earlier the Pharisee and scribe Gamaliel - the Apostle Paul's teacher - had warned the Jewish Council of Elders (Sanhedrin) about as it pondered the fate of the apostles after Christ's crucifixion:

"If this plan or undertaking is of men, it will fail; but if it is from God you will fail. You might even be found opposing God" (Acts 5:38-9).

Christmas is the season to be merry; this we know. For some, however, it is also the time to take the scribe Gamaliel's words to heart.