Advent Devotion 9 – Naughty or Nice?

The classic image of Santa involves the critical question – Have you been naughty or nice? The answer determines your fate with Santa. Many people project this kind of thinking on to God and feel God makes a similar determination the result of which accounts for our destiny with God.

So, are we naughty or nice? The vast majority of people want to be or intend to be nice. Basically, people want to be good and do the right thing. But does that intention really make us good? And can being good actually make us bad?

Apparently, doing good can give us the impression that we are good people. We’ve done the right thing. We have been generous. We have helped someone. So, we feel good about ourselves and we feel that we are good. That’s all fine. But we start to think of all this good like “money in the bank.” Then when the opportunity comes to do something morally questionable, we think, “Well, I’ve done all this good, it’s ok if I do this bad thing. I have done plenty of good to make up for it.” We think of our good as the counter balance to the bad thing we do.

A minor example could have to do with eating. Say we are trying to diet. We eat a low calorie salad and flavored water for lunch. In the mid afternoon, we are feeling a bit hungry. So, we have some chips and dip to tide us over, thinking it’s ok because we only had a salad for lunch.

But this kind of thinking also happens with regard to moral decision-making by individuals and corporations. We may donate a lot to charity. Then when we are doing our tax returns, we think we’ve been generous, we have been good so, we’re entitled to cheat on our return and not declare something we should really be disclosing. Or a company may do all kinds of things that are helpful to the environment and then feel that that makes it ok for them to ignore an EPA regulation and dispose of waste inappropriately.

With this kind of thinking, we convince ourselves that being good makes it ok to be bad once in a while. Being good earns us the right to to be bad.

So as we prepare for Christmas, beware. Pay attention. Are you being nice or good or generous and then using that as an excuse to do something selfish, or wrong, or bad?

The message of Christmas is that we are loved naughty or nice. Naughty AND nice.

When you do acts of charity, for example, don’t have it trumpeted before you; that is what hypocrites do in the synagogues and the streets, that they may be praised by others. The truth is, they’ve already received their reward in full. But when you do acts of charity, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing; your good deeds must be done in secret, and your Abba God – who sees all that is done in secret – will repay you.
Matthew 6: 2-4

Prayer: This Christmas season and all year, we pray for hearts that are pure. We want to be good and we want to do good, not as license to do bad or out of self interest, but in response to the unconditional love at the heart of life. May we forgive ourselves and others with the same abandon God extends mercy to us. Amen.