Hello friends and welcome back to the Pasture Talk podcast.
We are taking a short reprieve
from our other sort of series and the things that we had been doing and we’re going to
take a few weeks here looking at Advent/Christmas themes and we’re doing it with an interesting
frame which is really a natural frame if we’re going to be honest.
Clint and I have very different
sort of perspectives on Christmas.
I don’t think substantially different views of Christmas itself
but we definitely get to it from different roads and we’re going to reflect a little bit over the
next couple weeks on what we can learn about this really kind of messy entangled in some ways
beautiful in some ways really complicated story that is Christmas and our observance of it in
the midst of a culture that has very much made it its own cultural thing at the same time where
where Christians have our own unique practices and understandings of what is happening in this day.
So we turn our attention today specifically on some of the background of this.
We’re going to look a little bit at how we get to our understanding of Christmas today.
It may be more complicated and nuanced than you might initially think and that is going to set for
us a larger sort of stage or platform that the rest of our conversations can be built because
in order to talk about some of the fun stuff of Christmas which is coming or talk a little bit
about the music the traditions how some of the things that it’s easy to sort of point ourselves
in the direction of is this good or helpful or is it not those conversations are very much
dependent upon the fact that we all have a shared understanding of how we get to this kind of
entanglement that we have today.
So we’re glad to have you with us and we’ll jump right into it.
I think what is really interesting Michael is the extent to which Christmas is
clouded.
It has a pretty checkered history in many ways.
Some people are surprised that the
amount of diversity, variety,
and conflict you know every year we fight about something that
has to do with Christmas whether it’s the Starbuck cups or whether it’s acts in Xmas or whether it’s
you know some change to something traditional a song that is or isn’t okay.
But I think maybe
people would be surprised to know that that’s been going on for a long time.
Christmas has a rich
wonderful history of celebration but right alongside it there have always been questions
about what is and isn’t appropriate.
Interestingly enough even Christmas itself was one-time
a life of faith and I think that’s surprising for people.
It starts right away in the very
earliest instances as people began to think that there should be a moment where we celebrated the birth of Christ.
Interestingly enough that itself caused some conflict.
A) Nobody had a good sense
of when Jesus was born.
There wasn’t a clear indication that they had a particular day or
season in mind and so even choosing the date for Christmas which is not something we think of
but this caused its own unhappiness for people and one of the first Christmas fights probably
was not only whether or not to have it but when to have it.
Yeah so this is one of my favorite
sort of conversation starters that happens occasionally.
A person will come in
and they’ll kind of look at you like you know oh I’ve got a ace up my sleeve and they’ll say hey
pastor did you know love that lead-in did you know did you know that Christmas was actually
a pagan holiday like like they just swore in that moment did you know well yeah actually we did know
and Christmas extends way way beyond what we think of as December 25th with all of the inherited
time traditions of that day and even the biblical witness that we’ve associated with that day.
What we see is historically there there is a really a very ancient kind of celebration that happens
in this time of year.
In the middle of December you’ve got the moment of the least or the evening
with the least amount of daylight.
You’ve got this very hard season that is going to lead
into a gradually increasing march towards spring.
Some things that we don’t even think of things
like lots of farmers and herders aren’t going to keep their flocks all through the winter.
So this is a natural season where they are going to cull those herds they’re going to have fresh
meat for the first time maybe the entire season.
It’s also the time when wine is fermenting and
so there’s drink available.
So this becomes a natural moment in the ancient world for many
different kinds of celebrations.
Different places do it in different ways and you can pull out the
history of that if that’s of interest to you.
But the point being this is a sort of a a larger
fertile ground this time of year is for different kinds of celebrations throughout history for
lots of different reasons and so as the church continues to gain in its influence in the second
century there begins to be a reckoning with what Christians do with this season with as it grows
and influence in the Roman Empire and therefore Christianity is now having impacts in different
places with different traditions in this season.
That’s when the church begins to take very
seriously this idea of a Christmas celebration but up until that point Easter was the central
holiday of Christian faith and practice.
That is the day when Jesus Christ is resurrected and
that is the day that we see clearly emphasized in scriptures even the sermon that Peter gives in
the book of Acts is very much emphasizing that moment.
It’s then later once again second century
as Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman Empire now it needs to begin to
interface with this larger Christmas December season and we start to have this attention paid
to the 25th.
Yeah and it’s really several centuries before it lands consistently on December 25th.
A lot of diversity in terms of when Christmas is celebrated also alongside that a lot of
questions remained about should Christians even celebrate December 25th the birth of Christ.
Did that matter?
That’s not scripturally it’s not very important in the sense of the scriptures don’t make
a big deal of it it’s not all in all the gospels such as Easter and Good Friday and those other places.
So initially there are people of faith arguing that Christmas shouldn’t be celebrated
and as it gains traction even then it becomes a kind of alternative to some of the other things
that were happening on that winter solstice and some of that carried over.
There were some pretty
you know as it is now Christmas blended pretty quickly into the celebration of a new year
and things that Christians typically were expected not to participate in they may have
jumped in with both feet when it came to that week after Christmas or even some cases Christmas
itself.
So Christmas is not something that was simply fixed in stone at the beginning of the
it has really ebbed and flowed for the first thousand years almost of the church’s life.
A lot of ambiguity about Christmas both when it was what it was how it should be celebrated
if it should be celebrated.
Very ironic now Michael that we argue about whether
places respect Christmas enough when our original journey began with really the question should we even have it?
Yeah that it’s a great cosmic twist and they those are some of the most interesting
turns in history when we see how the pendulum can shift in these substantial ways.
I think a thing
that needs said early on in this conversation is the people who believe that the Christian
appropriation of holidays somehow undoes everything that surrounds it.
I have a fundamental misread
I think of the celebration but also if I’m going to be honest history because Christians have been
doing this kind of thing for a long time.
What makes Christmas different is the the absolute scale.
I mean Christmas is like any other kind of religious holiday except on steroids to the
twenty thousand twenty thousand twenty thousand degree.
I’m making up words I can’t even say them.
The reality is that Christmas has just gone so massive and it has such a large commercial and
cultural and then of course even religious impact that it is at another level.
But the reality is
the church has always been comfortable with some level of baptizing pagan things to come into
community and say well you were celebrating this but now we recognize that in light of the revelation
of Jesus Christ you shouldn’t celebrate that anymore you should celebrate this instead and
you can point to many different holidays a lot of those very culturally based different regions and
people different languages and the church has been comfortable with that kind of appropriation.
Now one has always had an argument regarding how much of that is appropriate and how much needs to be
done for a practice or a celebration to be fully Christian and no longer somehow beholden
to the original practices that may have inspired it.
Those conversations have been had literally
for hundreds and thousands of years and so we’re not going to in some way push that needle into a
completely different direction.
The point though being is that in order to take our understanding
of Christmas today seriously we need to be willing to accept that it is not in some way
a nugget that has been carried throughout all time in history.
That’s just simply an overly simplistic and to be honest an ahistorical understanding of what Christmas
actually is.
To understand it in its fullness we need to understand that it has had a lot of
synchronicities from cultures and times as well as theologians and Christians who have had
substantial disagreements about what should be in the fold of the Christmas celebration.
And Clint began a sermon series that we were doing here at First Press yesterday in which you
mentioned Clint this idea that Christmas has built into it a kind of small source material.
I mean realistically the Gospels don’t say a lot about Christmas and we often as Christians,
especially on this version of our Christmas celebration,
this moment in history as we
celebrate Christmas with all of its complexities,
we sometimes read into the Bible what it actually
says.
But in reality the text is small.
Two books,
very small sections that tell us about the birth
of Christ and in many ways Christmas has become the largest religious celebration in the Christian
church and that kind of dichotomy is going to create some really interesting places,
some hooks for conversation and even historically disagreement.
I think it probably is difficult for us Michael
because we have so many things that are so deeply entrenched into how we do Christmas.
We have trees, we have lights, we have music, we have gifts, we have Santa Claus.
But what isn’t I think important to understand but sometimes hard to remember is that nearly everything that
Christians got in regard to Christmas we got from somewhere else.
So there were other groups
using trees and Christians decided we’ll make that part of our celebration.
The idea of decorating,
we didn’t come up with that.
The idea of gift giving,
it grows out of other traditions.
So the Christians that first celebrated Christmas borrowed from what they saw around them and they
essentially said we’re going to do a similar practice but we’re going to try and make it
a referent of Jesus.
We’re going to try and make it about this celebration of Jesus Christ coming
to the world.
But those things don’t begin as Christian practices and each and every time
we embraced one there was some argument about whether it belonged,
about whether it was okay
because say the origins of it were not some place,
not some group that Christians wanted to
be associated with.
And so there’s this constant ebb and flow in the history of Christmas and that continues.
There are Christians who celebrate Christmas who won’t have anything to do with Santa
Claus because they believe that’s outside of the faith story.
There are others that will appeal to
the idea of St.
Nicholas and say no,
that Christians came up with that.
The truth is always a little of both,
a little messier than simply cut and dry.
The phrase Merry Christmas
itself is a misnomer of some sorts because Christmas was a reference to a worship service, the Christ mass,
not the idea of a special day.
And so we just have to understand a little bit
about where we come from because in our own day we continue to have to make decisions about what
does and doesn’t belong to Christmas,
about what is the religious aspect of Christmas that boosts
our faith and that makes itself important in our discipleship,
and what are the cultural aspects
of Christmas that may or may not be helpful and that we may need to view with some,
I won’t say, I’m tempted to say skepticism,
but I’ll just say some awareness or at least some
thoughtfulness about whether that does or doesn’t point to Christ,
which is the point of Christian Christmas.
So we’re going to see this theme I think that will trace through several of our
conversations, so we might as well be up front with it right now.
I think that what we’re going
to discover is that as people of faith,
especially if you’re compelled by or you’re within the
Reformed tradition, we tend to be people who emphasize thought and we give a lot of emphasis
upon theological consistency, not that we’ve always done that perfectly,
but it’s a value
that we have.
The problem in bringing that frame without other frames to Christmas is that Christmas
is at this point so much more than a consistent theology of worship to Jesus Christ.
It is an emotion.
I mean,
Christmas is designed in many different ways, the lights,
the songs,
the traditions,
the food, the smells,
the gatherings, the things that we do.
I mean,
these are in many
ways, and I don’t mean this negatively,
but they’re constructed and they’ve been honed over time
to leave us with a state of feeling.
To give some evidence to this point,
Clint, I think of the Christmas Eve service that we have here,
that moment where the sanctuary
slowly lights as candles light.
Many people describe that experience as a metaphor of their
experience of Christmas, that Christmas isn’t truly Christmas without that song,
that moment, that sort of prescience that happens.
I point to that as an example to say that’s how I think
Messy and Tovolut and Bound Together Christmas is because we feel in that moment a kind of sacredness,
and yet in that moment,
we’re also experiencing far more than just theology.
It’s not just about
the birth of Christ.
It’s also about the sense of community,
the gathering of family,
the traditions that will follow.
There’s so much that happens that’s been baked into this moment that if we’re
going to be honest about it,
we need to be willing to sort of unpack that.
That said,
I just want to add in here,
I don’t think that means we need to throw everything out.
This isn’t a baby with the bathwater situation.
To be thoughtful about Christmas and to admit that there’s a lot of
things happening here, I don’t think keeps Christians from celebrating Christmas.
I do think what it does, it asks us to submit Christmas to Christ as opposed to just assuming that everything
that we’ve done is somehow encapsulating of the perfect Christmas story.
That’s where Christians, I think, have made mistakes.
We’ve begun to think that the traditions themselves somehow represent
the only true celebration of Jesus Christ,
and when we’re willing to allow history and context to inform that,
maybe even reimagine that,
we become less possessive of this thing and more willing
for it to change into ebb as it always has,
and hopefully towards the end as those who celebrate Christ,
towards the end of making Christ the center as opposed to whatever traditions we may have put there.
Yeah, it’s interesting, and those who are part of First Press aren’t surprised by this.
You are far more gracious to Christmas than I am.
I am ambivalent at best most of the time in regard
to Christmas, but I think the tension there is that Christmas in many ways in the place we live
has nothing to do with Christian Christmas.
So much of what we understand to be Christmas
has almost nothing inherently to do with Jesus.
Now, that doesn’t mean that faithful people
can’t do those things and keep Jesus at the center of it,
but it is to say that what our
church tried to create when we carved out the idea of a celebration of the birth of Christ,
and so little of what we have as Christmas really points to Jesus from a cultural sense.
And yes,
you can be angry about that,
you can fight back,
but the idea that Christians argue
over things like whether a cup says Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays,
or whether you write out Christmas or put an X in it,
these are the most trivial matters in the bigger picture of
whether or not our own Christmases point to Jesus,
or whether we’re simply embracing the
culture around us that has taken what began as our thing and turned it into their own thing,
largely to market it.
And we live in this weird moment,
I think, and it’s not a new moment,
but it is increasingly true in which our thing really is no longer our thing.
And what do you
do with that?
How do you find the genuine sense and truth of the celebration of Jesus Christ
in this huge mess of Christmas stuff?
Sorry if I just called your favorite Christmas
thing a huge mess,
but again, I lean a little bit that direction.
But how do we keep our focus in
the right place in light of so much that would point it in the wrong direction?
So I wouldn’t call it maybe a mess.
I think that maybe it’s a pejorative term,
but I would say
that as Christians, we are always balancing things that are held in tension.
And what maybe makes Christmas hard is because for many of us,
Christmas is a season of lightness,
a season where we value a moment of giving up care and trying to value the things that matter.
And so, as it feels like Christmas is being shaped by cultural forces,
the temptation is to circle the wagons
and to say this needs protected away from this.
But the fundamental value of this conversation
is that when you circle the wagons around Christmas,
what you will almost inevitably miss
is that what you’re protecting is a thing that Christians have been suspect of and have been
trying to hold lightly for a very,
very long time, really since the beginning.
Let me give you
an example of this.
So think of the Puritans,
the men and women that make their way out of
England.
They come to America very much for the purpose of establishing a pure,
theologically consistent church.
When they come to America,
they institute a policy.
In fact, they made it law in Boston that you cannot celebrate Christmas.
And in fact, if the Puritans caught you celebrating Christmas,
they would find you five shillings for that infraction.
That seems harsh to us,
but the reason for this,
they took very seriously,
maybe can I say literally,
but regardless, very seriously, the scriptural account
of Jesus’s birth.
And they saw and they were right in seeing that December 25th is not named
as the birthday of Christmas.
And so for them,
it was actually impinging upon the scriptural witness
to make that the day that we don’t know when it is.
And so therefore we shouldn’t institute a day
for that, but rather we should celebrate the coming of Christ all year round.
That’s the spirit behind
what they were trying to say.
If you’re willing to see that,
that this is a internal debate,
you know, the Puritans are doing so from within the frame of the Christian faith.
Now, we might disagree theologically, but they are doing this as those who believe in Jesus Christ.
What that has to tell us is that when we get worked up about coffee cups or the latest song
that is or isn’t in vogue during the Christmas season,
or we find a place where retailers are
somehow impinging upon the tradition that we have taken for granted in Christmas,
the danger when we get upset about those things is that we actually lose our ability as Christians to be
having these very constructive conversations about what does and doesn’t help us celebrate
the advent of Jesus Christ.
And I use that word intentionally because one thing that the Christian
faith has consistently brought to the conversation of Christmas is that Christmas is not just celebration.
And this has been a thing,
not to wax too long here,
Clint, but this is a thing
that’s always really interested me about sort of modern Christian Christmas celebrations.
Lots of churches have what they call a blue Christmas,
and these are services that they
often intend for people who are going through difficult seasons.
They may have lost a loved one
or have had a painful diagnosis.
What’s interesting to me about the blue Christmas
kind of tradition is that seems to me to be adding a thing that Christians have always assumed with Advent.
We’ve always believed that the road to Christmas is a difficult road.
In fact,
if you read the gospel narratives again,
you’re going to see that the story to Christmas is a
very perilous story with social discord and with difficulty and pain.
And that has always been our
core part of the Christian understanding that to get to Christmas is the suffering,
the humility,
the willingness of God to take on flesh,
that this is part of what God’s advent means.
And so therefore it would fit into our celebrations.
The problem is when we assume that Christmas is all celebration
and not that journey towards God’s coming,
then we begin to miss the diversity and I would say
even the strength of Christmas.
So this isn’t about getting rid of things that help us celebrate
Christmas per se, I wouldn’t say.
I think it’s rather to be able to look at those things from
a frame that helps us see the fullness of Christmas,
which when we circle the wagons
around these other things,
we often fail to see.
Yeah, I think it would be,
I think it would be difficult to argue that one could follow the cultural pattern of Christmas
and call it a faithful celebration of Christ.
I think the path of faith and the path of culture
are ultimately going to deliver you to some moments where decisions have to be made about
what Christmas truly is.
And it’s not to say that the cultural emphasis of generosity,
togetherness,
excess,
it’s not to say that they’re bad in and of themselves,
but it is to say that the world around us gets far more excited about Christmas than it does about Christ.
And that can’t be true for Christians.
We have to fight against that to some extent.
We have to keep our focus on the reason that we have Christmas,
the thing in which we are
theoretically celebrating to begin with,
the idea that God came to us, that the
the incarnation of God is hope for all.
Not the latest sale,
not the lights, not the music, not the cookies,
but that Jesus Christ stands at the center and those other things serve Him,
those other things point to Him.
And I don’t think it would take a very
I don’t think it would take a very critical eye,
Michael, to look at the modern version of
Christmas and ask some serious questions about whether that happens.
Now,
having said that,
as much as Christmas sometimes bugs me,
I don’t think Christians should be out there fighting
about Christmas.
I don’t think that’s something worth our time.
I don’t think we should care
what Walmart says to us when we go in the store or what somebody puts on a coffee cup or
what Santa Claus looks like.
These aren’t things I think are very valuable places for
Christians to dig in and be stubborn.
And a lot of times,
Christians don’t understand what they’re doing.
The historic pushback still get asked once in a while,
though I think it’s less common now,
the idea of Xmas and that this whole line about trying to take Christ out of Christmas by putting an X there.
I think what people don’t understand is that what looks like X to us is in Greek,
the first letter of Christ.
Christians came up with Xmas.
It was an abbreviation that was used
and it meant the X,
what looks like the X,
was a symbol for Christ.
And a thousand years later,
Christians argue about it as something the world did,
and it was us.
We did Xmas.
It was never offensive.
It was never intended to take the Christ out of anything.
It was about Christ.
And I just don’t think we’re served by those kind of arguments.
I mean, it’s fun for us to argue
about when, you know,
the fact that you would listen to Christmas music in July maybe or whatever,
but I don’t think it’s very productive.
I think far more pressing is the need for Christians
to be intentional and to be focused and to realize that there’s a lot of distractions
in this time that can not make that easy.
So let me ask you a question.
When should
Christians push back against the Christian worship and themes of this season
being distilled into larger, more universal themes?
This is, I think, one of the fundamental questions of Christmas.
So we have this idea that exists in culture,
this language, that Christmas is a season of good tidings for all,
unity and peace.
In fact, there’s entire songs you wouldn’t
call Christian that essentially make the argument,
Clint, that there should be peace in the world,
people should behave well to one another,
there should be generosity.
These are, as I would see it,
sort of distilled from a larger Christian gospel.
The idea that the good news of Jesus Christ is for all,
that Jesus’s sacrifice is made for all,
that that should transform the lives of Christians so
they become people who become his hands and feet in the world.
We would use the biblical language of
the coming of the kingdom of God to describe this,
but when we exist in a culture that has these
Christmas songs and this sentiment that we should be good to all people,
at what point does that
become no longer religious in the Christian sense,
but rather a kind of humanist sentiment?
And that line is going to be tricky,
it’s going to be shifting,
and in some cases a Christian can
make that statement and have that sentiment for a very Christ-centered reason,
and another can say that to their neighbor because they just want to be a good person in the world and they
don’t have any particular religious beliefs.
That’s, I think,
where we begin to find a really
sort of difficult interpretive journey in Christmas.
Where people get hung up,
I think,
is in trying to either sort Christmas into all of its different parts and try it,
“well this is faithful but this isn’t a very kind of like compartmentalized moralistic understanding of
Christmas,” and then you have the people who just say,
“hey you know what,
carte blanche,
Christmas is supposed to be about Christ,
so I’m all in.” The Santa Claus stuff and the elf that comes alive,
and all of the kind of extraneous celebrations that surround Christmas,
right?
The lighting of the Christmas tree, the Christmas concerts,
the radio stations that have been playing
sexualized songs for 11 months out of the year,
now they’re saying songs about the manger and about Jesus,
and what are we to make of all of that?
I think fundamentally,
for me, this will be a theme you’ll see as we sort of dig down into some of these larger sections or genres of Christmas
in our future conversations.
I think the argument that I’m going to try to make is that these
celebrations are helpful to the extent to which they prepare us and open our hearts to be willing to see Christ,
and some of that is emotional.
I mean I will be 100% upfront about that.
You put Christmas lights in your house,
you play Christmas music,
you’re surrounded by your family.
In some ways you’ve produced a moment, if you’re honest,
but that moment isn’t necessarily bad if it opens
you and your heart to a willingness to see Jesus Christ as the center of it.
What does it deliver
you to?
That’s the question I think I would ask,
and I think to the larger question that I began
this section with, I would just say our culture lives in the moment in which it is seeking nothing
more than emotional experience, a good will,
a universal good, but Christians need more than
that, and so I hope whatever traditions we have,
whatever things we allow into our celebration of this season,
those things should deliver us to a higher end, a higher good,
one that is centered in Christ,
and to whatever extent that they detract from that,
that’s when I think we should
offer a rather critical eye of them.
I think it’s tough,
Michael, because there are some wonderful
things that happen during the Christmas season.
I think,
you know,
generally if you talk to people
and they were honest,
I think they tell you that they often do feel a little better.
There is an excitement, there is a little bit of camaraderie,
there is a sort of goodwill for many people that
comes with this season.
Donations to soup kitchens and shelters and clothing ministries,
all of those go up.
People are,
for a brief time,
more aware and more conscious of helping others,
you know, the angel trees in every community.
There is a sense of goodwill.
I think for me,
the danger is when those things become ends in themselves.
In other words, when
generosity or kindness or niceness or whatever becomes the goal rather than an expression of faithfulness.
For the Christian,
those things are all byproducts of following Jesus.
I give to people
who have needs because that’s what Christ has called me to do.
I seek to share of my own blessing
with others because that’s what it means to be faithful.
Yes, that’s a good thing,
but the good is not the end in itself.
The good is that it honors God through Christ when we do it.
And for me, I think that danger is that lacking the kind of religious underpinning of Christmas,
all the culture can offer is the emotion and the sort of good feelings that go with it.
It’s good to be nice.
It’s good to give money to people who don’t have it.
It’s good to give gifts to kids
who might not get them.
Yes, all that’s true.
But why is it good?
Is it good just because it makes
me feel good and it’s sort of better for everybody?
Or is it good because it’s anchored to what it
means to be faithful to God through Jesus Christ?
And it is my calling as a person who seeks to be
Christian.
Those are very different scenarios.
They may look similar.
They may have similar impact.
In fact,
sometimes people without the faith do more good than people of faith.
But for me, it comes down to why do we do what we do.
And I would say that in regard to just about
every aspect of the Christmas holiday, I think.
Which I think is both laudable and where you find
those moments where people do a double take and they look again.
Because so much of Christmas,
Clint, if we’re honest, is not thoughtful.
And I don’t mean that in a negative way.
I just mean, to be honest,
we celebrate Christmas for many different reasons.
Let me give you an illustration
of this and see if this tracks.
Okay, let me ask you,
what is the optimal weather for Christmas?
I think most people would say snowing or there’s snow on the ground.
I’ve heard this sentiment over and over,
especially if you live in the north,
right?
Where snow is possible.
Where in the world will we get that idea biblically?
I mean, nowhere, right?
If we’re honest, if we’re intellectually consistent,
that was not a reality wherever Jesus Christ was born.
One of my favorite songs is White Christmas.
And the part of that song that I think that engages
for me is, of course, this idea of the white, clean, pure,
sort of natural element.
But also this idea
I’m dreaming of a White Christmas surrounded by family,
surrounded by, for me,
intellectually, that does not square with a Christian observance of Christmas on any level.
But it delivers me to
a place where I value the gift of family.
I value the gift and celebration of that thin sort of space.
It incorporates more than just the intellect in that moment.
Now, am I trying to make
White Christmas sacred in any meaningful way?
No.
But I am trying to make the argument that I don’t
think that it is a roadblock to Christmas.
I think it is a thing that Christians must deal with.
We think a thing comes under the shroud of Christmas,
and so then we accept it carte blanche.
I don’t think that’s wise.
I think we should be more reflective than that.
I think we should be willing
to ask some hard questions of Christmas and say,
“Oh, when has the song or when has the celebration
or the tradition, when has it crossed the line?” And it’s now accepted for me without any
interpretation or really any question.
Those are very difficult and,
I think, important moments.
It doesn’t look like us putting all of our beloved Christmas things on the table
and dissecting them.
I don’t think it looks like killing Christmas so that we can
figure out the part of it that’s helpful.
I think it’s asking ourselves in a more fundamental,
and I would even say spiritual way,
to what extent are we worshiping and truly celebrating Christmas?
And to what extent are we defensively or reflexively trying to walk a tradition or a
habit or a practice that we’ve taken for granted?
If we are willing to humbly put some of these
things under a prayerful consideration,
I think we might actually even learn more than what we
might imagine before we start.
I think that’s, again,
one of the things that is so interesting
about this season, Michael, is that if you trace,
as you just pointed out, if we trace
so many of our deeply held convictions and if we trace so many of the things that are meaningful
to us about Christmas,
we’ll find that virtually none of them go back to Jesus.
Likely a man who in his lifetime never saw snow,
right?
I mean,
very unlikely that Jesus encountered snow.
Or the color red.
We all know the color Christmas red belongs in every Christmas
celebration.
That happened in the 30s thanks to the Coca-Cola Company.
Yes, there was some red
in the holly, the ivy, the idea of red and green had a little bit of traction,
but it’s only in the
last hundred years that the idea of Christmas red even existed.
Before that, all colors were used in
celebration of the holiday.
That’s a thing we did and so many of our traditions are like that,
that if you start to follow the threads,
you realize they’re not attached to the manger at all.
They came from somewhere else.
Now, is that in itself a problem?
Not necessarily.
Not really.
Though I think we should be aware of it.
What becomes a problem,
I think, is that we defend those things
as sacred rather than the thing they’re supposed to point to.
That we begin to get anchored to
this peripheral stuff about the parts of Christmas we love.
And that that’s what Christmas means,
when in fact the only reason those things are a part of Christmas was that at some point along the way,
historically,
someone thought they helped celebrate the birth of Christ in most instances.
The closer you get to modern times,
the less true that may be.
But by and large,
most of our traditions started because a group of people thought this helped us remember and
celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.
And I just think we have to be aware of that.
In order to do justice,
we have to treat the things as they are.
We’re going to talk
about music in an upcoming episode of this podcast, Christmas Music.
There’s a lot to dig into there.
I’m going to go hard on White Christmas when that time comes,
so we’ll leave that.
But music may be the place with the most good examples of secular and sacred mashed
together.
I think that for us is such a place,
a thing of Christmas we love,
that it’s also maybe
the easiest place to see how convoluted it gets at times.
So I think one of the really interesting
facets of this conversation is how quickly people really do shut down in it.
So I love Christmas.
I love so many different parts of it.
And yet, I’m readily willing to admit that
there are some parts of it that don’t help.
They don’t help me,
I can say confidently,
and I suspect that they don’t help others.
And I’ll give an example of that.
I think
one of the beautiful blessings of Christmas is the tradition of gift-giving.
I remember as a
kid, Christmas for me represented the kind of extravagance in the midst of a year,
a truly exceptional day.
There was no day that was even close to Christmas.
And so it was
special for that reason,
and not just for selfish reasons.
I mean, it was special because of the
family who gathered there because of the sacrifices that were made to make it possible.
Christmas represented something truly deep and meaningful that remains true for me today.
That said,
I’m firmly and wholly willing to admit that the practice and tradition of gift-giving
is troublesome in a society that is as rampantly consumerist as ours is.
The idea that things need
purchased and the latest and greatest needs purchased.
And then in five years, it needs,
after it’s consumed, to be thrown away.
That’s a troubling reality that we might have gotten from
the gold, frankincense, and myrrh of the biblical story to iPhones and TVs and smart watches and all
of the kinds of things that dominate our attention today.
And even that question,
is the thing or things I purchased big enough or good enough?
That’s troubling.
We should be troubled by that.
Christmas should also critique some of the things that exist in our culture.
And that’s where it gets messy,
Clint. That’s where I think our roads intersect in a really, truly meaningful way.
There isn’t a particular orientation to Christmas.
I think that is right,
that you can land on and say that this is theologically or morally required.
I do think, though,
one does need to have a posture of humility as it applies to Christmas.
And that is why I do feel some level of distaste for the Christmas wars is because I think they distract
us from the important work of Christian celebration of Christmas,
right?
It’s interesting.
I’ve not heard anyone get up in arms about the Easter Bunny,
who I find morally offensive,
by the way.
That’s a different conversation.
But, I mean, realistically, we should have some level of question,
but we shouldn’t let,
I think, that war kind of mentality,
the circle the wagons,
as I said before,
we shouldn’t let that become determinative because then what that does is it
keeps us from being reflective and relatively humble from the start,
which is what we need to be
to celebrate Christmas rightly.
Sort of a wonderful irony in the fact,
Michael, that these references that you make to Christmas
wars, the idea arguing that some things don’t belong in Christmas or some things shouldn’t change about Christmas,
when our ancestors, by and large, argued that Christmas shouldn’t
be in the church,
that we shouldn’t have Christmas,
that we shouldn’t celebrate on that day,
that we shouldn’t give gifts like the pagans did,
that we shouldn’t bring a tree in the house,
that we, you know, it’s just, it’s so interesting how that history is sort of cycled.
And now the very things that we defend as wholesome and religious and belonging to the
tradition of Christmas were met with skepticism by our ancestors in the faith.
Our fathers and mothers in the faith looked at those things very suspiciously.
And I think that should give us
a little bit of a relaxed nature.
You know, you and I joke a lot about the elements of Christmas,
but the reality is we should hold none of it too seriously,
because none of it is in itself sacred.
It is only a tool that can and should be used to point to Jesus.
And if it doesn’t do that,
then we should recognize that and treat it accordingly,
not necessarily get rid of it,
because that’s not, we’re never able to do that.
But we should be able to acknowledge,
yeah, this is something we need to hold on to fairly lightly,
because as it turns out,
it’s not essential.
The only thing essential for Christmas is that Jesus Christ was born,
and that full stop.
And that’s really where the Gospels,
I think, deliver us.
Now, there are some great things that go with it.
And in the coming weeks,
we’re going to dissect some of those.
We’re going to talk about where they come from,
what parts of them we like and what parts of them we don’t like.
And that won’t be in full agreement, I think.
But we will, having laid this groundwork with some history,
and some of this
may have been repetitive,
and we apologize for that.
But I think we need to do this step before
we can then go on to look at some of the things themselves.
Okay, so in future weeks,
we’re going to talk about Christmas and its traditions.
We’re not going to dissect it.
We’re not going to put it on the table and kill it so that we can break it apart.
No, I see that.
No,
but I can see two reasons why you should continue joining us.
First of all, I think it’s good to just have a moment where we get to lightheartedly talk
about some of the things that we may have taken for granted and to ask new questions about it,
which I think is a kind of playful invitation that we find in any good Christian theology.
And the second is that in the midst of this season of celebration,
it’s good to just have
a pause in a moment where we realize that it’s not that serious for all of the work that we put
into what I’m going to call the perfect Christmas.
That you don’t need to reach some level which is
not only unrealistic, but I would argue unbiblical.
It’s not scriptural.
And so then you can,
this is my frame,
so then you can enjoy those things for what they are.
Truly enjoy them.
Hold them lightly.
Let them be a joyous source of celebration and goodness.
These conversations that we’ll have are not going to just kill Christmas and make it no fun.
I think it,
at its best,
will free you to the kind of celebration that you would like to have.
And whether we can accomplish that or not,
I don’t know.
But there’ll be some laughs along the way.
Or you could decide you don’t need this and get rid of it.
Yeah.
There may be, if you’re out there,
put it in the comments.
Thanks for being with us, friends.
We look forward to seeing you for our next conversation,
which will happen next week.
We’ll release next Thursday.
And until then,
we look forward to whatever that conversation might hold.
Thanks for listening.