Christmas: God's Yearly Reminder
“Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.” (Isaiah 60:1–3)
Sometimes stiff atheists and stiffer conservatives make for strange bedfellows. There is enough, it seems, in the festive season for them both to hate. For the avowed atheist, of course, Thanksgiving and Christmas are rather awkward, if not downright embarrassing, holidays. "Happy Turkey Day !" and "Seasons Greetings" make for much more felicitous monikers that help them dodge uncomfortable questions and reminders from God. #NotMyReligious holiday is their seasonal slogan. Thankful? To Thom? Certainly not to God!
No surprises there from the pagan camp! But theirs is a lonely, hopeless world–a world without any real, transcendent Light or Love. Bertrand Russell summed up their world view well, when he observed,
“That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
With such a prospect, I think I understand the pagan’s willingness to “put up” with the nostalgia, the lights, the gifts, and the holiday cheer. They all serve as a welcome distraction from such unyielding despair.
What is perhaps a little more surprising is to find some men on our side of the proverbial theological fence who are too strict to celebrate Christmas (or Easter). To their minds, consistency is the name of the game and they see no Biblical reason for the season. And so, because God doesn’t command Christmas, they see such celebrations as verboten. In their yearly calendar, the Lord’s Day is the only holy-day to celebrate. One of my colleagues in ministry, for example, a dear friend, doesn't believe in Christmas (or Easter). He religiously avoids the traditional “Xmas” salutation, gently chiding those careless enough to wish him so, “And a happy New Year to you and yours!”
While there is a perverse and consistent logic to this kind of thinking (one of those half-truths told as whole truths), his refusal reminds me of Emerson Fosdick’s famous observation, “Consistency is the hobgoblin of tiny minds." As much as I loathe quoting Fosdick (no friend of the evangelical faith), his words expose a common weakness in the orthodox mind– the inability to think with nuance. When indulged, this unhappy penchant robs the Church not only of the joy of Christmastide but of one of its most powerful and winsome cultural apologetics.
Every year, just after the darkest time in the Northern Hemisphere, despite the Atheists' determined preference for “Season’s Greetings,” all across the land, the Bells still ring out for Christmas Day, and reverberating through those joyous bells, God’s patient perennial reminder of hope–real hope, eternal hope, true hope. Despite the raging darkness all around, there is Light now and there shall be Light forever. The future is not a meaningless race to oblivion; History is irrevocably Christ-shaped in nature. We are not spinning our wheels waiting for the sun to go supernova and obliterate life in our solar system forever. Christ has come. God the Son became flesh to become sin so that He could become accursed. And now, alive with the power of an endless life, He shall soon come again to make all the sad things of life untrue.
Now to be fair, I am quite sure my brother in arms would add his amen to everything I just said about the gospel; he just prefers to say it all sans-Christmas. But how can the Church explain the hope of Christ in a world that is always winter and never Christmas? Should we prefer the White Witch’s vision for Narnia? What an appealing gospel, “Give up Christmas and become a Christian!” What Christmas songs should we sing, “Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer had a very shiny nose, until Pastor Brown shot him, he thought he was a UFO (an unauthorized flying object)?”
No, my dear brothers and sisters, there are enough legitimate stumbling blocks in our gospel to lead many a pagan to think we are crazy, without us adding yet another of our own making.
So it is, with all my heart and soul, that I lean into this happiest of all earthly weeks and wish you all a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. No matter how dark our times, no matter how difficult your lot may be this December, Christmas is coming and Easter is fast on its heels. Soon and very soon, we are going to see the King in a Brave New world that is always Christmas and never Winter! Celebrate the season with reason and with holy pride! To God be the glory, great things He hath done!