Christmas For Christians

It's just a few days until the most popular Christian feast of the year. Everybody, believer or not, gets excited about Christmas.

Well not everybody.

In fact the people most conflicted over Christmas are the most committed of Christians. Christmas as a Christian celebration has been controversial in different parts of the church for centuries.

You can read about the history of Christmas at wikipedia, and I won't repeat what is written much more clearly there.

For many Christians the death and resurrection of Jesus is all that matters. That's the central message of the gospel- the sacrifice of Jesus for the sins of the world. Yes that is Good News and it is so important that the church remembers it every single Sunday in one form or another.

But the story has to start somewhere. And the story of Christmas is so awesome, words can hardly begin to describe it. Let me try to start...

The universe is impossibly huge-- billions of stars in each of billions of galaxies. The numbers are impossible for us to get our heads around it. HUGE!!!!! Too huge to imagine.

The God who made it all is outside of creation-- bigger and more powerful then we can imagine. Bigger than the whole universe, but able to relate to us individually and deeply interested in each of us.

Try to imagine that awesomely huge, powerful, intelligent God now squeezed into the form of a little baby-- weak, knowing nothing,living in an insignificant backwater of civilisation.

If you can work that out and get accustomed to the idea, then you don't need Christmas.

What is not to celebrate?

And if that leaves you jaded there is so much more. What about this? Just to get the attention of a few astronomers from a pagan country, God had arranged at the beginning of creation that particular planets would align with certain constellations on the exact day that this would happen.

We don't know that Jesus was born on December 25. It doesn't matter, really does it? What does matter is that you and I spend some time thinking about the utter miracle that those little nativity sets signify. Our God is not an all-conquering, fire-breathing, destructive monster screaming "Exterminate!"

No, he has shown us as an utterly humble, self-effacing, loving God. Yes he will deal with sin. Yes He will judge. But for now he is not wanting anyone to perish but all who will come into his Kingdom are welcome.

It's not surprising that Christians along the way have tried to celebrate the awesome event of what theologians call the Incarnation.

As the church took the gospel to the nations they discovered a host of winter celebrations and gave them a christian meaning. In what is now northern Germany, the original inhabitants venerated the conifers which seemed to stay alive when all else was dead. The missionaries used that as an illustration of the life that comes from Jesus.

In many European cultures there was the idea that there needed to be sacrifices made in order to bring the dying sun back to life-- but the church was able to put forward the idea that these practices and ideas pointed to Jesus. So over time the pagan practices and symbols were given new christian meaning and incorporated into the celebration of the birth of Jesus.

Now we live in a very different age. In the West the gospel is losing its influence in culture and the new pagan (or secular) practices are coming to the fore. Santa is more important than Jesus for most people, family celebrations more important than community worship and commercialism more powerful than incarnation. We celebrate the coming of the light of the world with gaudy decorations, but forget who the light is. We see drunkenness being a part of many celebrations with attendant issues of violence, conflict and property damage.

So how can we untangle a thousand years or more of paganism from the heart of the celebration of the amazing arrival of Emmanuel- God With Us?

Some Christians just go straight into the whole worldly event with maybe a bit of Jesus thrown in- "Jesus is the reason for the season" T-shirts, attendance at church but Santa for the kids and so on. I know of some churches which seem to follow this line by not having Christmas services because it's time for families.

Other Christians go to the other extreme, refusing to have anything to do with Christmas at all, because of the pagan content. For them Christmas trees are still demonic and the whole Christmas thing is irredeemable and best avoided. Some churches refuse to have Christmas services for this reason.

I think we need to get excited about the Christmas message. Let's truly celebrate the awesome message of Christmas. If the gospel means anything, it is far more awesome than some hairy bloke dressed in red travelling from the frozen wasted of the Arctic to chuck presents down non-existent chimneys. Jesus came from heaven, stripping himself of divine power to be among us. Christmas is bigger than Santa, Star Trek and Doctor Who combined!

In abandoning the Christian message of Christmas, our culture has taken on something far weaker, far less able to bring true joy. We've swapped the Presence for the presents, the Creator for a bunch of baubles and too many glasses of wine.

And here is the opportunity to redeem our culture and to make holy again the end of year celebrations.

Over the last couple of years we have taken a small stall to our town's Christmas Street Carnival. We have some christian books and gifts for sale and a quite cheesy wooden cut-out nativity scene which we surround with a few bales of hay. I am struck by two things. Firstly a number of people thank us for bringing the real message of Christmas to the street (even though we don't have any printed text telling people to repent!). Secondly most people know it's "baby Jesus" in the manger and they even have their photos taken with baby Jesus.

As far as I know, these people are not the full-on christians.

So what does this say? To me it says that people are hungry for the real meaning of Christmas. They know that Santa Claus does not have the message of eternal life and that somewhere there is a message of eternal life, and deep down they know it's got something to do with baby Jesus. They know that consumerism is not the answer but don't know where to find the answer.

I love Christmas. Yes our culture has got it wrong and most people don't have a clue what it's all about.

It just means that we have that chance, that annual opportunity to say, "Here is something that is beyond your wildest dreams."