My family had another wonderful Christmas season this year. Wonderful because we had a couple of dinners in our home where we had different groups of people come celebrate the season with us. We had our very own Christmas Eve family dinner. We also enjoyed the love of many who gave us thoughtful gifts. We gave ourselves to share the Good News of Jesus Christ individually and as a church with the Christmas Musical at Victoria Theatre. In all it was indeed a wonderful time of the year for us all.
But for many people the thought of Christmas brings fatigue. It’s not the spiritual aspect that causes the tiredness, but the the overly decorated shops, the shopping, the lights, the Christmas trees, and the carols that begin to echo through our malls already in early November.
And so it is asked: What has all of this, or any of it, got to do with the birth of Jesus? Wouldn’t we honour Jesus more if we spend the money we lavish on Christmas on the poor instead? Don’t our Christmas celebrations serve to obliterate our awareness of Jesus’ birth more than highlight it? Valid questions.
Our Christmas celebrations, admittedly, do start too early, are too-commercially driven, do focus too little on anything spiritual, and do not take the poor sufficiently into account. And so it is easy to be cynical about the Christmas. It contains too many excesses.
However, with that being conceded, we need to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water. Just because something is done badly by the world does not mean it should be cancelled. What is called for, I believe, is not the cancellation of the tinsel, the lights, the socials, the gifts and the food that surround Christmas, but a better use of them. There are good reasons to cancel the practices with which we surround Christmas, but there are even better reasons for keeping them.
What are those reasons? Why continue so many of these practices when, almost invariably, they degenerate into excess and fatigue? Because we have a congenital need to celebrate, pure and simple. As human beings we have a healthy, God-given, genetically-encoded need to sometimes make festival, to have carnival, to celebrate an elaborate Sabbath, to park our cautiousness for a few hours, and to live life as if there wasn’t any reason to pinch our dollars. Christmas is Sabbath, the supreme Sabbath.
There are seasons in life, and these should be on a regular cycle, that are meant precisely for enjoyment, for family, for friends, for colour, for tinsel, and for good food. There is even the occasional time for some prudent excess. Jesus gave voice to this when his disciples were scandalized by a woman’s excess in anointing his feet with perfume and kisses.
All cultures, not least those who are economically poor, have times of festival where, explicitly or implicitly, they take seriously the words: The poor you will always have with you, but today it is time to celebrate. Christmas is such a time, meant for festival.
There is a God-given pressure inside of us that pushes us to celebrate and instils in us an irrepressible sense that we are not meant for quiet gloom, and carefully measured-out relationships, but that we are meant ultimately for the feast, the dance, the place of lights and music, and the place where we don’t measure out our dollars and our hearts on the basis of just having to survive and pay our bills. The celebration of festival and carnival, even with their excesses, help teach us that.
Christmas is such a festival. In the end, its celebration is a lesson in faith and hope and love.
To make a festival of Christmas, to surround Jesus’ birthday with all the joy, lights, music, gift-giving, energy, warmth and evangelism we can muster is, strange as this may sound, a prophetic act. It is, or at least it can be, an expression of faith and hope. It’s not the person who says: “It’s tiring, it's too much work; let’s cancel it!” who radiates hope. That can easily be despair masquerading as faith. No. It is the man or woman who, despite the world’s misuse and abuse of these, still puts up a grand Christmas tree in his living room, strings up the Christmas lights round that tree, turns up the carols on CD, passes gifts to loved ones, sits down at table with family and friends, and flashes a smile to the world; he is the one who is radiating faith, who is saying that we are meant for more than gloom, who is celebrating Jesus’ birth, echoing with the angels, “Glory to God in the Highest, And on earth, peace, goodwill towards men.”
So my family had a wonderful Christmasthis year – with a house well decorated with Christmas cheer; with friends coming over for festive meals and with us sharing Christ with a lost world.
I am so looking forward to another great season of Christmas celebration....next year!
