Keeping Christ in Christmas
Few people
today know that the Nazis tried to remove Christ from Christmas:
For the perfect Nazi Christmas, you had to
hang glittering swastikas and toy grenades from the pine tree in the living
room and, in your freshly pressed uniform, belt out carols urging German women
to make babies for the Führer rather than worship the Jewish Baby Jesus. Then
came the moment to light the pagan candleholders — hand-made by laborers at
Dachau. (Roger Boyes, "How
the Nazis tried to take Christ out of Christmas," The Times, accessed November 17, 2009.)
More
surprisingly, significant manifestations of the Nazi efforts to remove Christ
from Christmas remained embedded in German culture throughout much of the latter
half of the twentieth century. Germans continued to sing carols and hymns,
revised by the Nazis to excise references to Jesus and the Christian story, often
unaware of how the Nazis had altered the lyrics. For example, Unto Us a Time Has Come became a hymn of praise about snowy
fields instead of lauding God's gift of the Christ-child.
Unlike what
happened in Germany with Hitler's propagandists centrally directing the effort
to transform Christmas from a celebration of Jesus' birth into adulation of the
Fuhrer and the Third Reich, today's growing disconnection between Christ and Christmas
is more insidious and operates without any central authority.
Unfortunately,
two strawmen are often lightning rods for Christian efforts to keep Christ at
the heart of Christmas. These strawmen are irrelevant distractions. First, the
growing disconnect between Christ and Christmas has nothing to do with removing
Christian symbols, including Christmas decorations and Nativity scenes, from
public property. Using state resources to promote a particular religion in a
secular, multi-cultural democracy inappropriately demeans non-Christians and
their freedom to practice their own (or no) religion. In short, Christian displays
on public property reflect a lack of love for our non-Christian neighbor. Christian
displays belong on Christian owned or leased property.
Second, complaints
about substituting the now seemingly ubiquitous Xmas for Christmas
reflect an inappropriate desire to control the speech of others and a lack of
understanding of Christian history. The Greek letter chi, written in Greek
as X) was one of the first Christian symbols. Rightly interpreted, Xmas
denotes Christ's mass, a Eucharistic thanksgiving or season of
commemoration for God's gift of the Christ child, which is what the word Christmas
itself means.
The real
threat to keeping Christ in Christmas in twenty-first century developed countries
is the commercialization of the holiday, transforming a spiritual event into a
season generally filled with widely extravagant expectations of partying, decorations,
and unaffordable gift giving. This is a battle that Christians fought once before
and won. As John Buchanan, the editor of the Christian Century, has observed,
One of the most memorable sermons I ever heard - one of the very
few I actually remember - was a Christmas Day sermon preached by Charles Leber.
At the time, he and Ulysses Blake were co-pastors of First Presbyterian Church on
Chicago's South Side. Leber's sermon was title 'Another Roman Holiday.' He
explained that the early church chose December 25 to celebrate Jesus' birth
even though everyone knew the birth had happened sometime in the spring. December
25 was the beginning of the Romans' year-end holiday, which Leber said was
quite a bash: seven straight days of eating, drinking, and reveling. The
Christians did not participate in these revels. They decided to draw attention
to themselves by rejecting the celebration. And so, to provide an alternative
and to help them resist the sensual temptations of the Roman holiday, they came
up with Christmas. ("Song in the City," Christian Century, 13
Dec 2005, 3)
Christians
still comprise a sizable and influential percentage of the US population and a sufficiently
substantial minority of ten percent or more to be able to exert considerable influence
in most other developed nations. We need not lose the current battle to keep
Christ in Christmas.
To keep
Christ in Christmas, live into the story of Christmas, which is a synopsis of
the gospel, by intentionally cultivating practices such as these:
- Becoming spiritual leaven instead of
becoming co-opted by the holiday's secular, commercial ethos
- Giving alternative gifts congruent
with Jesus' love, e.g., a gift of a goat to a hungry family in the name of
the person to whom one wishes to give a gift
- Focusing, as did Jesus, on
relationships and people instead of things and fleeting pleasures
- Developing counter-cultural Christmas
observances that tell the story of the birth of the Christ child and that
invite people to explore that story's meaning in ways appropriate to a biblically
illiterate society.
Whether
we in the twenty-first century succeed in keeping Christ in Christmas may well
hinge upon our answer to this poignant and memorable question that Marcus Borg
and John Dominic Crossan have posed:
Christmas is not about tinsel and mistletoe or even ornaments and
presents, but about what means will we use toward the end of a peace from
heaven upon our earth. Or is “peace on earth” but a Christmas ornament taken
each year from attic or basement and returned there as soon as possible? (The
First Christmas (New York: HarperOne, 2007), p. 167)
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