Christmas is for everyone

The secular celebration of Christmas kicked off weeks ago, on Black Friday. The real celebration of Christmas begins tonight. As a Lutheran pastor, I don’t begrudge the secular season. It has many beneficial features.

It makes December a time of self-conscious generosity and “good will toward men.” The downside of Christmas commercialization is that retailers use consumerism run amok in order to meet their annual profit margin. The upside, however, is that three hundred million people spend December thinking about other people.

In a culture where feelings of entitlement constantly turn our attention inward, Christmas shopping turns our thoughts to friends and family, to coworkers, postal workers and next-door neighbors. Hearts weighed down with pain and emptiness, are blessed with an opportunity to think of ways to bring joy to others.

These feelings of good will are not confined to mere thought. Pocketbooks are opened to make them real. Every charitable agency also uses the Christmas season to conduct a year-end appeal for donations. This is most visible in the red kettles and bell-ringers in front of retail stores. The Angel Tree buys gifts for local kids while Operation Christmas Child sends necessities to the poor in third-world countries.

All this generosity and selfless focus has the additional effect of making people speak and feel warm thoughts toward others. Total strangers wish one another a merry Christmas and happy holy days. Nobody asks, as a condition of kindness, how you voted in the last election or what your worldview might be. Christmas is for everybody.

This makes me smile. What kind of force could induce such widespread feelings of good cheer despite the most rancorous political and social climate in our generation? How it is that Christ’s mass is named by so many people who have never even been to mass? How is it that even those who consciously avoid the word, Christmas, nevertheless acknowledge the holiness of these days?

Many might dismiss this as a mere holdover from a more Christian time. That may be true. Customs do have an inertia of their own. They have a way of carrying on long after the ideas that inspired them have been forgotten. Nevertheless, they never cease bringing those original ideas back into consciousness.

If the customs of December are holdovers from a more Christian time, they remind us that such a time once existed, and they offer us hope that it could exist again. They give us an opportunity to reflect on our actions and rediscover their meaning and value.

Gift-giving is the most obvious action of the season. It signals the fact that God gave a gift to the world. The gift in view is the gift of a newborn child. His parents were from Nazareth, but he was born while they were travelling in Bethlehem.

No serious historian disputes the fact of Jesus’ birth. It is reported in both pagan Roman and in Jewish Roman sources. It is reported in books that were written and widely circulated while many of those who personally knew Jesus were still alive.

That Jesus was a real man, and not a myth, is simply historical fact. While historians both within and without Christianity debate the actual date of his birth, that does not deny the fact that he was born. Nor are there many who would dispute that Jesus is a gift to the world.

Of course, every child is a gift of God to the world. That’s not a uniquely Christian assertion. Each person who has ever been conceived has added some value to the world. Agnostics, Muslims, Jews—even atheists—can acknowledge that Christmas celebrates the gift of Jesus to the world.

Some value him as a moral teacher. Others, as a great prophet. Both are true. But they do not exhaust the truth. Still, let’s take a moment to develop these first thoughts.

It is a fact of history that no single man in the history of the whole world has influenced as many people as Jesus has. Prior to his birth, philosophers, kings and religious figures might exert regional influence, but most never broke out of the borders of their own country. Those that did lost influence soon after they died.

But Jesus is unique. His impact on the world did not diminish after his disappearance. In fact, unlike anyone before or since, Jesus’ influence spread across continents not by military conquest or by accident of birth. It spread by the sheer power of the ideas themselves.

And the ideas associated with Jesus gave rise to our most merciful and highly cherished institutions. Hospitals and orphanages, education and science, the dignity of women and of marriage, human freedom and the defeat of slavery—all these blessings are in the world because of Christ’s birth.

Among the customs of Christmas is that the gifts we exchange are wrapped. This also has a very deep meaning. It means that the exact content and value of a gift is hidden when we first receive it. The gift is in our possession, but we don’t enjoy its full benefit without unwrapping it, learning what it is, and making it part of our life.

While any secular historian can plainly see the “wrapping paper” of Jesus’ influence on Western Civilization, the fullness of God’s gift to the world is not discovered until one looks beneath the wrapping to see the gift himself. Finally, here we come to the distinctly Christian view of Christmas.

When we look at the man himself and his historical life, we see that the way he disappeared from the world was unlike any other man. All know that he was crucified and put to death. But after that comes a mystery that demands explanation. His tomb was found empty and no one—ever again—found his corpse.

Instead, hundreds of people said that they saw him walking and talking and eating with them—both singly and in groups. Some of these reported that after forty days his disappearance took the form of an ascent into the clouds. All of this leads to the Christian understanding that God’s gift to the world was not just a human child. Rather, the gift was God Himself.

If you thought the wrapping was pretty, look at what’s contained in it! “For God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16 KJV). If you appreciate the perks of Western Civilization, you will be blown away by the God who is celebrated at its heart.

In Jesus we learn that all the kindness, charity, generosity and selflessness of the Christmas season is the result of the only God in the world, who is kind, charitable, generous and selfless. He gave himself as gift not like a Trojan horse, but as a rescuer behind enemy lines. “That whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

After weeks of secular Christmas observances, the Christian Christmas begins today. It would be a great time to read the Christmas gospel in Luke, chapter 2. Better yet, join us for Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols (December 24, 2019).

St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Kemmerer at 5:30 P.M.
Our Saviour Lutheran Church in Evanston at 8:00 P.M.