Sean Brenon is our guest writer this week! He has written a reply to last week’s post, written by David Henry. You can head over to Sean’s blog here and read his original post and other thoughts. Enjoy!
The Meaning of Christmas
What began as a tongue-in-cheek vendetta against the replacement of the meaning of Christmas graciously received a response by a close friend of mine via his blog (which you can read if you click at the link at the bottom). Normally, I try to be docile in theological/pragmatic debates. But, where my original post was more of an offhand suggestion, I intend to more fully explore and explain the basis of my attempted Reformation.
Music
In my original post, I joked about how our family has a tradition of starting Christmas music long before Christmas. For most families, I think it starts after Thanksgiving. For ours, it starts at the beginning of November (after my parents have promised me for the fourth time that year that we won’t give in to temptation until after Thanksgiving). My outward problem with Christmas music as it is played today is two-fold. First, I take issue with the repetition of the same songs (as wonderful as they may be. I’m looking at you O Holy Night and O Come, O Come Immanuel). Second, I take issue with the lack of culture-creating. And yes, these are most definitely related.
On the first front, Mathew 6:7 says, “And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words.” Now, the first objection I smell coming my way is that this has nothing at all to do with songs; it only mentions prayer, after all. But, if worship through repetitive prayer is meaningless, wouldn’t we expect that repetition through music is also meaningless?
Allow me to explain.
When an aspiring body-builder begins building muscle mass, he starts with less weight. First he starts with, say, 25 pounds. After a while of training with that weight, when it becomes easier, he changes the weight and increases it to 35. Eventually, if he is consistent enough, he can work out with 50 or 60 pound weights. Imagine if this body-builder were to begin lifting 25 pounds weights again, after he’s begun lifting 50 pound weights. Assuming he’s doing the same repetitions, lifting 25 pound weights doesn’t help him at all. After a certain point, not increasing the amount of weight being lifted stagnates his muscle growth.
And so it is with music and prayer. If, every single night, you go through the motions of praying the Lord’s Prayer, reciting it from memory each time, of what benefit is that? If we listen to the same music over and over, the words become so common and stale that they lose their meaning. They become like bread left out on the counter too long. Re-singing the same songs over and over again no longer means anything for Christianity, and is quickly losing its American identity. That’s what repetition does. It loses identity.
The second issue I have is that no new songs are being written! Cultural Reformation is done in one of two ways. It is either done by destroying the current culture and rebuilding, or building on top of the status quo. We have only to look around to see that we aren’t doing the former. And, quite unfortunately, we see secularists and humanists doing the latter (more on this later). In my original post, I came off decidedly as a Reconstructionist in my culture-Reformation views. To be fair, that’s not always the best way to look at it. If someone can figure out how to build on top of what we have, then, for crying out loud, what you be waitin’ for? I’m behind you all the way.
Christmas hasn’t progressed musically since the 60’s, really. I don’t know why. I really don’t. But can you name one good Christmas song that wasn’t written before 1970? If you can, I can guarantee that the list is decidedly short. It seems that Christians and Humanists alike have been content to lift 25 pound weights for quite a while. And the Christmas culture has suffered for it.
My original (and, may I add, tongue-in-cheek) conclusion was to listen to Handel’s Messiah again and again, because there’s more good music in that than in all of the American folk songs combined. Okay, so maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic. I have a personal distaste for non-hymnic and non-classical Christmas songs on the basis of having heard them so many times. Nonetheless, I believe that birth of new Christmas songs would be a leap forward culturally. For now, we still live in the past. And it’s hurting us.
Commercialization
“Why is it hurting us?” you may ask. And, that’s certainly a fair question. This is the root of the issue, I think. And this is where my friend and I most differ.
The short answer is this: where Christians should be the culture-makers, we have been silent. This has allowed non-Christians to do the culture-making.
The result of this has been an emphasis of Christmas as ‘the season of giving,’ ‘the season of cheer,’ and the like. I think this is a mistake. At this point we have to distinguish between what is and what is perceived. Because those two things are radically different.
To steal a quote from my friend, “Christmas says God Almighty does exist, that he does care. He hears the people crying out for justice, hears the cries of the oppressed, and he will not sit idly by while they suffer. God came down. And not only did God come down to set the world aright—that alone is fantastic—he came down to suffer with us.”
This is what Christmas is all about (more on the semantics of this later). Christmas, on its face, is a celebration of Christ’s birth. But let’s get real. Look around. Do we really think that most people are celebrating Christmas because it’s Christ’s birth? One could argue, ‘Yes, duh. The day is supposed to be Jesus’ birthday, so any celebration that happens around the day only coincides with that date because Christ was born there first.’ But that does nothing but make the cultural bystanders, well… bystanders.
When you go to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, it’s very easy to walk through the building and miss the modern art section (it’s the only thing on the bottom floor). Not visiting the modern art gallery means one of two things: either you didn’t care to see it or didn’t know it existed. Either way, your failure to see it says nothing about it’s existence. Christmas is the same way. Non-Christians don’t celebrate Christ’s birth, not because it doesn’t exist, but because they don’t acknowledge it. They’re like people who attend a birthday party only because there’s cake involved.
The result of ignoring this original meaning of Christmas has led them to rationalize Christmas away as being ‘the season of giving,’ and indulging in the ‘spirit of Christmas.’ Is giving involved in the season? Of course it is. But Christmas is not about giving. It’s about Christ, and it’s only in that sense that giving makes any sense. So, let’s not pretend that this flamboyant celebration that the secularists put on is healthy celebration. It is very intentionally meant to subvert the Christian meaning. And failure to recognize this will do much more harm than good in the long run.
It’s all a matter of perspective, really. The celebration that goes along with Christmas is only harmful because Christmas has become about the celebration. That makes it sound like not a big deal. But, I will repeat what I said in my original post: “In a world where people don’t need to try very hard to search for idols, gouging their eyes out with flamboyant ones doesn’t really help the picture.” I should like to restate this: “In a culture where idolatry has been nearly perfected, flamboyant facades of celebrations serve as nothing but smokescreen to mask the true meaning of Christmas.” So, when I say that we should do away with Christmas celebration, what I’m really saying is that our perspective is way out of whack. I would think that this would be quite obvious, actually. This ‘smokescreen’ is everywhere. And even if we are not fooled on an individual level, let us not fall into the trap of thinking that no one else is.
The Semantics of Christmas
I knew, when I made my original post, that the most foolhardy thing I said was that the meaning of Christmas was not to celebrate the birth of Christ. I think my friend took the original meaning of what I said a bit far, but it was my words and my miscommunication that led him there. That said, I would like to revise my previous statement to allow for greater clarification.
On the day of Christmas, the first thing our family does, before opening gifts, before digging out the camera, is read the Gospel story. I have a feeling that this is the tradition of many Christian families, and I think that this is a good one. It contributes toward solving a lot of the problems I mentioned before. It helps keeps the ‘Christ’ in Christmas, to borrow the cliche.
But every time I hear the Christmas story told straight from the Gospel, I get an aching in my heart. I love the gospel story; I love it, I love it, I love it. And I could re-read (and have reread) that passage in Luke 2 over and over. But there’s so much more to the story. The gospel story starts in Genesis 1. And so often, we lose sight of that. I am not saying that we should only preach the Birth story in the context of everything else. But if that’s all we ever teach, we’ll never get anything out of the story. Christ was born to die. And this was the plan from the beginning of time. In the same way that Christmas celebration should be kept in the context of Christ’s birth, Christ’s birth should be kept in context of His eternal plan.
So, yes, celebrate with all the Christian joy in the world. Be the salt and light in a dark culture. But “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” Do not conform in imitation of the secular culture, but redeem it. Do not redeem by simply partaking, but redeem by building on it.
Tyndale Library 
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