The Heart of the Matter

Do you ever read books that get the gears in your brain turning? I do love reading books that help me unwind and de-stress, but I also get some of my mental exercise by reading books that challenge the status quo and challenge the assumption that things have always been this way.

Most Advent seasons, I either re-read Christmas Is Not Your Birthday or The Advent Conspiracy. These are profound books that have changed how I view Christmas traditions and are important enough to me that I make sure to re-read at least one of them a year.

This year, as I have been slowly re-reading and reflecting on The Advent Conspiracy, I have been wrestling with the concept of what makes my Christmas celebration (as a Christian) different from a non-Christian's celebration.

I assist in an English as a Second Language (ESL) program and part of my job is to write summaries of important holidays and events in the United States. It typically is a pretty plain task, until we get into Christian holidays. I expected to end up with a list of "Christian" ways to celebrate these holidays and a separate list of "non-Christian" traditions for comparison. I ended up with a list of secular traditions for these holidays, but many Christians celebrate Christmas & Easter by doing many of the same things that non-Christians do, but with a Christian twist or with other a few more religious traditions added in. This went completely against my expectations.

This insight I had in the Christian/non-Christian holiday traditions helped me to catch a glimpse of the heart of the matter.

The lives of Christians should look and be radically different from a non-Christian's life and I mean radically different in a positive way. We should be a joyful, generous people driven by sharing the Good News with everyone our lives touch.

The Church is trying to reform what has become a frenzy of consumerism and spending at Christmas. Unfortunately, we try to do this by conforming to and mimicking the world's patterns, instead of letting our transformed lives speak of a better way to live. We are spending too much time, energy, and effort in an attempt to to add back Christian meaning to what has become secular traditions. Maybe we should give our culture the traditions they have claimed and instead allow ourselves to focus on celebrating Christ in a different way.

We are trying to focus on the sacred aspects of Christmas, but we are still attempting to do all the secular traditions that we associate with Christmas. We can't do it all. We are running ourselves ragged trying to do it all. The secular traditions end up crowding out the sacred ones. Maybe the Church needs to start doing Christmas in a way that is obviously, completely different from how the world does things. Then, the Church will be transformed once we stop trying to conform to the pattern of the world.

If "Jesus is the Reason for the Season" as our bumper stickers proudly proclaim, then perhaps everything we say, do, buy, and make for Christmas needs to justify itself in light of Christ.

To whom would Jesus have us give gifts?
What kinds of gifts would Jesus have us buy for others?
How much would Jesus want us to spend on presents we give our family & friends for His birthday?
What does Jesus want us to give Him for Christmas?
With whom would Jesus have us share our Christmas baking?
What attitudes would Jesus endorse in the shopping mall?
What traditions do we have that glorify Christ in this special season?
What traditions do we need to set aside because they are just about us and our comfort?

Radical? Yes.
Different? Yes.
Putting Christ at the center of everything each Christmas? Hopefully.

Being a Christian should mean that our lives are radically different from non-Christians' lives. We shouldn't be mostly identical, except for our Sunday morning and Wednesday night activities. Our Christmases should look more different than just adding in a Christmas Eve service and reading Luke 2 before diving into our pile of presents.

Is our Christmas radically different from a non-Christian's Christmas?
Are our lives radically different from a non-Christian's life?

What are we going to do to make it so we can answer yes to those questions?