I’ll admit it. Part of me is glad Christmas is over. Sure, part of me laments the demise in our Western culture of celebrating the full 12 days of Christmas. But there’s a part of me that finds Christmas to be my least favorite holiday in the church year.
Yes, there’s the over-commercialization, and we would do well as churches to fight against it. But that’s not why I tend to dislike Christmas. For me, Christmas is irksome because it tends to come across as dripping with sappy sentimentalism and nostalgia, focusing way too much on the cute little baby in the manger.
Don’t believe me? Well, when was the last time you saw a Children’s Good Friday pageant? When was the last time your congregation clamored for singing just one Easter hymn during Lent? Easter just doesn’t have the same emotional pull that Christmas does.
So what’s a congregation to do? I have no answers, only questions. How can we take Christmas deeper than just sentimental trappings? How can we involve children in more meaningful ways than simply throwing them onto a stage to sing our favorite carols, or dress them up like angels and wise men? Is baby Jesus really what Christmas is all about? Making a big to-do about the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger may be missing the point. After all, it’s surely not insignificant that only two of the four gospels record a birth narrative. Is there not more to Christmas that we can focus on?
Perhaps you disagree with me. Perhaps I’m just venting frustration, but I think these questions deserve real thought on all our parts. How does your church stay countercultural in the face of the holiday season? Does your church hold a “blue Christmas” service to minister to those for whom Christmas is not filled with “good tidings of great joy?” Or what about an end of the year healing service? What other ways might congregations transcend the trivial during this time?
3 comments:
I agree about the excessive sentimentalism of it, and I dislike most things "dripping with sappiness." Maybe that's one of the reasons that Easter is my favorite holiday; it hasn't been quite as entangled with all these other aspects.
Our church does hold a Blue Christmas service, open to all, and also sends special invitations to those who have lost someone in that year. It's been a meaningful service for many.
I wonder what would happen if they put a Christmas drama series on, sort of like Lenten dramas, in which people act out the various stages of the story, and the difficulty of it, rather than just the nice little trip to Bethlehem and the cute little stable & hay. Besides that, to portray the actual fear people experienced when angels came to them; they were often terrified, which is sort of overlooked.
I saw something recently that disputed the translation of the word "inn," saying that it could also mean an "upper room," such as the family home where all the relatives came, and the animals were often kept below on ground level in sort of a dug out cave. No room at the inn meant that there was no room for the birth in the crowded living space. I like that kind of idea that freshens the image and perspective, as well as attempting more accuracy.
Perhaps the question to ask ourselves in liturgical planning, is what is really appropriate to the liturgy in order for it to have its desired impact? And in considering what is truly appropriate, do we use all of the tools at our disposal, or do we take the easy way out because we have so many liturgies on Christmas Eve/Christmas? For example, do we consider use all of the scriptures in our respective lectionaries, or stick with one set for ease and convenience? Pastorally sensitive questions arise as well. Are we giving people what they think they want or what they need? Are children's pageants or any pageant really proper to the liturgy, or do they belong somewhere else in the church's annual bevy of Christmas presentations? It is a certainly challenge to help congregations to see that the birth of Christ has meaning because of the cross, and the life that exists between the manger and the cross is a call to holiness, but after all that is why we do what we do. Christmas is all about love because that is why God does what he does, but it is a tough love not a sappy love. Helping congregations come to these sort of revelations will help them walk from church inspired with confidence to face the difficulties of life in this world.
@Maria: good insights on the importance of communicating the realities and difficulties faced by the characters in these sacred stories and not just sugarcoating them with holiday schmalziness. Glad to hear your church does a blue Christmas service.
@halsema: you raise several excellent points. I'm particularly drawn to two of them, your first being whose needs are we meeting, theirs or ours. Meeting people's needs is tricky business--too often the church functions like a corporation trying to meet shareholder's demands; the way out of that trap is not an easy one. The second point that resonated with me is that God's love is a "tough love not a sappy love." Again, I think it's easy for churches to let the message of tough love degenerate into sappiness as that's what resonates with us in Western culture as we're bombarded by Hallmark sentimentality. I think you're spot on in saying that cutting through the sappiness will have a bigger payoff for people in the long run.
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