“Family, Friends, Food, Credit Card Debt, Guilt, and Resentment” Dec. 23, 2018
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor click here to see the video
A poem (?) by Roger Ray
Airports, hectic and dehumanizing,
Highways, congested and slippery,
Crowded stores and credit card fatigue,
Religious sentimentality and tired old carols everywhere.
But it is going somewhere . . .
To the familiar smells of holiday cooking
And the nostalgia that erupts with each decoration
Taken from its hiding place under the stairs
To breathe again into life memories of children now grown
Parents now buried, hopes dashed, and dreams realized
Family squabbles simmer just beneath the surface
As potentially dangerous as an old-time pressure cooker
All wrapped up in the certainty of mortality
And defiantly topped with a bow that cries, “Not yet! Not this year!”
The original owners of this building would be none too happy about seeing a Christmas tree up here in the chancel of what was a Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall. The J. W.’s are quite particular about only observing holidays that are actually named in the Bible and even though you can find two very different accounts of the birth of Jesus in the New Testament, there is no mention of either Christmas nor of a December birthday. People in the non-instrumental Church of Christ like to similarly distinguish themselves by not observing non-Biblical holidays, certainly not Christmas or Easter and they don’t even talk about Old Testament holidays, regardless of whether Jesus observed them or not.
This is not just a matter for modern American Protestantism as these pious, and self-congratulatory sects try to find ways of distinguishing themselves from the mainstream. It was illegal in early Puritan colonies in the New World to observe Christmas because it was considered to be decadent. Which is also not a new thing.
The December observance of the birth of Jesus was set in the third century, probably to try to overtake the popularity of the winter Solstice holiday of Saturnalia in Rome.
Jewish and Christian holidays all have their origin, in one way or another, in a practical observance of the agricultural calendar. When the fall harvest is all in, the fields are bare and frozen and the days are short, people have the time an inclination to feast, dance, and make merry. In fact, a century after the celebration had been dubbed a Christian observance, a 4thcentury pope bemoaned that Christians were eating and drinking a bit too much in their adoration of the Christ child and maybe everyone should cool it a little bit.
This year, with a colorful Republican occupying the White House, we have not heard the Fox news crowd incessantly bemoaning the alleged “war on Christmas,” in fact, I awoke to the news on Friday that there is not only no longer a war on Christmas but there is no longer a war on Isis . . . Trump says that he won that war too! So, Merry Christmas indeed!
Sort of like when Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider, turning him into the Amazing Neighborhood Spiderman.
Ancient religious narratives often included accounts of miraculous births all of the way from the familiar Venus rising from the sea to the story of the birth of
The Hindu god, Krishna, who, it turns out, was threatened with death when he was born so family members put him in a basket and carried him through water to safety . . . hard to know if Moses gets to claim that story first or if it originated with Krishna but there has always been a good deal of honorific plagiarism among ancient religions.
Despite the sincere and centuries long efforts of the Roman Catholic Church to make stories of incarnation, virgin birth, angels, and magi seem like historical events, it isn’t very persuasive to us or to any of the academic traditions around church history.
So what is the real meaning of Christmas? Well, we kind of have to turn that question back around and ask our society what meaning it really has? How is Christmas used in culture, in literature, in the movies, and in art?
In the mid 19thcentury, when Charles Dickens first published his short novel, “A Christmas Carol,” England was just coming out of one of their more puritan times when all Christmas celebrations were either illegal or at least frowned upon. I have always called it the “best Christmas sermon ever written,” because with very imaginative characters and the extremes of tear-jerking narratives that would make some of those ASPCA adds, blush, Dickens tells a story of redemption, of conversion.
In “The Christmas Carol,” as in most short morality plays, there is an exaggerated villain, Scrooge, and an admirable saint, in this case, it was Scrooge’s nephew, Fred. Fred is trying to draw out his wealthy, but miserable uncle and Scrooge literally is derisive of any pleasure that does not fatten the bottom line.
It is an exaggerated caricature, of course, one does not encounter such one-dimensional characters in real life.
Well, we used to not encounter such one-dimensional characters but let’s not talk about Trump today.
Fred beautifully tries to open a crack in old Scrooge’s heart, saying to him:
"There are many things from which I might have derived good by which I have not profited . . . Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas-time, when it has come round-. . .-as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"
As she has grown up, I have grown old. I have buried my parents and many more of my friends than I can bear to think of, and I have arrive at a time, before this month’s stock market “correction,” when I have thought a lot about my own retirement and the fact that one day, I will no longer be around for her at all. I’m not being morbid, I’m being mortal. I don’t know how many more trips around the sun that I have left in me but I know that I have this Christmas, we have this year and I am going to try to make the most of it.
Among the lies and myths, the church told us when we were young is that we have an eternity to get life right. I can’t believe that anymore. What I believe is that we have a fairly short amount of time to get it right. The shorter days, the cold air, the gray skies all scream mortality but that doesn’t mean that it is time to give up, it means that it is time to hurry up.
