Keeping Christ in Christmas

Keep­ing Christ in Christmas

An entry in the Group Writ­ing Project spon­sored by On the Hori­zon and The Next Step.

And an angel of the Lord sud­denly stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them; and they were ter­ri­bly frightened.But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the peo­ple; for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Sav­ior, who is Christ the Lord.“This will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.“And sud­denly there appeared with the angel a mul­ti­tude of the heav­enly host prais­ing God and saying,“Glory to God in the highest,And on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased.“

Luke 2:9–14

Santa was kneel­ing before the manger. He was flanked by Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rein­deer, Frosty the Snow­man, Ebe­neezer Scrooge and a few other sec­u­lar char­ac­ters. They had come up to the stage one by one, fol­low­ing Ebeneezer’s lead, and taken their place on bended knee. Finally, Santa had walked down the aisle of the sanc­tu­ary, up the steps to the stage, and taken his place cen­ter stage in the spot­light. Then they all rose, turned to face the audi­ence and led the singing of “Silent Night.” It was the grand finale.

And for my father, it was the end.

“I’ll be in the car,” he said.

Before my mother or I could respond, he was out of his seat, strid­ing pur­pose­fully toward the rear doors of the sanc­tu­ary. As I watched him, I knew there was no point try­ing to dis­suade him and dreaded hav­ing to join him in the park­ing lot.

After all, attend­ing the local Assem­bly of God congregation’s annual “Singing Christ­mas Tree” had been my idea.

It was 1990 and #1Son was nearly three years old. He was learn­ing all the tra­di­tional Christ­mas car­ols and loved to sing them. I thought he would enjoy the music and invited my par­ents to join us. Singing Christ­mas trees were the rage and we were curi­ous to see just what all the fuss was about. Unlike our Lutheran con­gre­ga­tion, that church’s sanc­tu­ary boasted a full stage, com­plete with pro­fes­sional stage light­ing upon which their orches­tra led wor­ship every Sun­day morn­ing. The pro­gram was based upon “A Christ­mas Carol,” so I thought it sounded like a fun and inter­est­ing way to spend a Decem­ber Sun­day afternoon.

The trou­ble really started with the grand open­ing musi­cal num­ber when, from the side doors, those sec­u­lar char­ac­ters began singing and danc­ing their way into the sanc­tu­ary. #1Son’s eyes grew big and he exclaimed, “Mama, there’s Rudolph!” He was obliv­i­ous to the the­o­log­i­cal impli­ca­tions of invit­ing such fan­ci­ful sec­u­lar char­ac­ters into the wor­ship space, espe­cially from a Lutheran perspective.

But my par­ents were not. Seated between them, I found myself watch­ing them more closely than the musi­cal num­bers. I can still remem­ber the looks on their faces. My mother was totally per­plexed, strug­gling to process the images. She was reach­ing back into her mem­o­ries of a Lutheran upbring­ing on the prairie where she attended ser­vices con­ducted in Nor­we­gian and was still some­what trau­ma­tized by hav­ing to stand before the entire con­gre­ga­tion and recite por­tions of Luther’s Small Cat­e­chism as part of the Con­fir­ma­tion rit­ual that was com­mon in those days.

My father, who had no reli­gious upbring­ing at all but was bap­tized and con­firmed into the Lutheran faith when he mar­ried my mother, squirmed uncom­fort­ably in his seat. He cleared his throat a cou­ple of times and his eyes nar­rowed. Then came the “Oh, Kenny is def­i­nitely not enjoy­ing this” ges­ture that my sis­ter and I had learned as chil­dren to under­stand and fear: He put his right elbow on the arm of the chair and, rest­ing his hand on his chin, cov­ered his mouth with his right hand, deep in thought­ful con­sid­er­a­tion. That pose was never a good sign because it usu­ally meant that he was going to tell us exactly what he thought as soon as he fin­ished decid­ing upon the best way to com­mu­ni­cate his ideas. Kenny was a stoic man of few words. To those who knew him well, how­ever, his body lan­guage and daily habits spoke volumes.

#1Son dozed off shortly after the first cou­ple of musi­cal num­bers, bored with Ebeneezer’s jour­ney of self-discovery. He spent the rest of the after­noon snug­gled into my chest sleep­ing soundly, leav­ing me to appre­ci­ate that my deci­sion to bring my par­ents to that hol­i­day event con­sti­tuted a seri­ous miscalculation.

And by the time the grand finale was being played out, Kenny had had enough.

At the time, I was employed by my Lutheran con­gre­ga­tion as its organist/pianist and choir accom­pa­nist. I can still hear Pas­tor John’s dis­tinc­tive laugh­ter as I told him about our expe­ri­ence. Know­ing my father, he actu­ally snorted as he chided me about order­ing tick­ets early for the fol­low­ing year’s “Singing Christ­mas Tree.” He assured me that I would never find him in atten­dance — or Santa in our sanc­tu­ary so long as he was our pastor.

A few years later, I arrived at the home of our then-Associate Pas­tor, Hans. Pas­tor John had moved on and Pas­tor Hans was host­ing our annual staff Christ­mas party. I stopped in the mid­dle of the liv­ing room floor and stared at the fig­urine on the cof­fee table. There was Santa kneel­ing beside the manger in which the baby Jesus lay. I told him the above story which had less indi­vid­u­al­ized mean­ing because my father died before Pas­tor Hans arrived in Lodi, so he never had the oppor­tu­nity to know him. He did, how­ever, have an intri­cate under­stand­ing of the mind­set of folks like my parents.

Pas­tor Hans explained that he found the imagery to be a pow­er­ful reminder of the appro­pri­ate Christ­mas hier­ar­chy: The sec­u­lar is fine, but should always under­score and never out­shine or dom­i­nate the actual mes­sage of the Christ­mas sea­son. The fig­urine was fine on his cof­fee table, but not in the church, however.

When I hap­pened upon this image this morn­ing, I was reminded of those prior experiences:

Photo credit: Strange Santa Scene Makes Bre­mer­ton Man’s Com­ment on Christmas

The home­owner who erected that odd dis­play in front of his home said that he was moti­vated by the com­mer­cial­iza­tion of the hol­i­day, as well as “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness.” The Kit­sap Sun reported that Art Con­rad of Bre­mer­ton, Washington

cre­ated it by stuff­ing a Santa suit and bor­row­ing the head off a motion-activated Santa that dances and sings Christ­mas carols.The head­less danc­ing Santa now car­ries a knife and sings and dances on Conrad’s front porch.Conrad pho­tographed the cru­ci­fied Santa and cre­ated his own Christ­mas cards, one with the mes­sage, “Santa died for your MasterCard.”“Santa has been per­verted from who he started out to be,” Con­rad said. “Now he’s the per­son being used by cor­po­ra­tions to get us to buy more stuff.“Conrad said the sec­ond mes­sage comes from his belief that peo­ple are so afraid of being polit­i­cally incor­rect that they won’t do any­thing because of what other peo­ple might think or what the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union might do.Conrad said he’s had sev­eral peo­ple a day stop and take pho­tos. If anyone’s offended, no one has let on, he said. He declined to dis­cuss his own thoughts on God, but said he showed a pic­ture of the cru­ci­fied Santa to a Chris­t­ian coworker. She told him she wasn’t offended because she knows Christ is no longer on the cross.

I relate to the mes­sage Mr. Con­rad is attempt­ing to con­vey and def­i­nitely appre­ci­ate the per­spec­tive of his Chris­t­ian coworker. She is, of course, absolutely cor­rect: Christ was put on the cross but does not reside there because he was raised from the dead.

But do the images Mr. Con­rad dis­plays offend Chris­tians, much as the inter­twin­ing of sec­u­lar and reli­gious imagery offended my parents?

Vlad Zoblot­sky commented:

While Chris­tians may be upset at the sig­nal the image may be send­ing, it projects the truth about our soci­ety. It is accept­able to asso­ciate this pagan dwarf with Christ­mas, while men­tion­ing Christ dur­ing this sea­son makes you intol­er­ant to other reli­gious groups. Well here is an idea, why don’t we just rename this day into “Sant­mas”??? It is ironic that no one cares that the fig­ure of this non-existent pagan dwarf is more accepted than Christ, the true rea­son behind Christmas.I guess our soci­ety is much hap­pier to live in the midst of lies. We accept lies about this pagan dwarf over the truth of Christ.

The term “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness” infu­ri­ates me. How did the remark­ably sim­ple con­cept of “tol­er­ance” become so mis­un­der­stood and maligned?

The mean­ing of tol­er­ance that I find most help­ful is:

A fair, objec­tive, and per­mis­sive atti­tude toward those whose opin­ions, prac­tices, race, reli­gion, nation­al­ity, etc., dif­fer from one’s own; free­dom from bigotry.

Note that dis­play­ing tol­er­ance nei­ther con­tem­plates nor requires aban­don­ment of one’s own beliefs, ideas, tra­di­tions or rit­u­als. In order to be a tol­er­ant per­son, one need not refrain from engag­ing in activ­i­ties that are indi­vid­u­ally mean­ing­ful. This is where I believe that the whole notion of “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness” has taken a wrong turn in this culture.

I once unin­ten­tion­ally angered an athe­ist who was recount­ing some very seri­ous chal­lenges she and her fam­ily were fac­ing. She was dis­traught and talk­ing about their prob­lems was evi­dently ther­a­peu­tic for her.

So as our con­ver­sa­tion was con­clud­ing, I remarked, “I will cer­tainly keep you and your fam­ily in my prayers in the com­ing days.” Her emo­tional dis­tress quickly turned to rage. “I am an athe­ist! How dare you say that you will pray for me! I find that extremely offensive.”

First of all, I did not know she was an athe­ist. Obvi­ously, had I real­ized that, I would never have injected the topic of prayer into our con­ver­sa­tion, even though she was aware of my beliefs.

More impor­tantly, how­ever, in my opin­ion, it was her out­rage that was inap­pro­pri­ate, offen­sive and extremely dis­re­spect­ful, even though I was the one apol­o­giz­ing. I assured her that I was unaware of her beliefs and did not mean to offend. But had she been less defen­sive and more gra­cious, she would have sim­ply said, “Well, thank you” and gone on her way.

Why? Because I have a right to exer­cise my reli­gious beliefs. I do not have a right to obnox­iously inflict them upon oth­ers, so it would have been pre­sump­tu­ous and out of line for me to sug­gest that we stop at that moment and pray together.

But had she been capa­ble of respect­ing my beliefs, dif­fer­ent as they are from her own, she would have real­ized that inter­ces­sory prayer is a core com­po­nent of my reli­gious belief sys­tem. And she would have appre­ci­ated that when a Chris­t­ian says that he/she will pray for you, it is merely his/her way of say­ing that you will remain in his/her thoughts and he/she will con­tinue to send good wishes your way. Noth­ing more. Noth­ing less. After all, to an athe­ist, prayer is a point­less exer­cise. So if I want to waste my time pray­ing to a deity that an athe­ist does not believe exists, how can that be offen­sive? Wouldn’t it have been more impor­tant and valu­able to our rela­tion­ship for her to acknowl­edge that in my own way, I com­mu­ni­cated my con­cern and care for her and her family?

Demon­strat­ing tol­er­ance sim­ply means co-existing peace­fully with folks whose beliefs and lifestyles are dif­fer­ent than your own. It is noth­ing more com­pli­cated than the “Golden Rule,” i.e., treat­ing peo­ple in exactly the same man­ner as you wish to be treated. If you want oth­ers to respect your beliefs, you must respect theirs. You can acknowl­edge those dif­fer­ences and treat peo­ple fairly with­out yield­ing your own identity.

So why do so many peo­ple find it so dif­fi­cult to be truly tolerant?

More impor­tantly, why do they feel that when other peo­ple exer­cise the same free­doms that have been granted to them, their own rights are some­how threat­ened or dimin­ished? They are not.

Last Christ­mas there was a brouhaha about the Seat­tle air­port erect­ing a Christ­mas tree. A local rabbi asked that a Meno­rah be included in the pub­lic hol­i­day dis­play. The reac­tionary air­port man­age­ment responded by remov­ing the tree, caus­ing the rabbi to be sub­jected to deri­sion and ridicule.

Why was it so dif­fi­cult for the air­port offi­cials to grasp the con­cept of inclu­siv­ity which, of course, is an impor­tant aspect of tol­er­ance? When they finally under­stood the rabbi’s mes­sage, the tree went back up — as did the Meno­rah he asked to have dis­played as a show of respect to those cel­e­brat­ing Hanukkah. That sim­ple solu­tion should have been imple­mented in the first place.

Bet­ter yet, air­port offi­cials should have included a vari­ety of rec­og­niz­able hol­i­day sym­bols at the out­set, demon­strat­ing tol­er­ance and inclu­siv­ity, and elim­i­nat­ing the need for the rabbi to ask that his beliefs be represented.

To dis­play a “fair, objec­tive, and per­mis­sive atti­tude” toward oth­ers is, ulti­mately, to be Christ-like. It was a Lutheran ser­mon many years ago that really drove that point home for me and caused me to view dis­cus­sions about “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness” from this van­tage point.

Jesus prac­ticed tol­er­ance, accep­tance and inclu­siv­ity by step­ping out­side soci­etal norms, anger­ing society’s lead­ers in the process.

For instance, I am amused by Chris­t­ian women who say “Oh, no, I’m not a fem­i­nist. I could never be a fem­i­nist.” They do not under­stand that Jesus invented fem­i­nism, val­i­dat­ing not only women, but also chil­dren, by reject­ing the accepted social mores of that time. Women and chil­dren were prop­erty. Owned by men. Chat­tel. They had lit­tle value or worth by soci­o­log­i­cal standards.

So what did Jesus tell his male fol­low­ers to do? Love their wives the way he loved his church. That was a wildly rad­i­cal con­cept! Out­ra­geous! Unheard-of! And to prove the point, he sub­mit­ted to his Father’s will and died for that church.

As if that weren’t enough, he told us all to love each other in pre­cisely the way that we want to be loved. Nobody had ever heard such crazy ideas! But then he went right ahead and lived out his prin­ci­ples, hang­ing out not just with women and chil­dren, but all of society’s rejects: Tax­pay­ers, lep­ers, adul­ter­esses, et. al.

So if he set that kind of rad­i­cal exam­ple for us to fol­low, why is it so dif­fi­cult for us to sim­ply acknowl­edge and under­stand that other peo­ple see the world dif­fer­ently than we do and then go about our own business?

Frankly, I would never erect a cross like Mr. Conrad’s. Do I find it offen­sive? Yes, I do.

But this is Amer­ica and if he wants to put an obnox­ious dis­play like that one on the front lawn of his res­i­dence, that is his right. Do I believe that his intended par­ody is demean­ing to my Chris­tan beliefs? Yes. But would I go to the City Coun­cil and demand that he remove it? No. I would sim­ply refrain from dri­ving by his house. I would qui­etly tol­er­ate his right to free speech and reli­gious expression.

So what would be the dif­fer­ence between Santa on the cross and, for instance, a Swastika? The dis­tinc­tion is clear: A Swastika is a uni­ver­sally rec­og­nized and his­tor­i­cally sig­nif­i­cant sym­bol of hatred toward an entire class of per­sons that brings tremen­dous pain to large num­bers of peo­ple when they are exposed to that image. It con­notes ani­mos­ity toward a group of peo­ple because of an inher­ent char­ac­ter­is­tic over which they have no con­trol. That is far dif­fer­ent than a fool’s dis­play of a harm­less sec­u­lar char­ac­ter super­im­posed upon a reli­gious sym­bol. He is not say­ing that he hates Chris­tians or any other group. (Quite the oppo­site, in fact.) And many would argue that Chris­tian­ity, espe­cially as prac­ticed by our fun­da­men­tal­ist broth­ers and sis­ters, is an adopted or cho­sen sys­tem of beliefs. You may be born into a Chris­t­ian fam­ily, as I was, but you can change your reli­gious iden­tity and affil­i­a­tion. You can­not change, for exam­ple, the color of your skin, the coun­try from which your ances­tors hailed, the first lan­guage you were taught to speak, etc.

I believe in keep­ing Christ in Christ­mas means exhibit­ing tol­er­ance, for­bear­ance and con­sid­er­a­tion to those who do not see Christ­mas through the same lens that I do. That does not require me to refrain from exer­cis­ing my reli­gious free­doms and believes, but allows me to do so while respect­ing those who walk other paths.

So I wish all of you who are cel­e­brat­ing Christ­mas a very merry and joy­ous obser­vance! To those who do not cel­e­brate the hol­i­day, I wish you good cheer and happiness!

Other Par­tic­i­pants:

• All Because of Jesus
• Keep­ing Christ in Chrst­mas All the Time
• Free­dom of Reli­gion is Not Free­dom From Reli­gion Unless That is Your Religion
• Christ in Christmas
• Christ in Christmas
• His Christ­mas Legacy

Tech­no­rati Tags: Group Writ­ing Projects, Keep­ing Christ in Christmas

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