Dear God, I was listening to The Holy Post podcast this week, and they were kind of deep diving the “war on Christmas” and what Christians mean by defending and saving Christmas. Has it become empty rhetoric, but they really are only saving the Christian veneer of something that is already secular?
For example, they talked about how polling shows that most Christians find it more important to be with family Christmas day than to be at church worshipping you. This year, Christmas Eve is on a Sunday, and a lot of people go to Christmas Eve services, but Christmas Day often has very little to do with Jesus’s incarnation. And I’m not really any different. This year, my wife is singing in our church on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so I will be there for both, but if not for her involvement, I wouldn’t be going to church on Christmas Day.
I think Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is probably the biggest driver of how modern Christians view Christmas. You take the ideals of family importance and reaching out to the poor, and you just kind of gloss over the Jesus incarnation part. I’ve actually been grateful for the time I’ve been able to spend this year kind of exploring all of these things. The community church-to-church walk Christmas service we did a week ago was great, including the illustration of “God and the Planet of Vicious Dogs.” Then working on the project for my coworker and her young daughter covering Luke 1 and Luke 2 really blessed me as well as I tried to empathize in a new way with the characters I’ve read about hundreds of times.
Father, Jesus, Holy Spirit, of course, I don’t want to not think about Christmas and the incarnation throughout the year, but I am grateful for the extra emphasis on it during Christmas that I might then carry with me throughout the rest of the year. Help what I’m going to call the remnant of the discipling church (as opposed to those who have only claimed the label Christian for cultural and political reasons) to be found faithful in our worship of you and our love for our neighbors. Help me to be found faithful in my worship of you and my love for my neighbors.
I offer all of this to you through the power of the incarnate Jesus,
Amen
Emails to God 