Ghost of Christmas Recent

23 December.

Here are my notes from the Christmas service I put together for interested crew members:

It’s easy to see, in a theological sense, why Good Friday and Easter are important commemorations for Christians. Jesus’s sacrificial death and subsequent supernatural resurrection are the cornerstone of our salvation and our restitution with God our Father. But why is Christmas, the supposed celebration of Christ’s birth, important to the believing Christian?
A possible and increasingly common answer is that it’s not. Many people would point to the season’s commercialist nature, the date December 25th’s origin in the pagan festival of Saturnalia, and the seeming insignificance of a birthday as a divine milestone to infer that the observance of Christmas is irrelevant to the Christian faith.
In response, I came up with two serious reasons that Christmas might be a worthwhile occasion to celebrate. The first stems from the precedent that it is appropriate to celebrate special days to commemorate special occurrences. In the book of Leviticus, God ordained the Feast of Passover for the Israelites to remember their deliverance, the Feast of Unleavened Bread to further remember His distinctions of holy and unholy provision, and the Feast of Tabernacles to remember their time of nomadic itinerance and utter dependence on God in the wilderness. Although not biblically mandated, it seems also appropriate to celebrate a special day commemorating Jesus’s arrival into the world: the miraculous beginning to a very special and remarkable 33 years, perhaps the greatest 33 years in the history of mankind. Even if it’s since been moved to the wrong day, it’s a day worth celebrating.
The second argument for Christmas is the significance of Jesus’s incarnation. It’s true that His death on the cross was what saved us from sin, overcame death, and captured eternal life for believers. But His life among us on earth gives an inexorable, indelible portrait of the sort of God we’re supposed to worship: it’s a historically true rendering of a God who really loves us. If you feel sorry for someone, you give them a handout. We observe this behavior in the way we give to the Salvation Army or the Vietnam Vet around Christmastime. We feel sorry for the disenfranchised and the destitute, we see that it is right to help, and we give. But if you love someone, you leave where you are and go to them. If your brother or sister had fallen into difficult times, you would buy a plane ticket and travel thousands of miles to be with them. And given our plight and sinful condition, our God responded not with some blanket, impersonal measure, but instead left where He was and came to us Himself.
I like to think, and I think it’s reasonable to think, that Jesus didn’t see His time on earth solely as an obligation towards the plan of salvation, but that He actually likes us and liked to spend time with us. He wept with Martha and Mary, ate with His disciples, took the time to coach and mentor them personally, played with little children. His coming to earth was a matter of love, not duty. And Christmas is a celebration of, yes, His coming to earth in human form.
It is an important truth that God loved us not only enough to die for us, a one-time event, but enough to live with us day in and day out and still love us. In light of that love so demonstrated, how then should I live?

2 February.

My most recent favorite passage: James 1:26-27:
“If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless. Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”