There was an article in the paper the other day that said that since Christmas falls on a Sunday this year, many churches are cancelling their Sunday services in expectation of low turnout.
That kind of logic completely baffles me.
When I was a kid and Christmas fell on a Sunday, it didn’t mean we were less likely to go to church, it meant that we most definitely were going to have our behinds in the pew that Sunday.
But let’s face it, Christmas is an odd time of the year and as the years come and go it seems to only gets stranger.
People have been complaining about Christmas and materialism for decades beginning, perhaps, with Charlie Brown and one little Christmas tree among dozens of aluminum trees. (Did they really make such things?)
For many people, Christmas is a sad time of the year. This year’s Christmas episode of Glee had two characters arguing over whether their Christmas special should be only happy songs. I, myself, have suffered through some gut-punchingly sad Christmases but also some gloriously happy ones.
There was that Christmas, my senior year of high school, when I got everything I wanted (for the record, a mechanical kitty cat, a TI-85 calculator and tickets to see The Phantom of the Opera—which I think says everything you ever need to know about me).
The nature of Christmas though is to be both happy and sad.
We celebrate the birth of Jesus. The sanctuary which had been clothed in blue during Advent is now white and pure. Red poinsettias decorate the altar and while they are beautiful, an explosion of color, there is, in that juxtaposition of red on white, a reminder of what Jesus was born to do.
He was born to die. He was born to shed his blood, to sacrifice himself for all who had lived and for all who ever will.
And so every Christmas there must be conflicting emotions. There is joy, sheer pleasure and joy at the birth of Christ. Who among us, even those of us with the hardest hearts, doesn’t feel happiness over the birth of a child? I like to think of Jesus, the baby, as a giggler, one quick to smile and let out big spit bubbles with each laugh. I like to think of him, grabbing onto Joseph’s finger with his tiny hand, bonding with his human father. Was there ever a child so loved?
Or so hated?
Remember Herod’s decree that all boys under the age of two should be killed?
Before Jesus said his first word, he was already hunted and his family on the run.
So it’s okay to feel conflicting emotions at Christmas because, as I said before, Christmas is, at its core, a story of both hope and suffering. It is perhaps the only holiday that speaks to who we are, our essential selves, because we too are creatures who experience great joy and great heartache.
That God so loved the world, He sent His only son …
Not just so that we would know Him but so we would know that He knew us.
