Matthew Baalham asks us to think about how we treat December 25
My wife and I face a problem every Christmas.
It isn’t how many presents to buy for our children. It isn’t which side of the family to spend it with. It isn’t even whether to continue buying a real Christmas tree or whether we should finally succumb to an artificial one. No, our problem is whether a Christian today has a choice between keeping Christmas or not keeping Christmas.
‘One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind.’ (Romans 14.5)
Not a sacred day
Now for us, we are fairly clear in our own minds that Christmas is not to be regarded as a sacred day. We are uncomfortable with its origins as a pagan and then Catholic festival. We know that there is a clear lack of basis for the keeping of Christmas in our Lord’s teaching or that of the apostles.
More so, we are uncomfortable with the image of Christ which Christmas generally promotes. The cute baby, quietly sleeping on a bed of hay, surrounded by halo-adorned figures, does neither justice to the biblical account of Jesus’s birth, nor confronts us enough with the Jesus of the cross, the empty tomb, and the final judgment.
While Christmas presents us with some of the truths concerning the incarnation, we know that these truths need to be considered much more often than once a year, and is probably done better without the distractions of turkey, tree, and tinsel. Indeed the mixing of the incarnation with such trivial concepts as Santa hats, snowflakes and common nostalgia, is at best unhelpful. More than that, it seems to flatly contradict the terms of the New Testament, which reveal to us the end of holy days and festivals in the church age.
Christmas is getting bigger
That, in theory, is the position we take. And we know it is not a new position which we have invented. One only has to think of the Puritans, who we love to quote on other subjects; they had little time for Christmas or other festivals of the so-called ‘Christian’ calendar. But we are aware that this is not the common view among evangelical Christians today, and we are not people of the 17th century, but of the 21st. It is one thing to have ideas, it is quite another to live them out. Christmas seems to be getting bigger, both in the world and in the church, so it is increasingly difficult to avoid it. Indeed, it is at Christmas that the world seems most at ease with the church, which is why many choose to describe Christmas as the church’s best evangelistic opportunity. Last year a friend posted on Facebook her church’s Christmas activities. Of course every church does things slightly differently, but I took this to be a fairly representative example of what a larger evangelical church tends to do: Sunday 8 December, 10am: Nativity Service. Sunday 15 December, 6.30pm: Carols by Candlelight. Saturday 21 December, 4pm: Family Carols. Sunday 22 December, 6.30pm: Carols by Candlelight. Tuesday 24 December, 11.15pm: Christmas Eve Service. Wednesday 25 December, 10am: Christmas Day Service.
Before the supermarkets
But of course Christmas starts even earlier than that, in terms of planning and preparation, and there are also Christmas parties, small group socials and advent services. A recent FIEC article encouraged churches to start thinking about Christmas in August, before even the supermarkets.
And it often goes beyond the 25th of December too. My wife and I have regularly visited churches at this time of year who will still be singing their carols all the way up to New Year. Bearing all this in mind, for a contemporary Christian, the idea of letting Christmas in the church just pass one by is something of an impossibility, or at least that is what we have found. This has been made even plainer to us since having children in the last few years. It is difficult enough with the world’s celebrations, whether this is the staff Christmas party or the school nativity play, but for the committed church member in the church sphere, it is actually much more difficult. Rather than being a haven for those with misgivings about a festival with no biblical grounds, the church for us can appear as hostile territory.
Questions we cannot answer
At one level, Christmas can just become an embarrassment. People generally will often ask our children whether they are counting down the days till Christmas, or what is on their list of presents for Santa, but people in churches do this too, and naturally assume so much about what a family like ours will be doing for Christmas. Our four-year-old tends to be a bit confused by such questions, and we are aware that whatever we would like to teach our children about the time of the year as they grow older will be constantly contradicted by what is said in church, probably for a good month.
At another level, while we want to maintain a spirit of peace and love, and meet with members of the church as we have promised to do, Christmas can also be a time of feeling very compromised. When is it right to do what you don’t believe in for the common good? Is it right to attend a carol service, even when you don’t believe much of what the carols are saying? Is it ok to allow your child to participate in a nativity, even when you know it promotes the idea of the ‘cute Christ-child’? We often do not know how to fully answer these questions. If it was only one day of the year, it might be easier to avoid thinking about them, but as I have already argued, Christmas covers so many days and does seem quite unavoidable.
What to do?
If this is the situation that we find ourselves in, then what is to be done about it? In Romans 14, Paul outlines how believers should feel free to act according to ‘their own mind’, as it happens, on the issue of considering some days as special. But I wonder whether today’s church allows believers this measure of freedom when it comes to Christmas, in a practical sense. Often our church Christmas activities can be so geared up to the needs of outsiders that this whole question becomes unthinkable, but the question does remain: how do churches today apply this verse in relation to those who do not believe in keeping Christmas?
When, for example, did you last hear your church discuss how their Christmas programmes might affect those of ‘tender consciences’, to borrow a phrase from the Puritan period? Does the fact that many Christians ‘do’ and ‘love’ Christmas give them the right to impose these burdens on those who don’t? In reality today, is there no room at the ecclesiastical inn for those who don’t believe in Christmas?
I write these things, not because I feel that I have the answers to these issues, but because I believe it is not right that these questions are never asked. Perhaps my views are restricted to a minority, but in the light of Romans 14 should not Christians at least expect and be prepared to meet those who share them? And is it not incumbent upon all believers to work out how they might extend the principle of liberty of conscience to their brothers and sisters during the Christmas season? I hope that I do not sound unreasonable. I would like to be able to get along with everyone and avoid fruitless quarrels like the next Christian. But if I was in your church this December, what would you advise me to do?
